Finding Andromache

Leaving the familiar to go into the unknown is as alluring as it is daunting. The thought of my loved ones not being a short train or plane ride away scares the shit out of me. Alone at bed at night, sometimes I am filled with doubt and am convinced I should stay in the U.S. and "settle down". After all, I have opportunities here that a lot of people could only dream about. American Privilege. Sometimes I start to believe other people who say that I am a smart woman who has made a foolish decision to move to Turkey for an indeterminate amount of time for no reason other than answering "a call from deep within". It is an adventure, but an uncertainty nonetheless. 

And yet despite these doubts and looks of disappointment, I cannot give in to fear and doubts. I can no longer continually try to fulfill expectations that people have of how I should be. I cannot fall into the trap of complacency and safety. I need to let go…have and want to let go of these safety nets that weigh down my wings. I need to fall—or at the very least experience the sensations of falling—so that I can pull myself up and fly. I need to live and not just go through the motions of living. I need to live for myself instead of be a vessel for other people to live out their dreams. I have to make my own mistakes and not spend a lifetime trying to avoid making the mistakes that others have…mistakes that have defined them into the people that they are now. This lifetime is short enough to spend it worrying about reliving other people’s past, and it is long enough to spend it defined by regrets.

At times I feel like I’m too old for this “finding myself” bit; after all, I did it for a couple of years after high school. But logically, I know that it cannot be true, for since the dawn of time, people have struggled to find themselves. Some have spent a lifetime doing so. Age is irrelevant, as “self” itself doesn’t truly age. 

The hardest part about trying to live up to legacies is that in so doing, you could easily lose track of who you are. To follow in other people’s footsteps more often than not entails setting aside your wants until you just wake up one day and realize that you don’t know what you want. You’ve felt it for so long that somehow, you now believe that your wants have ceased to matter. 

Who am I without my so-called intelligence? Would I still be me? Would I be less of myself had I been more acquainted with the letter grade C than A? Would I still be the golden (grand)child had I chosen writing over game theory, and creativity over pragmatism? What if I believed in kindness and in humanity more than I do in prestige and profits? 

Maybe at the end of this journey and adventure, I'll come back to where it all began. Maybe I already have whatever it is I'm searching for--whatever I feel is missing in my life but have yet to be able to name. Or maybe, just maybe, whatever I'm looking for is on the other side of the world...waiting to be explored. Perhaps in searching for Hector, I'll end up finding Andromache. 

So I'll keep walking, no matter how hesitant my steps. No matter how many times I falter or fall, I will get up and keep walking. I can feel the sun even as I feel uncertainty. I just gotta keep facing forward. 

The One (Who Should've Been): Old Journal Entry

This is my dream home. Not this exactly, but something like it: a house on a cliff that overlooks the ocean. The kind of home where through my bedroom window, I could catch the faint yet distinctive scent of salty sea air. The kind of home where the brightest light I could see at night emanates from the sky—the moon and the stars—and not billboard lights. The kind of home where I could cook big meals with my husband and have our family and friends come over for dinner and drinks. The kind of home where my children calls our neighbours tita and tito, or lola and lolo. A simple home and a simple life, intellectually and culturally rich, rooted in history and invested in the future. 

But wanting this dream means letting go of him, because it is not his dream. 

We finally talked again, this time not tiptoeing on the fragile eggshells that were remnants of us. Anger, frustration, regrets, confusion, resentment, love…all of them were laid bare. 

He pinpointed where it all went wrong: when I wavered on my (family's) lifelong plans for me to attend law school and get into the family business of politics. The only place to go on from where I was academically was up, he said, but I chose to take a descending detour. He was angry and confused as to why I deviated from a plan laid out for me, in a field where I have already proven myself to excel. He believed I didn’t need to find myself, because from an early age, it was expected that I continue a legacy. 

He has become a stranger…he who I could read far better than “The Great Gatsby” or “Knulp.” 

He is no longer the man whose smile knocked me off my feet when we first met. He is no longer the man who reaches out in kindness to homeless people by buying them food. Instead, he is now a man governed by socio-economic, racial, and gender distinction. 

Cognitive dissonance, they call it.

I want so badly to believe that the man I fell for is still there, and that maybe if we compromised, we could still have it all. I believed that love on its own is powerful enough to undo the hurts, the confusion, the frustration. I believed all of it could be salvaged. We still love each other so deeply, you see? 

But then I thought of it. Love. 

And I realized that in my determination to believe our love to be all-encompassing, I forgot about loving oneself.

And I could now see. Understand. Why two people in love isn’t enough, as the fairy tales say. 

To fall in love—to give love to someone else—you must first know and have love for yourself. 

I want him to love and accept me as I am, all of me. I want him to love  not just my so-called intellectual mind but my idealistic heart as well. I want him to love me more when I’m having a rough day at work—not when I win an award—because that’s when I need it the most. I want him to love my ability to read 500-page books in a half a day, as well as the fact that when I try to assemble furniture, they almost always end up lopsided. I want him to love me because I snort when I laugh and make faces at babies. I want him to love me when I’m covered in paint and when I’m biting my lip as I try to finish my manuscripts. I want him to love the part of me who believes that people are capable of goodness, the part of me that’s full of hope and the part of me that’s insecure. I want him to love who I am as well as what I do. 

But what he loves  more is an idealized image of me, an image of what I could or should be. I realize that now. 

And I deserve better. 

Of course I’m fucking scared of this finality that lingers in the air. I’m aware that he may be it, that despite everything, no man could love me as deeply as he does.  I’m scared of being 90 years old and not having a hand to hold. I’m scared of coming home to an empty apartment ten years from now, and rolling over to the other side of the bed and finding it cold and empty. I want to wake up in the mornings realizing that even as I slept, somebody was watching me, loving me. I want to rest my head on somebody’s chest at night and be lulled to sleep by the sound of their heart beating. Knowing that all those could possibly not happen because I let go of him…it scares the shit out of me. 

And yet even if I’m scared shitless, I can’t ever change who I am. I tried. I can change what I am, what I do, where I go, what job to take…but who I am…I cannot. It is my core, my self. 

I can’t give up on my dream home, because it is mine. I cannot give up myself.  

And finally, I understand that my wants do  matter. 

I matter. 

Angels Used to Cry

 

Hold your head up and wipe your tears dry
Your pain has unlocked the gates of my once-closed heart
For so long all I've ever wanted was to remain unemotional
But when I held you in my arms,
I forgot about the fears that made me shut out the world  

Once upon a lifetime
Angels wandered the world aimlessly
Tears streaked their rosy cheeks
As they drifted off to sleep 

Prayers left unspoken and unanswered
Were what my heart hath beckoned
Thought I'd be alone forever,
Then you came into my life
You looked into my eyes and saw my dreams
Not the emptiness I once cast upon the stars and skies 

And in this lifetime
I wandered this world purposefully
Peace filled my heart
As we walked hand in hand

Yo Soy una Sirena

Calmly do the waves sway back and forth, as the sirens sing  their song
that speaks of love. Sultry voices hath beckoned you and me to stray for far too long,
as we bid adieu to the confines of the sacred ground we once had tread.
Together we float in a daze, half submerged in water, half in a fog, safety is now what we dread.

We have reached a moment in time when the naive idolatry of flying has been trashed,
replaced now by the need to forevermore wander with the fluidity of waters we cannot hold. Unabashed,
we strip down to enhance the essence of humanity, showing the voyeuristic sailors a glimpse
of the people they wish to be, deceiving them with images far too removed from their war-torn lives predicting apocalypse.  

I would sooner lose the breath upon my chest and the beat of my heart
than to feel the tips of my toes touch the sand.
Let us stay where we are, listening to the sirens singing a song of life, not ones speaking of a bloodied hand.
Right here, in the mystic sea of never, forevermore can one live
without the fear of having breath to give. 

Abre Tus Ojos

Faint echoes of tentative footsteps resonate
throughout this long and winding hallway
as we slowly walk towards a realm that is sadly
completely beyond all that we know.

Perhaps everything's just a giant propaganda
when they say that we are young and we are free.
Society paralyzes us, billboard and magazine images
enslave us with false hope and blind ambition.

Surreptitiously and inconspicuously our lives stagnate
as we mournfully analyze all the things that might've gone awry.
We look backwards and forward, until suddenly
our present becomes our past, and we have nothing to show.

Neither young nor free, our generation's top-notch agenda
should be to defy definition, to hear, to listen, to feel, and see
potential as it courses through our veins, speaking to us in langauges
only we can understand,
should knowledge be our new addiction. 

Route 3

The soft pitter patter of the rain
slowly fogs up the view of the foliage
as we drive past Route 3.
Reality undermined gives way
to distorted images of what's to be
and will become.

In the darkness,
I see clearly now
more than I ever have.    

The Shadow Dancer Retrieves Herself

The storytelling tradition is one of the many cherished shards that that make up the rich mosaic of my heritage. I’ve been blessed to know those who came before me and have been afforded the chance to be an active participant in the continuation of the old ways. My yewyah (grandma) is definitely a master storyteller, and some of my keenest memories as a child were that of sitting at her knee, and listening to her recount the tales of diwatas, sirenas, agta…otherworldly beings that while seemingly whimsical at first hear, are really an observation of the nature of man and the world he inhabits. Fate. Destiny. Choice.

I don’t think I really appreciated the significance of folklore until much later, when I was in the throes of that inevitable “finding yourself” stage. Truth be told, as soon as I grew out of the Disney princess stage, I began to examine folklore from a harsh academic’s eyes. I was that type of academic who believed in proof and abided by statistics and probabilities rather than simply believing. In other words, I was a jaded government concentrator who believed that everything worth something must hold up well to scrutiny. I saw folklore, culture, and traditions as scholarly things, rather than as living things that are a part of people…and in turn, are shaped by people and their beliefs to help form their identity.

That all changed when I had to fulfill some of my core requirements outside my concentration. One of the requirements for that course was to compile a folklore collection by interviewing people. I first approached the assignment with a grain of salt; I figured I could just talk to some of my family and friends and type everything verbatim. Easy enough. What I didn’t expect was for the assignment to put into words and bring back into being the dormant native child that I once was. As I collected creation myths, tales of the first pineapple, and the like, I began to realize that I didn’t need to find myself; I just needed to retrieve myself.