Crying over lost gravy

There was Jo-Ni’s, the old bakery that, for reasons I can no longer properly explain, I associate almost entirely with fried chicken. I remember that chicken with a devotion that is probably disproportionate to what it actually tasted like. The closest approximation I can find now is Pancake House fried chicken, although even saying that feels vaguely disloyal.

I am now 48 and I am still looking for that gravy. I still dream of it.

Then there was the old Galleria. Not Robinsons Galleria as it exists today. Our Galleria. The Galleria that was practically a supporting character in my high school life. The basement was where everybody seemed to end up eventually, usually with no particular reason for being there and absolutely no intention of going home yet. There was the legendary Skybowl. As the kids now say, "If you know you know."

There was the Megamall ice-skating rink, back when putting an enormous sheet of ice inside a shopping mall in tropical Manila seemed perfectly reasonable. And you could smoke cigarettes everywhere, which then forced the malls to have trashcans at all the ends/beginnings of escalators.

And then there are the places that technically survived but betrayed us.

McDonald’s, I am looking at you. There was once a McChicken that was genuinely delicious. I will stand by this until death. Whatever is being served under that name now tastes vaguely like seasoned cardboard and disappointment.

And KFC. Good heavens. The gravy alone deserves an obituary.

And what happened to the Original Recipe? There are supposed to be 11 herbs and spices. Somewhere along the way, I suspect somebody decided we could make do with four and some optimism.

The OG Virra Mall. Now that place had all those nooks and crannies that made it what it was for so long. Now it seems to just be as gentrified as SM MOA. Thank God the courtyard is still in the middle near the chapel!

Which is perhaps the peculiar thing about nostalgia. We talk about missing places, but often what we really miss is a very specific version of the world—and the person we happened to be when we occupied it.

Of course, there are the places that have actually disappeared.

Old restaurants whose names I can barely remember but whose interiors I somehow can. The particular color of the tables. The glasses they used. Where the cashier stood. The strange little details that have absolutely no practical reason to remain lodged in my brain, and yet there they are.

There were bookstores where you could disappear for an afternoon. Record stores where you actually had to stand around and look through things instead of typing the name of whatever you wanted into a search bar. Video stores! Imagine having to leave your house, travel somewhere, wander through shelves, argue with whoever you were with about what movie to rent, discover that all the copies of the movie you wanted were already out, and then go home with something completely different.

We were apparently pioneers.

And there were places that weren’t particularly beautiful, important or even very good. They simply belonged to a certain period of our lives.

I think this is what makes their disappearance surprisingly painful.

Nobody thinks, while sitting around a mall basement with their high school friends doing absolutely nothing of consequence, I must pay attention because one day I will desperately miss this.

You don’t know that you’re standing inside a memory while you’re making it.

You certainly don’t look at the terrible fluorescent lighting or the plastic chairs or somebody’s untouched French fries and think: This will become precious to me.

At the time, it is just Tuesday. But then 30 years pass.

Suddenly you would give almost anything to walk through that exact version of the place again. Not the renovated version. Not the improved one with better lighting, international brands and a coffee shop selling a P240 latte. You want the slightly shabby one. You want the old tiles. You want the shop that sold things nobody needed. You want the restaurant with the menu you can still half remember.

Most of all, of course, you want the people who were there with you exactly as they were then.

And that is the trick nostalgia plays on us.

We say we miss Galleria. We say we miss Skybowl. We say we miss the old McChicken.

But perhaps what we are really saying is that we would like to visit ourselves again.

I would like to see that girl walking around Galleria with her friends, probably worried about something she has long since forgotten. I would like to tell her that the things she thinks are enormously important will mostly turn out not to be, while the completely ordinary afternoon she is currently wasting will somehow survive in her memory for decades.

I wouldn’t even tell her to appreciate it more. Nobody likes being told that by a woman who looks suspiciously like their future.

That would absolutely ruin it.

Part of the beauty of those days was precisely that we didn’t know they were finite. And maybe that is why I get disproportionately annoyed when something from that world changes. I don’t actually believe civilization collapsed because KFC changed its gravy; I know recipes change. Companies change. Malls renovate and expand. Restaurants close. Buildings are demolished. Cities have to move on.

We have to move on too. But couldn’t somebody have kept one branch exactly the same?

One Galleria basement preserved in amber. One old McDonald’s with the original McChicken. One bowling alley. One ice-skating rink. One KFC where all eleven herbs and spices are actually present and accounted for.

Not because I want to live in the past, but I sometimes wish I had visitation rights. I would just occasionally like to visit.

Maybe that is what places ultimately become: little coordinates in our personal histories. We remember where we sat, what we ordered, who was beside us, what song was playing, what we were wearing, who we had a crush on, what we thought our lives were going to look like.

Then one day you drive past and the place is gone. Or worse, it is still there. Only you aren’t.