When I was a kid, my grandma bought me my first body pillow which I promptly named 'haba unan,' meaning: long pillow. I grew seriously attached to this pillow. It was the same size as me and I'd hug it tightly every night to sleep and wake up in the same position. My parents were amazed at how I was able to stay so still in the night, clutching tightly onto that pillow.
Anyway, so when we had to move to Canada, I stuffed my haba unan in my yellow knapsack so we could travel on the plane together. Unfortunately, my great-aunt noticed how big my knapsack was and asked what was in it. When I told her I had my haba unan in it, she took it out and said, "we'll buy you a new one in Canada."
And so, my beloved haba unan and I were separated. I was very upset but didn't show it, since if I cried they'd just assume it was because I was scared of going on the plane and not because I'd just been separated from my best pillow I'd ever owned.
Fortunately, my grandma bought me a new haba unan once we arrived in Toronto. This one was huge, it was at least a head bigger than I was at the time. This time, I was determined to never be separated from it, no matter what.
So I kept my new haba unan by my side until it became old, tattered haba unan. Around December last year, it begun to rip until the entire thing fell apart, but I was still determined to keep it by my side and gave it a quick fix by stuffing it into two pillow cases.
Eventually though, I seriously just had to put my haba unan to rest and threw it out, since it didn't even resemble a pillow anymore. It just looked like a old, frayed cotton balls stuffed into two pillow cases. A few weeks ago I unceremoniously dumped it in the trash and that was the end of it.
I don't know if I'll ever have own another haba unan ever again. I had to blog about it because I threw it out so unceremoniously, I should have at least given it a proper burial or something.
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I used to sleep with one too, but I was never that attached to it...it was just something that I pretended warded off "things" that might creep onto my bed.
I'll keep a lookout for another one, just in case you ever feel like having another one...hehe.
This is probably really insensitive but now pou pou has something to sleep with
This isn't a funny story, but can I just say that I chuckled at the mention of haba unan. At first I thought "what is a haba" Then I realized that you meant "ang haba." Hahaha Kay, sorry.
Sry I failed to entertain you Hannah.
My limited Tagalog failed to realize that I should have added an ang before haba but in this case, I used haba as an adjective to describe unan. If I called it ang haba unan all the time it would be like saying the long pillow, the long pillow! To personify it, it's probably better not to have ang to describe the pillow, so it'd just be called 'long pillow' instead of 'the long pillow'.