i like to think that home is new york. my immediate family is peppered along the eastern seaboard, all within a few hours’ drive from each other, just close enough not to be a constant pain in the ass. and new york is where i live and work, where i find irritation and joy, hardships and blessings, disappointments and successes, heartbreak and renewal. it’s where i’ve shaped my life, for better or worse, for many, many years.
but i have another home that i think of — one of memory, appropriately sepia-toned and edged with blurry vignette, triggered into conscious thought by very small things: a word, a beloved’s name, a gesture of shared culture, the scent of a stew slow-cooking on the stove. at times like these, i feel i could crawl back under a blanket to nap away the worries of my present day, with the noise wrapping around me like childhood in its best moments.
both of these ‘homes’ feed and influence and color each other with all the trappings of my experience, but i can’t truthfully say that one is the home of the heart. my childhood is memory, manila is where it took place; everything after becomes part of the same chain of memory, wherever and however they happened. where does a body make their home? does one concept of home invalidate the other?
when someone asks me, “when are you going home,” what do i say? i’m already home — in the way i speak, how i think, the way my hands and arms wave in gestures big and small, how i’m so lazy i point with my lips, the strange mannerisms of my habits, the way i insert pilipino words into my english unconsciously, how i need to read my tita’s elegant, calligraphic handwriting with a pilipino-english dictionary and my brother beside me to translate, how i’m the first in line to scoop a ladleful of escabeche and kare-kare onto my mound of kanin and eat it all with a spoon. how do i say that i’ve made a life for myself within and beyond my circumstances and abilities, that my heart is not the domain of fuzzy, unreliable remembrance, but a part of me, wherever i go and whatever i do? would that make me less of a pinay than you?