All that you can't leave behind

As with school, my country has defined me, yes, but I always sought never to let it confine me. It’s ironic, then, that a chance to study in the United States this fall was the reason I needed to leave.

Departing from school like I had — a gleeful skip in my step as I made my way to my car, entertaining plans to burn my high school uniform or college textbooks — wasn’t like leaving a city rife with places I’ve referred to as home. Manila had my identity strewn through its byways and the “expressway” we know as EDSA, its lengthy travel time often spurring me to contemplate the challenges of getting where I wanted to be, both literally and existentially.

There are the actual places I’ve resided in: a house in Pasig, for instance, where a succession of pets and television sets either ministered to or polarized a brood of eight kids. It was a house where characters were built around the enforced finishing of a dinner plate or impassioned quarrel over a remote control, everyone unaware of what wistfulness such memories would later incite, especially when the house grew emptier with each of my siblings’ discovering their own lives to lead or households to head. A sizable chunk of our lives in this city being spent in malls, many memories of mine littered them, too, venues for youth’s loitering as they are. There were cinemas where another’s hand was first held during a dimly lit scene and stores whose goods were used to curate a persona exhibited through the sneaking of an after-school cigarette and, later, the frequenting of an after-hours nightspot.

Of course, standing like depots for friendships either severed or strengthened are the bars and clubs I’ve patronized. And conversely, as if a drink in hand nourishes the passing of time, there are the commercial coffeehouses where I’ve clocked in more hours than any job I’d ever held. The city’s waiting room is the ubiquitous chain café; the ambient displacement I got from strangers meeting, confiding and working in a cozy place of transition became apt accompaniment to my writing, from the time I banged out the first article I contributed to a magazine to the personal essay that led to my being accepted by a graduate school in New York.

Suffice to say, I am not just leaving home or a hometown but the person I was through my Manila. Soon as I pass through customs, the officer’s stamp on my passport is as good an indication that this part of my life — almost exactly a quarter of my life — is over; the destination I’m heading towards, the change I’m staring straight in the face.

Not any less absurd than death is departure, I believe. It involves one’s conscious decision to evolve; instead of becoming merely a memory to the people you’re leaving behind, you are openly defying that memory, birthing a new person within that may veto who one was. This is what it’s been like for me as I gradually disconnect myself from the tubes of a soon-to-be-former reality: job, routine and the easy proximity of friends and family.

Wear Sunscreen

Departure is daunting because you yourself are about to meet the acquaintance of the person you’ll become amid such severe changes. All I know of this future Me is that he is living in a two-bedroom apartment that’s a quick pedal from Harlem, New York; the sternness and graceful instrumental tinkering I expect of his German roommate, a harpsichord major, countering the frenzied character of that neighboring district. This person will be accosted by countless experiences. He’ll be forced to assert himself when the ignorance or obnoxiousness of Americans threatens him. He might become stronger as opposed to hardened by the city, as that Wear Sunscreen song warned, but already I’m getting ahead of myself, knowing fully well that a city like New York deals an experiential lottery. What I am certain about of this person: he is up for grabs.

I’m preparing to meet this person, though, whoever he may be. I’ve begun packing and separating remnants of 26 years lived into either boxes to be left or into the two suitcases I’m bringing with me.

Last night, as I’d begun filling my bags with all the clothing worthy of a professor’s or prospective employer’s respect, I’d drawn up a list of other important things to bring:

A bit of Bon Iver, a bit of Fitzgerald.

1. My birth certificate, lest I need to prove the legitimacy of where I’d come from, most especially if it has to be to myself. 

2. A framed photo of New York. A friend’s very personal capture rendered in sepia, reminding me of the many times I’d stared at it to visually coax myself into seeing it with my own eyes. 

3. An unopened vinyl copy of Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” gifted by someone who’d shown an anxious person like myself patience in love — something I don’t plan on forgetting.

4. A dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby. A testament to a man with a past’s ability to create his own mythology, one of those essential New York novels.

I’d stopped at four things, disoriented by a feeling I’ve had for the past few weeks. Sitting around the current cast of characters in my life as they talked about ongoing challenges and the flourish of their careers, of their unfolding narratives in settings that would go on without me, it was akin to hovering above them like a restless spirit neither here nor there. And here I was now in my room, still floating and surveying the things that helped reinforce my character at an epoch in my life.

Here were the CD sleeves and fake DVDs — Donnie Darko to mollify a brooding teen, The Endless Summer for a weekend hobby that ended with a rogue surfboard’s fin hacking at my forehead, the Vedder-bolstered soundtrack to Into the Wild as accompaniment to a phase of Walden-esque hermitry. They were all plastic fragments of a bygone time, more so because iTunes had phased shelves out for a while now.

Excess Baggage

On the night of my room’s upending, thoughts of my luggage’s limitations kept me awake. Yes, I’d finally gotten the one-way ticket I’d always wanted, though the time between the impassioned sending of my application and the receiving of my acceptance letter had rendered me a different person suddenly content with his stance in Manila. Lying uneasily in bed, I couldn’t bear my drifting from the consciousness of people; that my tweets, like the new identity I’d cultivate, would gradually alienate.

Then it dawned on me that even without the obstacle of distance, I’d lost contact with a lot of people anyway. I thought of the people I’d been able to consider friends at one point in my life, their memories so quick to summon because of the palpable attention they once paid or that ultimate comfort reached when a conversation could be one of silence, all of them now just seeming figments of my imagination. How resilient we are to experience countless departures in a lifetime, and yet how lucky we are to have a mind that testifies to their having happened.

 As with every person imbued with memory, every place I’d traversed meant something. A street flooded with rainwater and debris as with one inundated by the suds of a foam party; an avenue where I pumped my fists with others to resuscitate an ailing government; or the bus lane that had almost taken my life when I’d driven drunkenly into one of its dividers. You couldn’t string people and places along — a country, especially— but they resided in your mind, anyway, no matter where you yourself ended up.

The most important relic to all that has come to pass is myself, I thought, as the ebb of restfulness began to build upon me. I then shut my eyes, content in the fact that soon everything would be so far yet still so near.