Strolling Along EDSA

“Where would you like to go?” he was asking me about my preferences for our next date. Or was it our first? I can’t even remember. “A sari-sari store please! Or a carwash! Nothing fancy!”, I replied. Whether we sat on the bench outside a sari-sari store or on the monoblock stools of a makeshift carwash station, I pictured somewhere beside the road, sitting on a bench, watching the cars go by while children played and ran around the streets. “What would you want to do this Thursday?” he asked. “Ooooh could we walk along EDSA after work?” I suggested. Prior to that, I had imagined holding hands with him while we laughed and talked all night as we walked under a starless sky courtesy of Manila’s light pollution, his asthma triggered as we walked along a procession of red lights from all that traffic. All these images playing in my head as I typed my reply, completely setting aside the potential of getting mugged during our romantic date along a busy highway.

With a soul like mine, I had often wondered if I was ever going to find someone who would humor me. Many times, I’d imagine that instead of having a reception, my new husband and I together with our friends would build a house for a family. We would do this together with the family who was in need of a home. As my husband and I were to begin our lives together and be each other’s home, I had imagined celebrating our miraculous improbability by helping others start their own homes too. Other times I would fantasize of putting up a wedding planning company that was to be known for being horribly ruthless with the couple’s guestlist — wherein there is room for only 18 guests. I got this idea from a magazine article that detailed a birthday celebration of a Jewish girl wherein at some point, she was to be surrounded by 18 of her loved ones as the number 18 signified the fulness of life.

I knew then as I know now that I would need to meet someone with parents just as crazy as I am to have guests hold hammers and nails instead of spoons and forks during the reception. This eccentricity was something I had acknowledged for the longest time. However, I did not realize the gravity of it until I got a “HAHAHAHAHAHA” for a reply to my suggested strolling along EDSA after work as a date. Well, rightly so, you would like to make a good impression on your first date. Usually they are to be in places that were fancy. Not that I didn’t like fancy dates. Nor was there anything wrong with being fancy. I love both. But it seems that I was looking for something that my current vocabulary wasn’t equipped to describe yet at the time. Perhaps it was a bit too much to ask for on a first date but it was always this feeling of home and peace that I was looking for. Wherein one could just be.

It was always this feeling of home and peace that I was looking for. Wherein one could just be.

So if you haven’t guessed it already, no one really took these dream dates seriously. Except that one date where he did take me to the perfect carwash — complete with a makeshift wooden bench and a monobloc stool, some junk food and softdrinks in glass bottles with the token non-environment friendly plastic straws. This was completely reminiscent of the one my father used to take me to that was beside an old railroad track located along the boundary of my city and the city of Manila. Along that road, there too was this makeshift gas station that was haphazardly built on top of what seemed a half sidewalk — half cement island protruding from the terribly paved road. My description of the place is just as distorted as my visual of that memory. Though I can barely explain the place now, what I can tell you is this:

My father and I used to sit on a bench assembled from the scraps of wood the carwash owners probably found on the streets.

There we sat on what felt like countless afternoons enjoying a completely wordless dialogue, listening to the traffic, smelling all that pollution. Happy.

This is exactly the same dialogue I have now with a grandfather I had found for myself along the tiny streets of my new Manila here in Spain.

It seems that wherever I am, however old I am, I look for the same things. Just as I comment the same things years later complete with the amount of exclamation points and letters in caps lock.

Funny how I speak of different people for these memories. I suggested many different kinds of dates — ones in a cafe in the red light district, another one just sitting on a sidewalk talking, another while doing laundry with me, yet another sitting on a ledge by Manila bay watching the sun set. One of my favorites was actually with a friend who stopped talking to me after he dropped me off at my favorite French café that happened to be nestled in the heart of the red light district. Haha. He used to pick me up and just drive all the way to some faraway gas station. We would have some coffee in a Starbucks there then drive back home. I reckon he enjoyed it a lot because really where could his Porsche or whatever expensive car that was really enjoy its 150+ horse power speed? Definitely not along EDSA. I don’t know if those were dates but I definitely enjoyed those rides. Being in transit in silence in a fast car to elsewhere but here, having some coffee there, then going back to our lives.

I remember how my brother told me off for always having my head up in the clouds. How it was insensitive of me to have certain perspectives, how I was romanticizing someone else’s reality. It happened one day when I told him of how much I enjoyed riding the metro or public buses. How I took them when I needed to relax and take my mind off things.

After hearing something to the tone of, “you like it because it’s not your reality”, a crack on the wall formed. There was truth to what he said. I had to check my privilege as it has now been coined. I am afforded happiness because these were not my realities. But somehow, deep inside me, I still felt that these feelings were genuine whether or not they were because of my social class. Was my reality informed by status? Later on I will learn that the truth need not be defended by words. It stands on its own and is told through time.

Here I am years later in Spain, sometimes taking a bus to wherever enjoying the bus ride more than the destination as the time in transit affords me enough silence for the noise in my head. Sometimes it’s a bus, other times it’s standing in line waiting for my turn inside a Spanish bank. Later on it occurred to me that perhaps it’s not merely a matter of privilege, but mostly just the way I am wired. I always seem to find pockets of time and beauty wherever I go.

This wordless comfort I seek can be explained by speaking about the day of my graduation lunch. If it was on another day and my memory fails me it doesn’t matter. For that afternoon we had lunch in one of my favorite buffets. I hear it happens to be one of the best, if not the best in my country. I had all the steak, foie gras, cheese, wine, sushi, dessert that I wanted.

That evening, I visited a close friend’s home whose family I loved dearly. For dinner, we had fried fish, rice, garlic kangkong, and I can’t even remember what. For some odd reason, that meal was just as good as the buffet.

I still remember the best meals I have had in my life. When I say meal, it isn’t necessarily just food. Sometimes it’s even just a drink. Whatever it is, along with it, comes a feeling of home.

Through this, the physical becomes a sacrament of communion. Of being one with that person or people you are with. The ones who prepared it for you. The ones who made it home. Like that cold glass of powdered orange juice I used to look forward to coming home to everyday back in high school.

Or the freshly picked coconut that grandpa went up the tree for. And he wasn’t even my real grandpa. I just happened to trespass on his beachfront accidentally. His wife and granddaughter found me sunbathing on their beachfront which I assumed belonged to no one. They welcomed me — complete with allowing me on their hammock, making me a cup of coffee, and offering to make a tiny hut just for me once the weather got better. We exchanged numbers. Grandma neither had a phone nor a pen to write with. My phone had died by then as well. She tore off a piece from their wall calendar and with some charcoal, she wrote her number on it. I did so too with mine. Oh how wonderful is it to be alive to experience these meals together, this shared intersection in the tapestry of time.

I still remember that cup of coffee freshly brewed from beans that the wife of my grandmother’s friend had farmed herself. She was the wife of a national treasure, a poet from the mountain province. She gave me her vest that afternoon. It was made of woven cloth, some beads, and some shells. I wear it up to this day. I can still smell the coffee from that afternoon, how it was served on that cream colored steel cup that was slowly yellowing through time. At that time I didn’t even like coffee, yet it is one of the best cups I have ever had.

All these cups of coffee making their way through time. Little shots of love served at different points in my life. Like the coffee someone I admired would prepare for me just the way his parents used to brew it. Or that espresso that a good friend would make with her little portable espresso maker whenever we travelled together. The 3-in-1 my best friend brought all the way from Manila when she visited me in Spain. The coffee which we miserably failed to have since the balcony we were in was too cold and windy for us to stay long enough in. Never mind the precious view of Granada, we were going to have our caffeine somewhere more practical. The 3-in-1 coffee that my grandmother would prepare for me in the morning for our breakfasts together. Or the 3-in-1 coffee that I never had myself but felt I did because an elder co-worker of mine used to describe how he would start his day with it. He told me about how he would sit down and enjoy the peace and quiet at 5am while having his coffee and hot pandesal. If there was time, he would read the newspaper sometime after. Or that cold glass of peach juice, my grandfather got for me one parched afternoon. At 91, he stood up from our usual bench by the side of the road, walked over to the cafe across us and bought and brought me some melocotón to go with my bocadillo. 4 months prior to that afternoon, we were strangers who saw each other daily as I passed by him on my way to work.

I remember the breakfasts my father used to make me — he would ask me if I wanted some tea, toasted bread, jam and cheese. And of course I would say yes even if I wasn’t so much into breakfasts at that time.

It was the sixth of May, perhaps it has been 5 years since that car ride where my brother spoke to me about my finding riding public transportation therapeutic. I was seated on a plastic chair underneath a palm tree, reading about the life of a painter I admired. There I was with my cold glass of a fizzy energy drink, feet up on another chair, literally on the side of a road waiting for my bus back home. Once again reminiscent of those afternoons spent with my father at the carwash, except this time I was by myself.

And then it struck me — whether I was in a developing country or developed one — I was the same. I had always been home.

I had always been home.