Travel dark.

Last week, the world felt smaller than it was.

That Monday, I went to class, the last one before the midterm break. Afterward, I had dinner with my roommate at one of the campus canteens. I finished packing when I got to the hall, took a quick shower, and then walked down with my bags to the bus stop.

It was dark and kind of muggy, and an orange haze hung from the trees. I supposed that nearly everyone else had gone already; the campus was so quiet. The bus stop was empty, but a few fellow stragglers came too as every car that swept quietly by was not the 199 bus.

Two or three other students were there, and so was a big guy in a singlet. A woman on a scooter pulled up, exchanged a few words with him, and then went away again. He lit a cigarette. I couldn't sit down, knowing where I'd be in just 12 hours. All of us watched the street.

It was the kind of night at the kind of bus stop where anything could pull up at any moment — a van full of goons, an elegant lady riding a giant dog, an indigo bus carrying tired ghosts — anything that might possibly be interested in a small girl in black. But I'd have to beg off; I had to get on the 199.

In the film version, the bus will be mostly empty, the driver gray and world-weary, the ride quiet. But I boarded a packed bus and had to stand. I didn't care. I kept looking at my big blue bag — big enough to carry my body, if I folded myself up like the shirts inside — and remembering what having a bag and being on a bus meant, what was waiting at the end for me.

The whole thing took nearly nine hours, but I think of that Monday evening as an unbelievably brief trip through a long, long tunnel of night. The world outside the bus was dark. The crossing from the bus station to the train station was dark. The train ride across the country was dark — doubly dark as I drifted in and out of sleep. I'd close my eyes to an empty train, open them to a full one, close them again, and then find myself alone again, as the train entered and exited the city center and people trickled off to their homes, leaving me still slouched in that green plastic seat, my feet guarding the week's worth of clothes in the blue bag underneath.

The Tanah Merah Station platform is in the open air, but when I got out there, I was still in the tunnel; the world beyond the railings was dark. More people shuffled into the scene as the second train took its time: a male flight crew member, sitting up straight in his crisp lilac-colored shirt, one hand on the handle of his smart black luggage set; an interracial couple with tiny sling bags, slumping against one another in fatigue, probably making their way back after spending a layover in the city; a trio of students giggling over a notebook; an elegant young woman in trendy, dark clothes and a floral head scarf. She looked at me for a moment, and then she went back to watching for the train; I was a character too, maybe.

Then, I was back on the train and moving through the tunnel again, but only until I had to get out to walk the next part of the way.

Changi airport was very different at close to midnight. Many of the shops were closed, the air smelled faintly of urine, and there were traces of litter around the terminal as, understandably, the night shift staff was probably smaller. The terminal's trademark carpet, almost luxurious in the daytime, made me think of seedy hotel hallways at that strange hour.

The penultimate stretch of the tunnel was the sky. I had a window seat, squashed between two other girls and the blackness outside. We weren't moving, maybe; maybe we were suspended in the sky, and the world slowly turned a few degrees underneath. I closed my eyes and then opened them, and somehow, two hours had passed. I spent the last hour awake, eating the sandwich I'd bought in the terminal.

We landed. I got through immigration. I claimed my bag. I walked past customs. And then Cris was there, handsome as ever, and warm, and real. It was the end of the tunnel. We crab-walked, arms still around each other, to the parking lot.

Finally, finally, through another orange haze, the sun.

These days.

These days, I’m just waiting. While everyone around me seems to be getting on with their lives, I’m waiting.

It’s not like I’m waiting for nothing. I applied to a grad school. Results don’t come out until July. If I get in, I’ll get to live in another country for at least a year and study some things I believe a regular job in this country wouldn’t show me. If I don’t, I’ve got a long list of Plan-B things to do.

In the meantime, though, the frustrations pile up. A few weeks ago, Cris and I visited an animal shelter and saw so many dogs in need of a home. We could give one or two a home, but that requires a basic certainty or permanence that our lives don’t really have right now. Dogs, according to our favorite show on Animal Planet, are, at most, a 15-year investment. You can’t take home a dog — previously abandoned, at that — and then give it back after four months because grad school’s come a-callin’ (Cris has applied, too).

My apartment still looks like I just moved in. I put up my shelves and unpacked the books, but I don’t see the point of getting everything set up given the possibility that I might have to leave again. It isn’t like my old apartment, the one with the treetop view that I loved, where I thought I’d live for a few years. I’d planned decor, I was going to get a proper couch, and I was going to replace all the dorm-era bedsheets I was still using. Then, I applied to grad school. And then, I took this job and had to move closer to work.

My dad offered to finance a trip to Europe, particularly so I can go with him and Mon to visit Mikko in Barcelona. The time he set for the trip was the Easter weekend plus two weeks, which is when Mikko is on holiday from school and can tramp around Spain and maybe Paris with us. But because of some changes at work and my fairness thing that other people say I should ignore, I didn’t ask for leave and didn’t apply for a visa.

That fairness thing: Since I went on leave at Christmas while our complement was already understaffed and overworked, I feel someone else should get to go on leave at Easter. This is not actually a rule at work but one of those conscience things. It now looks like nobody is actually going to file for leave, but it’s too late for me to do that now, since visa appointments have to be scheduled months in advance.

Meanwhile, my friends are traveling, or planning to travel, to places nearer than Europe but still some great distance from here. I want to do the same but hold back because I might need the money for school.

I have one more shot to see Barcelona this year, but again, it depends on whether I get into school. My dad says that, if I get in, he’d give me the money that would have gone into my trip to set myself up as a grad student in that other country instead. If I don’t get in, I can go to Spain with my mom, when she visits Mikko in November.

I almost don’t know if I still want to go to school at this point.

If I don’t get in, I get to move to a different place, somewhere with a lower noise level and a pet-friendly landlord. Maybe I can get a new bike, an electric one. Maybe I can look into long-term projects at work. I’ll definitely plan a trip, not just one to Europe, but to all the other places I want to visit.

If I do get in, I get to move to a different place, somewhere with decent public transport and city parks larger than a half-block or a road island. I get to study, feel horribly inferior to my more experienced and more talented classmates, and remind myself that I’m lucky that I even get to be there, learning. Maybe I can get a bike, a second-hand one, handed down by a previous batch of dormers. I’ll bike around the city without fear of getting catcalled or run off the road by jeepney, truck, and cab drivers.

Waiting is the pits. It’s a weird uncertainty where the ifs are a lot sunnier than the but really right nows.

Eh. It’s just a couple more months.

thing-a-week 17, 18, and 19

Things have been really busy in the past couple of weeks, but I've done my best to keep up with the crafts.

When I started making kirigami, I went through an inverted symmetry phase, and I wanted to revisit it for Week 17. Unfortunately, work piled up that week, so all I have to show for it is this nearly done diagram. I had a bit of a problem with the middle chunk, so I decided to start over.

Week 18 was not much better, but I lucked out when Taiwan put on a big tourism exhibit in the new Glorietta activity center, where they gave free supplies for these cows and messages in bottles. Mine is the blue cow; Mikko's is the gray.

They came courtesy of Flying Cow Ranch, the "Most Childish Ranch in Western Taiwan." The brochure offers other wonderful Engrish gems; this is what's on the cover:

Flying Cow Ranch is natural and fun,
Because the ranch is built by our bared hands and feet.
In Flying Cow Ranch,
You can jump like a child,
You can laugh like a child,
You can drink some milk with children.
The ranch is filled with the rich smell of dairy products.
Come to visit the most childish ranch in Taiwan.
And have great fun here!

To be honest, I really want to go now, but that's because I like farms in general.

Week 19, this past week, was a lot better. I went through with my inverted symmetry. I was initially inspired by the cover of "North," by Stars, but I was also thinking of cities in outer space and the squarish scrollwork around some Chinese windows and building accents.

Letter No. 17

In a few days, I'll be taking Cris home with me to Socsksargen. He's been pretty busy with work and other things, so he says it hasn't sunk in for him yet. But I've been looking forward to it every day this March, because I've been looking forward to bringing him home since last year, and now we actually have a date, and that date is in sight.

I don't expect him to like everything, of course. In fact, I really don't know what to expect. A lot of good-natured ribbing from my brothers, to be sure. A lot of walking, maybe some hiking. Definitely some swimming, as my parents want to drive straight from the airport to a Sarangani resort for the first two days. Dad's birthday. Maybe Nadie's chicken and some blackened tuna. Cousins over for Easter. A little church.

I'm most looking forward, though, to the walking — taking Cris to all my favorite places, showing him my school, walking under the old trees, and basically giving him the grand tour of my home planet.

Home is a part of me that I, unlike a lot of people I know here, can't just show people by asking them to come over later for dinner. It takes patience, cash, good timing, and a copy or a bookmark of one of those long weekend calendars floating around, especially if you have to watch for airline promos. And ever since my job made me more office-bound, it's become harder to plan trips home. So, every trip I get to take is precious, and the people I get to take with me are precious, too.

When I do invite friends to fly home with me sometime, or when my parents say I should bring them with me, I always warn my friends, "There's nothing to do there. There's no nightlife or anything like that. If you want to go to a bar, you have to drive 45 minutes through the dark pineapple fields to General Santos, about 60km away. We will probably just walk around a lot, eat, and sleep. You'll probably have all the pineapple you want, though, and we will probably get a tuna jaw for lunch or dinner sometime." Walking around a lot, eating, and sleeping is basically my dream life, but of course, it's not for everybody.

The timing for this trip is actually not that great; between Sarangani, the cousins coming, Dad's birthday, and church stuff, I don't really know how much time I'll get to walk around with just Cris. But it's the best we could get, given how unpredictable this year promises to be. I look forward to it all the same; for however briefly, I'll be home, and he'll be there with me.

thing-a-week 2: Postcard and photo wallhanging

I've collected a bunch of neat postcards and old photos, and I wanted to put them up on my wall somehow.

Featured here are:

• four big black-and-white postcards from Beijing
• one colored postcard depicting rickshaw drivers, also from Beijing
• photos of India and Tokyo by Isagani Campo
• a mysterious photo of the Luneta Grandstand
• tiger and palm postcards from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, plus the brown envelope
• a postcard depicting the German moped, the NSU Quickly

The bar is part of a defective shower curtain rod that I covered in paper and then painted with blue poster paint.

I'm not entirely happy with how the whole thing turned out, though. I like the sleeves, but I'd like some alternative to the rod and the string.

Till next week, then.

Letter No. 6

The last time I travelled abroad, I fell in love with a country. I hadn’t expected to; I’d only expected to have some fun with my family and explore a new place. But Singapore floored me, and it became the backdrop to my daydreams, a vision of the kind of life I wanted for myself.

This time, I went to China, and the love I felt was for another person, and the dream was for a life that could be lived and shared anywhere, hesitant though I am about such dreams.

Sometime ago, Cris told me that he’d follow me anywhere. Instead of feeling happy about this, I wanted to run away. Someone had made me that promise before, but when I’d finally found a place I actually wanted to go, I learned that “anywhere” really just meant “anywhere around here, because he never, ever wants to leave.” It was just one of several fundamental differences that, when I think about it, led to our breakup. But I don’t want to think about that; that’s in the past.

Today, looking back on the near-week I just spent with Cris in Beijing, I’m starting to entertain the idea of grand declarations and impassioned promises again. Maybe we really can go anywhere now, together.

I had a fantastic time. We saw the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Bird’s Nest, a handful of manmade lakes, the schools Cris attended, the 798 art district, and a load of intimidating architecture and impressive infrastructure. I had dumplings and lamb chuànr almost every day, and the autumn cold was as thrilling as it was, well, chilling.

Yet to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I would have liked it as much if Cris hadn’t been with me. Don’t get me wrong; all the things I’ve mentioned are well worth the RMB. I’d highly recommend Beijing to anyone looking for a great culture and history trip.

It’s just that whatever enjoyment I got out of poking around the palaces and climbing up and down Badaling was heightened by the underlying idea that they were parts of a place that Cris loved, and he was sharing them now with me. Even simple bus rides, brief campus walks, stomping through bustling shopping streets, and ducking into dumpling shops not wide enough to spread your arms felt like secret privileges, little peeks into the life he had as a student there, little chances to try and understand him better. I don’t know if I succeeded, only that the need to feel close(r) to him feels stronger now than ever.

Beijing itself, of course, was a great place for this to happen. All over the city, there are banners and posters for a campaign called “Beijing Spirit”, which the posters say is composed of patriotism, innovation, inclusiveness, and virtue. To one longtime expat, the campaign smells of subtle propaganda. But to this tourist, it underscores the awe one feels from that first ride from the airport through modern Beijing, jaw-dropping even in the dead of night after a budget flight, to the end of an eight-hour walk through Qianmen and the Forbidden City with all its bronze dragons, marble staircases, and tantalizing echoes of the emperors’ lives. Beijing smells both of historical greatness and of the promise of great change, and it can get hard to figure out where wanting your life to be part of that promise ends, and where wanting that promise in your life begins.


It’s been a little jarring, maybe sobering, to be back and to go about life as before, to remember to tell the cashier “Thank you,” and not, “Xièxiè,” to swap my thick RFID-equipped yīkǎtōng for the bendy, magnetic LRT cards, and to look out at a skyline not dotted with hipped palace roofs as well as high-rises. I say sobering because, now that the vacation and the subsequent long weekend are over, I’ve had to think hard about what I’m doing and what I need to do next to stay happy where I am. Then, I think of Cris, and I feel worry fade away, and see promise within my reach.

Letter No. 5

This time tomorrow, I'll be in Beijing. I'll probably be having breakfast in the hostel cafe, listening to Cris plan our day aloud, and trying to get my head around the vastness of the things he's about to show me (“Tiananmen Square is how many hundred Bellarmine Fields?!”). I'll probably be a little groggy and achy already, considering how late our flight will have arrived. And I'll definitely know whether I brought enough clothes for the single-digit dark-hour temperatures.

This will be my second trip abroad since my family returned to the Philippines 15 or so years ago, and my first trip abroad without them. It's also my first trip anywhere with Cris. It seems like a major milestone, a big deal, another important experience on the way to getting older. But I'd rather not overthink things more than I may have already.

I'm just looking forward to the break from regularly scheduled life. I'm going to put it out there: I've been feeling burned out for the past couple of months. My head's been in a fog, and I haven't been doing so well at work; I've been underperforming and letting people down. Our tickets to Beijing were booked months ago, when I hadn't expected or realized that this was where my head would be, but I'm glad now that we'd planned this far ahead, and doubly glad that we're actually going now. Shambling from task to task and trying to pinch and press myself into renewed productivity hasn't been working, so maybe I just need to go away for a while.

I've really gotten into Glitch, but I won't deny that a lot of it has been escapism. There's always something new to do in the world of Ur: a new region to explore, another interesting character to meet, another quest to fulfill, another skill to learn and test, a weird new thing to eat or drink, and even a tiny moment of beauty and enlightenment every day – and every day lasts just four hours, so there's always a new day around on the horizon.

It's time now, though, to really wake up in another place, for real-life exploring, real-life people-watching, real-life new-thing-tasting, and maybe some real-life learning and inspiration.

I'm really grateful that I'm about to take this trip. I know that not everyone can be so lucky or blessed, whichever way you want to look at it, so I really want to make the most of the time. I'm looking forward to seeing the sights – the Forbidden City, the drum tower, the Great Wall – but I'm also looking forward to just chilling out at Houhai, maybe riding a bike, and getting to know a place that Cris loves and sometimes loves to hate.

They say that travelling together is a great test of any relationship, and some might say Cris and I shouldn't be taking this trip so early; we haven't been together a year yet. But I don't want to overthink that, either. For one thing, we didn't plan to take this trip alone; we planned it with friends who, sadly, had to back out at the last minute. I'm not about to back out myself just to satisfy some vague convention. If this trip is a test, then I'm glad it's come sooner rather than later. But, I'm sure we'll be fine.

I guess that's it for now; I still have to finish packing. 再见!

Time for Time

I'm flying home this Saturday to spend the long weekend somewhere quiet, green, and familiar.

Maybe it's just my brain flipping out over the clean oxygen, but something magical always happens to me whenever I go home after a long time away. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing my family, my oldest friends, my favorite neighborhood haunts, and the dog. But I'm also looking forward to taking a long walk alone around the place, just to reacquaint myself with myself.

This is usually done by any combination of the following: looking for the kinds of leaves and seeds and rocks I played with as a kid, crossing the gully bridge to the high school campus, visiting the abandoned pond behind the Grade Two classrooms, standing under any tree in the ballpark, taking the pine-needle-covered path to the Clubhouse, and/or sitting on a half-buried boulder in the backyard of an empty house, just on the edge of the eight fairway.

At some point in the middle of all this, I can expect to be blindsided (every time) by the general feeling that all is well, my life has a purpose, and even if it doesn't, all shall still be well. If I'm feeling particularly low at that moment, some crying may be involved. If I'm especially lucky, it happens at that odd hour in late-mid-afternoon when the sun hangs an golden veil over everything, and walking feels like a swimmy dream, or a Florence + the Machine song.

Possibly this one (thanks for the share, Meg).

It's like Adam Young having one last perfect summer day in Lower Tadfield, or perhaps Ruth Belville going to Greenwich just to set her watch.

I can already feel it in my ribcage; this is going to be the best time.

Priorities 1

It started to rain just as I was about to step out of the office, get groceries (i.e. a carton of milk, a bottle of water, a can of tuna, a can of soup, and a bag of potatoes), and go home, so I guess I'll post an update while waiting out the rain--which is getting stronger as I type.

The other weekend, I went home in time for Kalilangan. Pictures here.

The funny thing was that all the thinking I usually do during a one-or-two-week homecoming, I managed to do in two-and-a-half days. The usual is basically:

1. My life in Manila, and having to return to it
2. Martin
3. My career
4. Stuff I miss about my family

The other funny thing was that I left with my head clearer than it usually is after a homecoming.

My plan now is to enjoy today. I have a sort-of-distant date in mind for a much longer return home, but that's not going to be an excuse for me to do well where I am right now. Nor will I pass up on special opportunities as they come by--even if seizing one might actually mean putting off my return for an even later date, whether that's by two or three years or indefinitely. I won't let my desire to go home keep me from finding something worth staying here for.

And speaking of things worth staying for, I feel like I can finally just enjoy being with Martin without worrying about the future. Last year, setting my sights on the future, however clouded, helped dull the difficulty of the present. Now that the present is much better, I'm slowly relearning not only how to accept it, but also how to enjoy it. Already, I'm much happier for it. I'm glad for Martin's patience, too.

There's a part 2 to this post, but it's stopped raining, so I'm going to take off now. Cheers.