Battleship

Battleship

“This isn’t what I wanted,” she sighed. The warmth    of her breath melted the goosebumps on her forearm. He looked at her devilishly.

“Of course it isn’t. But you asked for it,” he snickered. “That’s what you get when you don’t listen to me.”

“This isn’t what I planned. Nothing is going right. Everything is so wrong.”

He could tell she was starting to get nervous and frustrated. Large beads of sweat started to form atop her forehead. Any moment now, it would all be over, and he would have won.

Games are always a part of a person’s childhood - whether it is physical such as sports, hop-scotch, or jumping rope; logical like puzzles or board games like Taboo. My personal favorite: Battleship. The feeling of demolishing ships and experiencing the taste of sweet success after outthinking my male opponent’s strategies attracted me to the game. However, Battleship was more than just a board game. It was a link to what I saw as normal.

Growing up, my parents only bought games that were “educational...a source of enrichment for [the] mind and spirit.” I was not surprised when I received substitutions for the sidewalk chalk and tea party sets I had written down on my Christmas wishlist just like all the other girls in my Kindergarten class. At that age, I understood why. Like most parents, mine only wanted the best for me and had the expectations of nothing less than extraordinary. So, why settle for dirty items and make-believe nonsense when, at the age of six, I can learn the basics of accounting and trade with Monopoly, challenge my knowledge with Cranium, and strategize like a pro with Chess? Intelligence and success ran on both sides of the family, and being the eldest, the pressure to exceed and live up to those expectations was past the heavens, forcing me into an addiction for self-doubt and neglect which, in turn, led me to experience a life-changing awakening of beauty and reward.

I, along with my younger brother and sister, was raised in an overprotective, authoritarian household. My father would engrave Filipino family traditions in our minds as if his life depended on it: dinner needed to be cooked and placed on the table before parents arrive from work, trash taken out, dishwasher unloaded, and laundry washed and folded all while maintaining at least a B+/A- average at school. Failure to do so resulted in knees with imprints of dozens of small, split mung beans cutting through the skin leaving it out to bleed; weak arms from two four-inch thick textbooks held on each hand with a possible bonus of bruised or cracked ribs from the belt reminding us to hold our source of education high no matter how tired our arms were. As the eldest, I received the harshest blows and chores because not only was I failing, but I was falling behind on his timeline - I was a Musngi after all - and, in that family, the eldest makes all the sacrifices. He just wants what’s best for me, I thought. That’s how much he loves me.

A few years later, due to a sudden illness, my father had to resign from his job, causing him to no longer feel worthy as a parent or even a man. The plague of depression swept through him, taking away the very life from his empty eyes and, in turn, caused traumatic outbreaks and multiple suicide threats and attempts. A once lit home turned into a cold, dark house freezing the walls that are now so thick that not even wisps of air were allowed to escape. The music that beat through the roof now whispered plain murmurs before deciding it no longer had a place there, allowing silence to soak in the remaining bits of life. For years, I had struggled to please my father for not being the daughter he wanted and trained to be, and to feel so hollow, empty, and completely helpless tore away the only certain piece of what I knew how to do. I felt like I was one of my ships on the board blindly taking hits from my opponent as he blasts coordinates left and right leaving me defenseless out on sea. My head boggled with contradictions and battles between what was right and what was wrong - battles that were all encased in an ongoing civil war with who and what I should be versus the real person I felt I was. Even after all that struggle, I never felt I was given the chance to discover or explore my own feelings, until the day I met my match.

As a little girl, I had always been in love with the idea of Prince Charming riding on a horse to save the princess from a life she hated. The sun kissing her hair as she rides horseback in the arms of her knight and shining armour, finally feeling the warmth of genuine care and attention, seemed like it was only for the storybooks. Then, a video, specifically for me, arrived and rested in my inbox.

“Hi, Christa,” it read. The notecards in the video he pulled away one by one, as if recreating the cheesy iconic moment in Love Actually, became a blur as tears started to fill my eyes. That sun-kissed feeling no longer felt so far away. After three minutes of streaming tears and watching a young man’s self-introduction, the real cause for the video surfaced, “Maybe we can get coffee sometime?” He nervously scribbled. “Because maybe, just maybe, I want to get to know you, too.”  I froze the screen. Allen was not much of a face to look at back then - he was more dorky and strange than he was charming and suave - but he was there and, that