From +63 to +39

Back in Rome after a month in the Philippines

It’s been almost a month since I arrived in Rome from the Philippines. During the last few days in the city, I was already imagining myself walking outside the street in front of our apartment here, crossing the pedestrian at via Magnagrecia, shadowed by the view of the Basilica of St. John Lateran at a distance. I had done the same days ahead of my trip to the country, thinking I was already at Salcedo Village, crossing to Jaime Velasquez Park with my iced long black from Habitual Coffee.

The trip itself deserves a different post or two, just to help me reconstruct the blur that the past month was. In the thick of it, the days felt like they were never going to end, that I was finally back in Makati, as artificial as it was to cram day after day with meeting friends from different social circles. That never happened when I lived in the Philippines: I tried to space my social activities to give myself time to breathe. Plus, how many stories could you keep repeating after meeting the same people over and over?

This time around, I summoned all my energy to meet people I haven’t met for almost two years. I actively reached out to people and scheduled meetups, calendared everything to make sure that events didn’t overlap, and planned my errands around people’s availabilities.

After a month of frantic socializing (although almost two weeks of my time in the country were spent in Siargao with B and Gretchen, so technically I really only had two weeks and a couple of days to meet friends), being back alone in our apartment here in Rome feels like the unresolved ending to a feverish climax. One evening a few days ago, I decided to walk all the way to Termini station, about thirty minutes from where we lived. I was restless and bored. I went to the gym earlier in the day, but I was still craving for something to happen.

Nobody really prepares one for the silence that comes with immigrating as an adult. That observation is not a thinly veiled complaint. I understand the consequences of my actions. But it forces me to confront myself fully, in a way that being surrounded by people all the time can drown one’s existential reckoning with noise. I realize the parts of myself that I love and hate with such sharpness and vividness.

I used to go every evening to this corner at Carmencita, a block away from our house in Las Piñas, where I’d buy a cigarette or two and smoke surreptitiously, thinking what kind of life lay ahead. I was in my twenties, I hadn’t moved out, I was in a toxic relationship with my then-boyfriend, who told me why, if I truly loved him, I hadn't yet attempted to kill myself for him as I did for my exes. I looked at the full moon and wondered if it could pull me into the future like the ocean waves that slammed to the shore. I knew I would be somebody, whatever that somebody was. Maybe I was delusional. Having your thyroid surgically removed could sometimes do that.

Over lunch at a restaurant in Makati, my parents asked me to bring B to our house. I shrugged it off, saying yes non-committally, explaining that we needed to check our schedule. There was something about coming back that made me feel nauseated. I dreaded what that place represented in my history. I don’t hate who I was then. But I remember the twelve-year-old boy who lived there who survived awkwardness and abuse, the fifteen-year-old who wanted to emancipate himself from his parents, and the suicidal twenty-year-old. It took me seven more years to finally move out of that house.

I didn’t know that, eight years later, I would also be moving out of the country.