The Arrival of the Inevitable, Part One

Tomorrow, I shall leave for New York and begin the next chapter book in my enchanted life. Tomorrow! I remember when the days still numbered more than a hundred and how I’d often wish that waking up the following morning meant that the day of my departure has come. That day is today! However, it has also become a seesaw between wanting to haste/delay my departure.

In between doing nothing and spending much time with my loved ones, the inevitability of being homesick has already arrived long before I have even set foot in the Big Apple. No, I don’t think I’d miss the hustle and bustle of urban Manila (especially commuting during the monsoon season!) that much especially that New York is the cosmopolitan behemoth. 

Pathways loves at mi despedida

Cliché as it may sound, the aspect of Manila I would miss the most would be the people. My family, my friends, Pathways co-staff, volunteers and participants and all other significant people who may not fall within any of the aforementioned circles.

I think it rings true for every individual who has voluntarily plucked himself/herself from the comforts of his hometown and plopped into a cosmopolitan wilderness eager to devour every inch of him/her. Suddenly without a familiar face to converse and laugh with, without a familiar shoulder to lean and cry on, a familiar hand to hold on to and help, without a longtime friend to conquer the world and celebrate with afterwards, the displaced individual finds himself/herself void of any shell to protect him/her from the foreign. It’s the hasty fade of the familiar and its eventual nonexistence that leaves the displaced individual reeling for warmth. For home.

And she/he does not realize that the worse is far from over as the home she/he looks forward to has already morphed into the unfamiliar as well and rather a worse kind. The kind that initially misleads with the familiar and deliberately delivers the painful reality of irreplaceable time and vanished moments. As such, his/her only option is to cling to the remnants of his/her blissful familiar past in the hope that he/she shall regain a part of him/her that he/she has forever lost.

Nostalgia by the river Seine, 2007

Look, this is probably just an entry of a young man trying to deal with the inescapable longing that comes with the experience of separation. A young man who just wants to simply say that he will miss everyone back in Manila, his home, and despite the overwhelming odds against it, he hopes that somehow things will still be all too familiar when he gets back home.