Breadcrumb #604
PAMELA FAITH MUSNI
I’m sitting in a café that once was an eyewear shop. When I was a kid, I knew it was an eyewear shop because of the beige marble floors that had been kept when the store changed. Back then, I took those floors to mean you could lie on them whenever you wanted to. Of course, that wasn’t the case, so I always got a scolding for it.
Seeing these floors again gives me a strange bout of nostalgia, like I’m the five-year-old who once lay on them.
The café is located in Balibago. I don’t come here that often because of the traffic, though this is where I grew up. Across the café is Johnny’s, the blue supermarket that’s been here forever. Next to the cafe is the Wild Orchid—a traveler’s inn—and Rosas, where you buy handicrafts. Everything else is new storefronts on the not-so-new buildings. When I was younger the shops seemed a little more spaced out, a little more breathable.
Back then, I used to find the area so boring, so lifeless. But then again, I was a kid, and kids get bored easily.
“Across the café is Johnny’s, the perpetually-blue supermarket that’s been here forever.”
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.