There And Back Again

October 2007
Davao City

I entered my parking space wrongly, I was too close to the left side and I can’t open the door wide enough to be able to get out. I switch gear to reverse and release the brake gently, but I steered my wheels to the wrong side that the car’s rear end got even closer to the car parked next on the left. Oh, my God! One look and I know I need a miracle to squeeze my car out without scratching the other and another miracle to keep me alive as I feel I am suffocating and dying fast of my mounting anxiety attack. Take control! I paused and breathe. Breathe once more. Breathe again. Another careful look on the rear left … No shit, I will not be able to get out of this unharmed!

I just dropped Gabriel to his basketball game a few blocks from the mall where I am to shop for groceries. I told him I do not think I can already manage to park the CRV on my own. You will, you’re a fast learner. I learned to drive the minute I took the wheel. It took me five minutes to listen to the basic instructions, the next five trying out the gears and the last five mastering the highway. After that, I was zooming the roads with humongous twelve wheeler trucks covering the fifty kilometers distance away and back to where I started in an hour. My driving lesson went by without a hitch.

But learning to park is another story. Here I am already traumatized. I hate to have to make the call to Gabriel who is now on his way to rescue me, abandoning his basketball game and jumping into a motorbike. The driver to my right was on a wait and see mode, watching me through his window mirror. But someone, thank God, from the back lane came forward and signaled me on how to turn the steer to give my car’s wheels the proper position to back out of disaster. As Gabriel and the Good Samaritan pointed out, I am bad in reversing. I found a way out of my parking dilemma, now I look for a parking space with vacancies on each side or at-least on one side before I make the turn and park and each time I am careful not to miss the enclosing lines and learn to retrace my way in to get out gracefully.

Most people live their lives figuring their place under the sun. I did the very thing and found out most people will find their place under the sun, but as soon as we do, we’ll just go to find another thing. Sometimes, we never even realized that we are really just trying to find back what we’ve already thrown. Maybe not away, but rather things we’ve somewhat archived, set aside, somehow forgotten, but at the right moment, something always sets us to find the very thing we need and always when we most need it, either in the archives of our life, dusting in the corners of our secret life library, but not totally forgotten and still waiting to be found.

We don’t always know it, but we do have all the answers to our life questions, the funny thing or ironic if you will is they never come after the questions. Life plays us back in reverse, why else would they say that the only way to embrace our future is by understanding the past and yes, living the present.

I feel as though I am an old person trying out a new life for the last sixteen months. I brought myself to a new place, found new things to do, look at new people, dressed in new fashions, a new lifestyle. A tropical province, a new course in a new school, new neighbors in a new apartment block, half dozens new flip flops and new denim skirts, a new car, which I drove myself everywhere to. But after all these new things, I still feel the same old me, wanting back my old things, my old apartment, my old friends, my old clothes… my old life.