Work Text:
“All that I love
I fold over once
And once again”
— Edith Tiempo, Bonsai
NAIA Terminal 1 looks like a government office building, which is an unflattering point of comparison in Manila (Pasay, really, but it’s hard to explain the nomenclature to people who aren’t from here, so you’ve gotten used to settling for what’s familiar to them). There’s elaborate lattice woodwork in the ceiling that frames the white lights, and the beige-marbled white tiles on the floor can gleam in the noon sunlight. But in the early morning of pre-dusk, it’s dark inside. The lights are fluorescent-dim, the large rooms filled with sleepy travelers in joggers and denim jackets metaphorically gray. The ceiling feels low and close to your head. A truism that every Filipino somehow knows is that NAIA was declared the worst airport in the world by some magazine years ago. It’s not untrue, even from just the handful of airports you’ve passed through.
You like it, though. You’ve always liked it. It’s drab, and the tiled carpeting in the boarding area is literally gray. There are always people with their feet up on the waiting seats. The aircon is never cold enough, although maybe that’s a favor to prepare you from the unrepentant blast of humidity once you step outside, even with the cooler winds of December.
Still. It’s home, drabness and all.
You’re standing beside the baggage carousel in economy seat-crinkled high waisted sweatpants and a cropped cotton knit shirt, still half-asleep from the sleeping pill you pushed down with tomato juice a little after take off, waiting for your Away suitcase in aqua to roll by.
Before your first flight to Manila, your mother helped you tie a red ribbon on the top handle of your miniature frog-themed suitcase, guiding your hands to fold the ends of the ribbons around your index fingers like you’d just learned to do for your shoelaces. Whenever you’re back in NAIA, it feels like nothing has changed since then. Not your propensity for showy rolling suitcases, and not your learned habit of tying red ribbons on them.
The procession of black, navy, dark green, black, and black suitcases in front of you continues, no aqua in sight yet. You don’t mind. You’re in that rare airport headspace of zen, when you feel one with your untetheredness of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time. That, and you’re on your phone, trying to transfer money from your neglected BPI account to GrabPay so you can take a rideshare to your parents’ house in Quezon City with the old sliding windows and walls covered in crawling vines that you still think of as home.
You feel a tap on your shoulder from behind. You jump in surprise, almost dropping your phone. When you turn around and see who it is, you’re glad you didn’t.
It’s Jose “Waks” Wakatoshi IV. Waks. The guy to whom you attached all of Taylor Swift’s early discography. Your first love, if you want to be sincere about it.
You haven’t seen him in years. He’s a few inches taller than you remember, and his hair is shorter than he wore it in college. He has a camel trench coat folded over his arm. He still looks like he perpetually smells of baby powder and Jo Malone Wood Sage and Sea Salt. And he looks great, even if he’s in sweatpants too. The part of you that got messy drunk on cheap, strawberry lambanog from SaveMore in your friend’s Berkeley one bedroom condo after you broke up years ago hates that.
“Hello,” he says with his usual curtness, though there’s a line between his brows that tells you that maybe his choice to walk up to you surprised him too. He lets his hand hover inches shy of your shoulder for a beat too long.
“Hi Waks,” you say back on autopilot with a smile. Showing warmth on cue is an adult skill that took you years to master. It was hard to break through your comfortable shyness. You remember standing behind him in the McDo along Katip while he explained to the food service worker behind the counter, “Can we have napkins po and water? Someone elbowed yung Coke ng girlfriend ko, natapon po sa pants niya. Doon po, near the door.”
Waks smiles at the nickname. It’s the rare one, the smile that reaches his eyes. You used to brood about that smile in the last corner seat in Old Rizal Lib, scribbling mostly unusable poetry drafts in your notebook instead of studying for Histo with Fr. David. “Kamusta? I haven’t seen you in years,” he says.
“Yeah, I think everyone lost touch with me kasi I deleted my Facebook,” you say. “I’m on Telegram na lang, and my priv IG so I can watch people’s stories.” This conversation feels like a cosmic irony that your post-flight brain can’t articulate yet. Years ago, the best thing about the two of you was that no silence was ever awkward, and no conversation ever inane.
Waks nudges his suitcase so he can stand closer. It’s a black, nondescript Samsonite with the plain tag it must have come with in the store. It’s just like him, you think, to be able to pick out his suitcase from the luggage procession without need for a ribbon. He was insufferably competent like that. Apparently he still is.
“Ah, ako rin,” he replies. “Well, di ko naman dinelete but I haven’t opened it since law school. I read that article you wrote about Facebook. Yung targeted ads?”
Waks went to law school after graduation. You deleted your Facebook, but he remains a sporadic member of the list of people from college that your friends still give you updates about. Maia’s ex Sheena went to med school and is doing her residency in PGH, Cas the weird guy from your lit classes is taking a masters in NUS, your former blockmate Gel who transferred to DS got married to her college sweetheart and they share a condo in Pasig, Waks’ best friend Ten moved to New York to become a pastry chef, and Waks went to law school in Rockwell, did really well at the bar, did a year at a local firm, and then got a better job doing international arbitration in Singapore.
You left after graduation and tried your best to write. Once, for a magazine in Singapore where you briefly covered tech.
“Oh god,” you say, and you will yourself to sound nonplussed. It’s against the rules of talking to your ex to admit to even vaguely keeping track of them, but Waks was always terrible at social rules. “‘San mo nahanap?”
“I did an internship for this environmental law firm in Singapore nung law school. I went to their office once, tapos they had yung magazine mo dun sa waiting area.”
Magazine mo. You almost want to laugh and say, actually I was an underpaid editorial assistant.
“Well, thanks. I’m glad someone liked it.” The magazine was a niche publication on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector that you’re not surprised would be displayed in an environmental law clinic. You are surprised that the lofty objective of journalism, to use words with precision to inform the public about the world around them, somehow found its mark in your ex-boyfriend, of all people.
“Do you still write poetry?” he asks, once more curt, as if he wasn’t steering the conversation to another surprising turn.
“Barely,” you reply, making a face in the hopes of conveying that you haven’t been happy with your attempts for a while now.
He frowns and says, “Ako rin, I’ve barely played volleyball.”
A shared understanding seems to pass between you then—of breaks spent sitting in the library together while you both scanned next semester’s schedule in AISIS on his Macbook to synchronize your schedules; of the long drive to Alabang with him drunk and asleep in the front seat after his team made it to the UAAP finals only to bomb; of lying in his bed with the aircon set to max in the summer, the Moleskine he got you for your birthday open in front of you so you could read him poems you planned to submit for delibs and writing well was the only thing that mattered in the world.
“I don’t think I’ll ever love anything as much as I loved everything in college.” His tone is matter-of-fact, as if he’s reading out the news. Then he exhales loudly, his equivalent to a giggle, and says, “Gets ba? I don’t know, ikaw yung writer satin.”
You’re restless all of a sudden. This conversation is not inane. The last vestiges of the sleeping pill had gone, and you feel electric. You remember what you called it before, in long Telegram messages sent to the group chat in 2012. Schrodinger’s flirting.
Despite your silence, he says, “Sa’yo ba yon?” and points to your aqua suitcase with the red ribbon lying on its side, finally rolling towards you.
“Ah, yeah.” You say nothing else, and watch the suitcase glide over the rolling conveyors.
You remember that he would know about your mom’s red ribbon trick because he brought you along on a family trip to Japan on your last summer vacation before senior year, the last summer vacation before you broke up. You had a purple suitcase then.
You pick your aqua suitcase up and place it beside you. You’re quickly trying to script an appropriate goodbye, maybe offer your Telegram or IG, but he beats you to it.
You expect the usual ‘we should get coffee sometime’ that you’ve gotten used to hearing from your acquaintances in Manila who you haven’t seen since.
He says, “Do you want to get Bo’s? Quick lang.” Now, he means. Do you want to get Bo’s with me right now?
A younger you would have had a barbed retort. She would have said that you owe him nothing, that he hurt you for so long. You didn’t see him at all after you broke up and he did not deserve any more of your time now. You walked around campus and never saw him, not in Caf Up at peak lunch hours amid the cacophony of chatter, utensils, and the occasional clatter of a chair falling to the floor that commanded a few milliseconds of silence before the noise started up again; not in what used to be your usual booth near the tall aircon unit and electric sockets in 5/F Lib, because he always came to school early for practice and could leave his laptop charging there while you were still in a jeep along Quezon Ave; not even in JSEC, where all his Management (Honors) blockmates hung out in their stiff black suits and neutral pantsuits for thesis defense. That it hurt because it felt like he sectioned the campus and made sure to never run into you, incising himself from your life; like he contracted Lacuna to swoop in and take all traces of him—not from your memory, but from your present. You never experienced the catharsis of resentfully boring holes with your eyes at the back of his head from afar as he chatted up another girl, your friends cooing in sympathy and telling you all the things they’d always hated about him. There was only his absence, the fresh sprigs of sympathy lavender your mom put in your dad’s car when you had to drive yourself everywhere again, All Too Well playing on max volume in the radio with the front windows rolled down so you could feel the early morning December wind cooling your hot tears as you navigated an empty Katip at 4 A.M. to have a cry in your friend’s house in Marikina.
But that was long ago. The wound had long scarred. You’d made it to your late twenties with an okay credit score and resignation to the reality that once you’ve experienced it enough times, even heartbreak lost its sharp edges; it could dull too, like your former instinct for a turn of phrase, an enjambment in a poem.
And he was right about you, wasn’t he? He said you were afraid of staying. You left after graduation and tried your best to write.
Still. He looks great, and you like him now. Despite, despite, despite.
“Okay. Quick lang,” you say. You’re older now, and you’ve allowed yourself some shamelessness.
He smiles again, the rare one that reaches his eyes. He’s already pulling his suitcase towards the Bo’s stand that was there when you first flew back to Manila at seventeen to attend college.
You follow him.
He asks, “Do you still drink caramel macchiatos?”
“No. I learned to do black coffee with a Splenda and a splash of almond at work. I haven’t asked for caramel in years.”
He hmms in sympathy, though you don’t know why, because he’d always drank black coffee, a perfectly acceptable adult beverage.
“But ang tagal na. Maybe I’ll try one again.”