Moving Still
lost and found
by Jeneen R. Garcia
to be published on May 6, 2006
Already, half the summer has been consumed in maddening heat, bottles of sunblock, and mileage across rough road and sea.
As early as March, I was out and about, diving at sunrise in Malapascua, rappelling from the mouth of a huge cave in Argao, and hiking up Cebu’s last remaining natural forest in
Today I sit in a corner café a few steps from where I live, facing an empty computer screen, wondering why, for every sweet bruise and ache gained, I seem to have lost a lifetime of stories, my soul now a blank page. It is as if in moving so fast, I’ve been dropping words in my wake.
I remember that time the family went on our first long road trip: the cold morning on the bus, Mama easing my youngest brother’s stomachache with a hot water bottle as I kept still, trying not to feel queasy on the 10-hour ride. It was summer, of course, and I was 13 going on 14. In a week, we toured Camiguin, Cagayan de Oro, and Cebu. Despite the strangeness of each day on a new island, of sleeping in the houses of friends’ friends we’d just met, not once did I feel too far away from home.
Thirteen years later and we’re still anywhere but home. Though we were together in Palawan for a week, my father is right now on his own adventure in
I, too, am in the midst of packing up boxes--torn between staying in Cebu and moving back to Davao, wanting to move on to somewhere else. Since high school graduation, I haven’t lived in one place longer than four years. And even so, there has always been the moving out and moving in (four times in the last four years), and the periodic visit to another island or continent for days or weeks at a time.
Yet transience has never left me so orphaned of words as now, when after all the miles I’ve crossed and all the breathtaking stories I’ve lived, I find that home is even farther than a 45-minute flight.
How much farther must I look if, upon reaching the place I still call home, all I find is an empty house? Where do my memories, both tangible and intangible, find sanctuary, then? Inside, my mind leaps about to fill the uneasy silence. What else can I do, it asks, where else can I dive, leap, climb, run? Away, always away from where I am.
Perhaps it is my fate to be in constant transit; I trust this moving away is also a moving towards. Home, in some form. I will start by picking up the words I’ve left strewn behind me--words to keep my stories in, both new and old.
When I was nine, I took a boat with my family from
It did not matter that it would be days before we’d reach port. Outside, great waves rocked the ship in every direction; inside, everything was still.
i am always in awe at what you can articulate in so little words and sentences. i feel like how you do except i can not put them in words as well as you do. somehow, i feel that you know what i know but then again, with the lack of understanding for my own predicament, i am left unsure if i do feel what you have written... if i really feel what you felt. but then again, my steps are always unsure even if i do make them a thousand times over. this must be an existentialist's curse to roam everywhere and nowhere and sometimes, for no reason at all. i envy you for being able to roam, arrive, depart and roam again... to live like you do, like the earth was your own backyard. thank you for being you.
ReplyDeleteI have a draft in my blog about "life's about running away"... when I read this, I thought you said much of what I wanted to write in that draft. When you said that "Perhaps it is my fate to be in constant transit; I trust this moving away is also a moving towards. Home, in some form," I cannot help but feel some amount of company there. In constant movement, stillness in whatever form that takes -- gives us a sense of home. I can only pray that I have enough of that stillness in my inner vessels when I need them the most...
ReplyDeletemy fellow dabawenyo wanderers,
ReplyDeletei forget that i am not alone =) whether a curse or a gift, whether it will eventually bring us to where we dream of going or not, i say let us savor motion in its bittersweetness, knowing we cannot live any other way.
and yes, cris, that stillness in constant movement is in the end the only true home, as i realized in my writing of this--knowing with certainty in one moment that everything in the world is exactly where it should be, though we may be miles and years away from what we call our physical home.
thank you for writing back.
--you always articulate it the best way
ReplyDeleteextra, extra:
“What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.”
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
from the movie garden state:
ReplyDeleteAndrew: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew: You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.
=)
exactly, cat =)
ReplyDelete