I take a glance at the view outside. Balibago is stuck in a perpetual rush hour, so the only people who visit it are residents, workers, and late-night bar-hoppers. I don’t have to be here, technically speaking. There are a bunch of other cafés where I live, mostly just a walk away. And getting to Balibago is a pain in the ass—you’re either caught in a rotunda from hell or stuck driving through narrow alleyways. But I go here anyway, despite everything.
I take a sip of coffee.
The café reminds me of the coffee shops in Makati, where I used to spend my spare afternoons. You’re sure to find a ton of them around, with Makati being a business district and all. And there’s all sorts of interesting people—entrepreneurs, college kids, people with their own start-ups. I guess thought I’d be able recreate that feeling again.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing nowadays. Recreating the past.
It’s not just places, either. Other times, its people. Feelings. I see doppelgangers of people I used to know in the crowd. I find moments where I’m thrown back in time.
I don’t really know why I do it, exactly. Rose-colored glasses, perhaps. I know that for every pretty-looking coffee shop, there’s a lonely night at a convenience store. For every sharp-looking barista, there’s the friend who was never really sure of you. The past is never pretty, I know. But it doesn’t make it all the less tantalizing.
The table up ahead comes alive with conversation. I try to keep my ears to myself, but end up half-listening. I can’t remember what they talked about, exactly. But there’s something about it that seems familiar, even if I can’t register the words.
We used to do the same things, back in Makati. A similar mix of people. A similar conversation. Even the way of speaking sparks familiar, ebbing and flowing in the way I’d used to speak with friends.
The second time I go to the coffee shop, I stay until the sun sets. When they turn on the yellow incandescent bulbs, for a moment I feel more at home than I’d ever been.
I’m a perennial outsider for the most part. Even in the places I’d grown up in, I always had that looming feeling that I’d never be a part of them. A foreign body in a foreign land. The last time I visited my old university, I felt like a ghost, hanging onto a life that wasn’t mine. I stalked the halls wondering what it would feel like to sit on those desks, as if I’d never really been there.
When I came back to my hometown, even the streets I’d known well felt foreign. I’d thought to message some old batchmates when I got back, but the cold realization that it’d seem out of the blue hit me like ice. How well did I know them exactly?
(Did they even like me, I wonder.)
(I wasn’t exactly the best person in high school.)
Of course we were friends, I tell myself, remembering how we laughed in-between lessons and the strange inside-jokes we shared. Of course I belonged, I tell myself, watching the sun set behind familiar mountains.
But that’s just it, really. I only feel like I belong in retrospect. Not in the Balibago of my childhood, not in the Makati of my past. Not even in the simulacra of those places that I find in this coffee shop.
Life always has a way of catching up.
Outside, more cars join the onslaught of traffic, moving like molasses. It’s time to leave.
I get up, bid goodbye to the kindly baristas, and head out just before Balibago gets too crowded. I can’t stay here forever, after all. Nor can I stay in my memories.
Driving down these dusty streets, then, I take a glimpse of what my childhood home has become, tuning my ears to the rumble of the cars around me.
It’s chaos, I know, with car horns and pedestrians and everything else coming together in terrible cacophony.
• • •
