The sky was overcast when I got to UP the day after the Faculty Center was razed by a fire. Seeing the building that housed the brightest minds of the nation, the repository of innumerable books, artworks, researches, documents and records burned down to its concrete shell was enough to bring one to tears. It was an indescribable loss.
When I read the news of the tragedy, I refused to believe it even if the photos seemed real enough. In futile resistance trying to convince myself that it was but a terrible April Fool's joke.
Because how can FC, the first building I stepped into as a UP student, the very same hall that witnessed the most fruitful years of my education, just...turn to ashes?
And even when I saw it in person on Saturday, the shock and grief still refuse to set in. Maybe all these years, even with recognizing how fragile FC could be, I believed that the very same building will remain a fixture in the Acad Oval. That years and years hence, generations after generations, FC will forever house CAL and CSSP departments: the professors continuously building up their piles of books and references to use in class, working and reflecting on their life's work, sharing ideas that shape the nation, the students submitting (and performing!) the products of their toil in the very same building, making countless memories attached to the very same space.
Seeing it in shambles, the roof collapsed, charred debris all over, windows broken–it was too much of a heartbreak. It took me back to the time when I alighted the jeepney for my first day of class in UP. Bulwagang Rizal, the sign says. Like my section in high school, IV-Rizal. And instantly, I felt connected, subduing my misgivings about journeying in college alone, without my friends. From then on, I would always be within FC's proximity during my stay in UP. Meeting up with friends, consulting with my professors and the EL department, enlisting in classes, visiting the exhibits, occasionally transacting records business at CAL101, having lunch at Katag... I can only imagine the loss and grief of the professors who had made FC their home in UP.
Tributes to FC have been made by UP's sons and daughters who thrived within and beyond the academe, who had longer and stronger connection to its hallowed halls and rooms, who stayed truer to everything the College taught them.
Me, I'm just one of the many students who had the opportunity to call FC my first home, back then a freshman/sophomore who tried to find her way in the university, who sought the comfort of FC's dimmed hallways to pass the time, who read and marveled at the posters and signs telling a room's significance or a luminary's contribution to literature and the arts. It was, without fail, the place where I found refuge when the din and the loneliness I feel in CMC became too much to bear.
From the ashes, the phoenix will rise, so the prose goes. And what a phoenix FC had been, lighting the way of the nation's arts, history, humanities. But however FC is reborn, its former incarnation will remain ingrained in UP's identity.
It was a loss--of art, history, of collective memories--quite unlike any other. It's a farewell immeasurably saddening and devastating.
Paalam, FC. Maraming salamat. Hanggang sa muli.
