Five years ago, this was home.
Yesterday, I came back, feeling exactly the same way I did the first time I set foot here: I am transported not just to another place, but to another time. I am away from the rest of the world, and it is strange, scary and delightful.
It is exactly where I should be.
So many things have changed from the way I remembered it–new buildings, spots that have been completely renovated, restaurants that weren’t there when I was around, places that have been walled up as if they never even existed. But even then, my heart is filled with those lost things and lost places, for I have loved each one with equal measure; even though they will now exist only in my imagination and in the memories of those with whom I have shared them.
Conversations, laughter, the perpetual stream of footsteps, hot afternoons, cold nights, a mild quake, Christmas fireworks, the splashing of fountain water, whispers, the shuffling of notebooks and photocopied papers, words spoken and better left unsaid, silence–I know all the corners in which each one was made, and they remain like small dots in the puzzle-map of my soul. Send me to one of those spots and I will tell you what happened there, who adopted a cat, which path we took when it rained as if the sky had no mercy, what we were having for lunch, how much loose change I had in my pocket, who we were watching from afar, where we sat down for a while when we were drunk, sad, joyful or alone. I’ll tell you where we waited for miracles to happen, where we fought, where we hid from anyone who would figure out we were cutting class, where we told each other secrets.
A different time. Different people. Same sky.
Thinking about all these things, I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen the sky outside of my village for ten months. And I haven’t seen the Manila sky in five years.











