From where I sat in my room, I could see my mother's blown-up picture which was taken at the Manila International Airport just a few minutes before she left the country. I couldn't help but gaze at her picture and it touched my innermost feelings. She looked gorgeous in her brown terno. She had her hair permed, had just a slight make up and pale lipstick. She was waving her hand while a heavy handbag hung from her frail shoulders. She threw a full smile at us while she climbed the staircase of the airplane that would bring her abroad. But I knew behind that beautiful smile, she had lots of worries deep inside her heart -- worries about the job that she would pursue there, of adapting to her new environment, of the different climate which her weak body was not accustomed to, and about myself and my sister who would be left behind here. She carried all these worries with her until the airplane zoomed up in the air and was hidden by the clouds in the horizon. Meanwhile, I stopped reminiscing those few moments before she left. I stood up from my bed and only then did I notice the tears that were running down my cheeks.
I wrote this when I was a college freshman at Centro Escolar University. It was actually a homework. We were asked to write a paragraph starting with the phrase "From where I sat." Being a very sentimental young person, this was what I came up with. My English professor liked it so much that she read it to all her English classes during that semester.
