Landing and Take Off

24 March 2010
HK Airport

I’m on the move again. I cannot remember the number of times I find myself sitting on the departure area waiting for my flight. Always going and coming, such is life that it has become blurry which way is going and which way is coming. No real place to call home, to call my home. Everything is imagined, hoped, wished for. Whatever reality there is I hang on to it, like it’s the only shred and thread of life that keeps me breathing, living, going, it doesn’t matter whether it’s towards or away. The plane now boards …

25 March 2010
Manila Centennial Airport Terminal 3

It’s past midnight and I am wide-awake listening to seas of conversations by people, strangers around me. There is something unusual in the way people behave in the company of strangers at airports. The stories are always the same, told in different ways, in different tones, in different attempts by the teller to place a certain degree of importance to the stories he or she is telling. But why, why do people have this insane urge to tell the story of their lives to strangers whom they have just met? We all know that the person telling the story is lying half the time, we know it because we do the same. We tell a version of our stories half imagined or wishing it is the way we tell it. We allow ourselves the delusion that our truth can be told without being wrong, because who is there to oppose our thoughts, our wish how things could have turned out. There is a universal understanding amongst strangers meeting in airports, to allow everyone their own version of a larger story that might have been told differently. And after we tell all the lies, we sigh an air of feeling right, justified within our rights to tell it the way we do. It doesn’t make sense, but there is certain pleasure being given that 15-minute of sunshine being right. And when that warmth and privilege is gone, we carry our baggage and get on our respective planes.

I go back to my original thoughts about not knowing whether I am coming or going. It’s not fair to ask where my home is, because I know where my heart belongs. It is sad, that most of us spend our lives away from the place we call home. I look at the faces of the men around me, quiet, I don’t know what they are thinking. They all seem sad to me. I wonder why and yet I know. It’s the same question of coming or going. Each time you land, you know that you’re bound to take off soon. Living on borrowed times is sad, nothing could be sadder than having to live under one sky, yet unable to touch your loved-ones faces or look in their eyes as you hear their laughter.
The man to my right wearing a red crew neck shirt has an amazing similarity to Silver. He was older, perhaps in his mid forties or perhaps early, it’s hard to tell with Filipino men since they always appear older than their age. I imagine my brother to look like him when he is older. I miss him suddenly. I always felt sorry about not being able to experience what I hoped would have been happy shared moments between brother and sister. All the things I imagined and wished for a big sister should share in feeling with her younger brother. How happy I imagine it would have been if he got married properly, I would have been there walking him to the altar in the absence of our parents. How excited I would have been to share the news of him becoming a father. How doting an aunt I would have been to my nephew and niece. But life didn’t turn out to be how much you perfectly dreamt it to be. It would seem to me now that all the world has conspired to make everything sad and regrettable for me and my family. All the wits and sense of humor that I’ve acquired or born with didn’t guarantee a well thought of happy and perfect life. It’s all in the thinking, but when it goes down to living the life I so perfectly plot, everything fell apart.

He looks sad, tired, calm. I feel the same way. I don’t know whether I am coming or going.