Lego are Building Blocks

by Esther Suson

While taking a walk around Shangri-la Plaza (EDSA-Shaw) with R and Bluejay (obviously another codename) after lunch, we wandered by Build City.

“Want to build with Legos?” R asked.

“Okay,” I said, and we went in, leaving Bluejay to chase us. (My excuse is that we were a little bit dopey from lunch, and his legs are long. We weren’t too slow, he was too fast).

With only a few glances spared for the display models, the three of us headed for the Lego-table, which had a tube cut open at the top to hold the building-blocks in, while foundations were stuck to the floor: for all the world like a model assembly line, except there were no instructions. Imagine what the Model T would have looked like.

We found seats and set to work, picking out blocks and creating whatever caught our fancies, whether or not they stayed up. For the most part, we were quiet with after-lunch lethargy. Added to that, neither R nor Bluejay knew each other too well. I, sitting in the middle, was pretty much their only link.

But, amidst the quiet of the shop and the soft clicks of Lego blocks attaching to one another, I felt something else being built, as steadily and as inevitably as flat round pebbles dropped into a pool and settling to the bottom.

Something happens when you discover, even by accident, that there is a certain part of yourself that you can share with another person. Sometimes it’s squeezing each other’s hands at exactly the same time while watching Brave, like with R and I. Sometimes it’s entering into a conversation about American gangs, like Bluejay and I.

And sometimes it’s discovering that you can sit side-by-side with a particular acquaintance and build with Lego as if doing so was the most natural thing on earth. Never mind that you’ve both reached the age of majority.

In the picture in my mind, someone had just dropped two pebbles marked ‘R’ and ‘Bluejay’ into the pool marked ‘Friendship’, and slowly but surely, both were making their way to the bottom.