We are made of everyone else.

Silences are the most difficult things we keep. Its different degrees are in varying weights. The things we don’t say seem juvenile trifle to the things we can’t seem to.

In ‘Ang Nawawala (What isn’t there),’ our beautiful adorable broken lead character, Gibson does not speak. He communicates through hand gestures, flicks of the head and purses of the lip. If this makes him sound like a child, he is. Even in his 18-year old body (and as we discover, virginal. How interesting how that word doesn’t seem right when you look at him even in his ernie-like long sleeved shirts. Almost brings to mind the question, are men ever virgins?) Everything about the trailer suggests that this is a coming-of-age story, and yes perhaps it is his popping the cherry story. Except eventually you realize that even when he loses his virginity and declares his love (of course, in that tentative manner that will always, always, always be laglag panty,) his not speaking isn’t only about the unsaid or the can’t-be-said, it’s about the can’t-be-said-to-whom. (take that grammar freaks!) 

I like how each time Gibson does not speak, but is engaged in conversation with people, their reactions to his silences says more about who they are, then Gibson really. An interesting twist since characters usually reveal things about each other through dialogue in plays and movies, when there is no narrator.

 His best friend, Teddy uses the silence as a way to one-up his friend (scoring free drinks, using him as a fragile, human icebreaker,) another friend finds a willing audience to prattle to, a brother-in-law finds a willing participant in odd behavior. Enid, the first love, uses him—as most young relationships are wont to do—as a mirror. How cool is she that she doesn’t mind this strangeness of his. But of course, like all mirrors, they are closed loops. A Narcissus in the face of Orpheus, perhaps? 

Speaking of reflections, Gibson and his missing? missed? twin brother, Jaime engage in the more interesting conversations. Actual conversations between two people. They hint at their differences (clothes, declarations of macho superiority, etc) even as their similarities are of course what we assume‚their identities ultimately linked. A chimera is a human being with two dna profiles, usually happens when a twin is consumed by another in the womb. 

We discover in the end who needs Gibson to speak, and who actually is his twin. 

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I wrote this after I watched Ang Nawawala last year, and didn’t publish for some reason.