Tag: singapore

Mga Alon ng Kalungkutan

Raw materials retrieved from my 2019 tweets. Re-worked and then submitted in the Mountain Beacon facebook page. Perhaps, they will be used again as content in my stories of loneliness, anxieties and dreads. After all, my heart became at ease as soon as I put them all on paper.

Tiong Bahru, August 2022

“Hindi na yata ako makakahanap. Napaglipasan na ako.”

And I felt that loneliness na wala na siyang magiging life partner.
He will be like me.

A voice inside me asks,
“Baka pwede ako? We can try, at least.”

HK Airport Confessions, 2019

There was a wave of loneliness earlier today.

Little waves came when I saw my luggage exceeding 2kg from the enforced carry-on. I kind of willingly surrender some of my clothes to the bin, and put all the luxurious soaps hoarded inside my purse. Tried removing things here and there.

A medium wave came when I saw a yuppie couple before the immigration gate, hugging and talking in their mother tongue, and the guy stayed while the girl rolled her luggage and walked away. It sucks that you are the one making the departure.

The huge one came when I entered the airport rails to the boarding gates, when these old Lolas and Lolos seated inside and merrily talking, in a language I cannot comprehend (even via context clues!).

I was wondering, why do I keep on leaving..? I mean before, whenever I leave, I feel excited or light and happy. But then again I thought, what about those being left? What if… I become part of the other side — the woman who stays and waits?

I realized, we need to treasure every “now” that we hold in our hands. We have to be brave in unfolding ourselves, and drop those inhibitions. So that when they leave, we don’t regret. Or…

We regret less, and we wait more.

BGC High Street at 3AM

They say that loneliness comes in waves. A variety of sizes, a plethora of sounds. Sometimes, it appears as a ripple. Like a little crystal between the toes, being playful. In rare instances, they come in huge waves, like you are in a little kayak in the middle of the sea.

As I was walking the city at 3AM, the little ripples came knocking at my senses. It started to build up, and when I opened the door — the huge wave surprised me. I felt like I was drowning, but my feet kept walking on the concrete. I was haunted. My doubts and fears… those anxieties that you thought you never could have… 

The heart started to beat fast, the chest started to heave sighs, the sight started to blur.
Little did I know, I was crying.

I talked to God. And I whispered this deepest fear at the moment… On what to do next, do I take it logically, should I be analytical on things and such. But there’s no answer. All I did was cry and sigh and walk. I think I was like a soldier becoming tired of getting through the day. Heck, tired of getting through life. And yet, I remembered Lolo’s story:

In waves, one must learn total surrender, and the art of dance.

And so I danced with the waves coming and going. Suddenly, all of it just melted away. Like the battle of storm clouds finally ended, and the waves became little ripples again. But this time, they are subtle and at peace.

My heart became at ease.

Diaspora sa Singapura

Majulah, Singapura. 

March on, Singapore. You were a port of tea before, then you became “The Asia layover”, and now, you were an option for my forevermore.

That is, until you crush me with the difficulty of taking investment bankers in and paying New York-ish rent, plus the fact that what we are is a legally-permitted ant. An ASEAN worker who has no right to invest in your reclaimed lands. This is what I learned upon checking-in with a guy I met in an instagram meme, as he was looking for a fund manager (and all the while I thought he was looking for a corporate-type, alas, he needs a freelancer).

Upon arriving in Singapura and seeing that vortex waterfall of recycled chlorine in colored LED, I ask myself again, “Why do I go here? What is your plan? Is you plan to meet him? And then what? Are you proposing something in mind? Something in kind? Just something…?”

I guess I went to meet him not only because of me exploring this as a setting of my personal rendition of “brain-drain” tropes, or maybe it’s not only because of me being left out by the siblings who went halfway across the world just to explore a better healthcare and greater chance of saving money, but also because I was imagining a vision of us together, renting a bedsit in the OG HDB Estate teeming with Singapura storylines of struggle, strife, and finally, thrive.

That is, when he mentioned in passing that he isn’t really looking for a partner at a moment. Or maybe in the near future. Or maybe, in forever. He won’t look, period. Ganern. Disappointed, but kind of expected. After all, we are too busy assessing if we really are in a thriving place — if our current careers are okay, or if our savings are intact… Or in my case, if I can afford to go to TWG and have a jasmine tea whenever I wish to rant about this foolish situation of the world. (The Climate change commission estimated an ealier end btw, way earlier than our projected first run of the Manila subway project in 2078).

We are too busy to heal, to dream, to grind separately. After all, we just met in a meme.

“Tell me where you are right now, no kidding.” was that meme. I was in my office cafeteria, blindly taking a snapshot of the false greenery of the pantry, introspecting how corporate that is— green sofas, like the old plants uprooted in BGC, to give way to our payable carparks, and limited slots for driving employees. A shout of “Slot is full!” for every time an FTE wishes to avail a free parking in the night. Alas, most of us work at night.

The meme went and so our conversations ensued. From August 2022 to moments of crisis and anxieties of earning, progressing with careers, to emotional emergencies of breaking up and how to deal and how to heal, and scheduled breakdowns, to net worths, grit of the grind, IG stories and madam bebi branding. Until Lazada 12.12 sale offered an ad about flying again. After all, it has been two years since my last scheduled flight and subsequently cancelled because of Covid.

We took our conversation outside the usual platform, and I find ourselves that in moments of silence, we still stick to the noise. Rather than dropping the phone and look at each other, we hover our eyes to the blue lights and its radiation; I don’t even know now if too much can cause an eye cancer. Brain-drain, I guess. The mental health kind, not the economic diaspora kind.

And so I mull again on this diaspora idea and he was saying that I should stick to this current gig as it gives me what I need without moving out of the comfort zone. And I felt antsy again, because that sentiment came from a thriving man who went all the way to uproot himself and remove from the anxiety of being the great breadwinner. An anxiety that I keep on managing, as long as I stay in my family home. I still stay, because I was too busy and too tired to deal with the paperwork of applying renovations and seeing to it that every design fitted the japandi aesthetic. The design was there, the paperwork wasn’t. It still wasn’t. Just like the doctor who was emotionally absent from the time he became physically absent from Manila. He doesn’t deserve to be included in my treasure trove of dating fails, but I guess he really is a dating fail. He set the benchmark of the profiles too high, but he crushed the vision bar too low, it became six feet under.

I don’t even know if there is still a single soltero with a PRC license, a crossover with automatic transmission, and a net worth of at least Php5 million (financial notes came from that auditor, not from this banker). That, plus a desire of not having a kid. Will I ever find that in Manila? I mean, most of these men are (1) not hitting the profile, or (2) desiring to make a child, or (3) that doctor: a single father. Wala bang (4) none of the above? I mean, I am still optimistic, but if the market is so limited in Manila, perhaps I can start looking for one in Singapura…?

So we circle back to this Majulah Singapura, together with my unique #chikitingpatrolSG hashtag and ubiquitous learning about content-creation and noise-cancellation. Back to the re-imagining the vision, or perhaps time to learn algorithms and python?

Let’s see.