Retracing Makati
People who move back carry the weight of two great realities and a habit of avoiding comparing their new home to the last one.
Manila is home. More specifically, Makati is. I can trace city gridlines like the back of my hand, only by landmark and not by historical surnames; and except for the times they rerouted one of the four levels of the EDSA-Magallanes interchange. I spent all my life in Makati, tucked away from greater Metro Manila and the wider expanse of the Philippines I’ve yet to explore.
I worked my first 9 to 5 on minimum wage sustained by P50 coffee and donuts or pandesal, depending on the day. I had a view every day of my favorite triad of buildings in the Makati business district. Every friend from college worked in either finance or advertising in the area. Clad in business casual, the vague term for Uniqlo’s sale pile, we drew out a list of go-to spots at three in the afternoon, whenever anyone could find 30 minutes to escape from their desks. Chat about office politics, family life, and cravings ensued while we waited in lines. We waited in convenience stores, in coffee chains, in busy cafeterias, food courts, in elevators, and we waited to cross the street.
Certain I had to outgrow fresh graduate realities, like the unsustainable salary and matching pretense of politeness, I blew out 20-something candles on a birthday and left the Philippines, though — to no better place, just someplace else. I anxiously gripped a one-way ticket, a few copies of my résumé bookmarked by photos of loved ones. I had never known what to pack in a suitcase should this day come. Like anybody uprooting indefinitely but not direly, it’s always because of a handful of reasons, never just one.
Did I leave to make my dad proud? Did I move to prove I could cook myself a meal and separate whites from the darks? Was I looking to mix things up in spite of being in a long-term relationship? Could I honestly consider beginning a life in Singapore? I didn’t tell any of my friends and nobody noticed I was gone until maybe Instagram or a new log-in would give my area code away in the time that followed.
Whether I was a content strategist or a freelance writer, I was foreign and new. I worked my way through the cracks of a fast-moving heritage city where people call everyone Uncle and Auntie in some of the newest landscapes I hadn’t a clue about before. I was lost in translation, sifting through their version of Taglish between minutes of the meeting; they spoke in fast Singlish and inserted jargon in the realm of blockchain and a client’s Series A funding.
Here, I didn’t mind not being found. I stopped caring about belonging to anyone or anything. I took comfort in knowing I was never going to be especially all the way “elsewhere.” My mom would tell me that she missed me back home; I started missing mangoes and pastillas even if I hadn’t had one in a decade.
As fast as it took for me to leave home, I found myself back on a 12:45 flight, right in time for a very Filipino Christmas, and for good. My time was up. I accomplished all the documents I needed to maintain calling Singapore a second home just for a few years until I’d lose that to stricter policies. It’s strange how flights arbitrarily take somewhere between four and 14 hours, but flights before a big move feel longer and harder than any other. They’re made up of minutes either slipping by or slowing down to a halt.
I took less than an hour unpacking my bags and my added carry-on. I brought back with me five more books, a Labradorite crystal, a new lime-green journal for the year ahead, and a stronger sense of knowing exactly what I liked. People who move back carry the weight of two great realities and a habit of avoiding comparing their new home to the last one. Soon I would also find parallels between my favorite places in Singapore and in Makati, only to realize that home really came first in honing how I’d love to spend a free day. I only ever needed to dwell where I felt closest to peace.
I had driven and walked through Ayala Avenue far too many times, still never losing the urge to raise my arms while gazing up at clouds reflected on the sea of buildings, from Tower One and Zuellig to Insular Life and Enterprise. I liked feeling tiny, just a speck of motion in the seemingly endless bustle of the business district, just as I did in Singapore.
Mom, Dad and I would head back to Legazpi for a mid-afternoon drive avoiding the Sunday market crowd. Sipping coffee while they cracked open last week’s newspaper and tended to an influx of Viber group messages. It’s a good hour of stillness, slowly blowing on piping hot coffee that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I spent many of the most unremarkable and precious in-betweens of my life in small shops and sidewalks in this neighborhood.
The last things I knew before Metro Manila went into community quarantine were the couple of lives I left behind in the Makati I knew before moving, Singapore, and a month into re-learning how to be back after Christmas.
Today, the city’s changing facade begins with its people: how there’s infinitely fewer of them. For six months, Ayala looked like it did on the weekends, only more ghostly. Saturdays at Salcedo Market were socially distanced, only telling people apart by what they sold as they yelled prices underneath reusable face masks and face shields. Apart from dozens of bars repeatedly mourned in Poblacion, we’ve had to say goodbye to restaurants and cafes only by lengthy posts on social media. All the places we’ve lost and hope to revisit are tucked away in a postcard in mind; both old and novel, only changing according to the proximity of when they were last visited in memory.
How do you dissect a word like “belong”? It could be synonymous with “being a part of” and “for a length of time” or “to long for.” Here, I’ll always “be-long” to the small adventures I can recall. Pulling up a one-way street with Dad practicing my driving, racing through gravel and jolly jeeps with friends going five different directions to get boba and coffee. I’m pleasantly surprised with a bougainvillea vine crawling out of a crack on the wall. These thoroughly mundane spaces have aged well with me.
A friend and I have been roaming the city radius in an effort to capture the remaining pulses of Brutalist buildings on camera. We’ve been retracing our steps, observing distance and closeness in back-alleys and corner shops. We’ve seen signs of life pick up in the bakeries and art galleries of Chino Roces.
Sometimes places make people; some days people make space. I shuffle fondly between favorites I recognize would be just my luck to call “home.”
Banner caption: Here, I’ll always “be-long” to the small adventures I can recall. Photos from Sean Ocier
