The morning air was so thick with tropical humidity that it felt like a veil between the air-conditioned airport and the outdoors. Palm trees lined the fences around the industrial buildings. A few of my cousins, my tito, and one of my titas stood next to the van that would take us home.
My mom, dad, and I walked up to our relatives and greeted everyone with the usual kiss on the cheek, and a few hugs. Hiligaynon and Tagalog flew back and forth across me. I just smiled, exhausted from the flight and clueless about what anyone was saying. My name came up a few times. My tito was asking my parents something about my decision to move to the Philippines, and I didn't have enough of the language at the time to follow more than that.
Then he looked past me, toward my parents or the group, and said to no one in particular, in English, "Good luck!" with a breathy laugh.
For a half-second it felt like a jab. It was the one phrase in all that conversation I understood completely. But Filipino culture teaches you not to question what your elders say, even when it's about you, so I filed it away. What stung, I think, was being seen as naive and out of place: the one who clearly didn't belong, called out on the very thing I was already feeling vulnerable about.
That day, I thought this move wouldn't be permanent anyway. This was just for now.
I hadn't thought much about that sentence since, until lately. When I recall that moment, I still feel a little jab.
What would have made this move count as a success? Finding stability and a clear sense of direction for my life path. Writing it out, that sounds like immense pressure to put on myself for what was supposed to be just one season of my life.
Ideally, it would have looked like a remote job, a better grasp of the language, and a fairly smooth adjustment to the lifestyle. In reality, I don't have the job yet, and I probably know 5% more Tagalog and Hiligaynon combined than I did back in January.
Yet when I reflect on what I gained during these nine months, one thing comes to mind: time. Time to reflect on my thoughts and life experiences by writing personal essays. Time to take photos of my travels and make colorful, intricate beaded embroidery pieces. Time to enjoy white sand beaches with my parents and explore Iloilo's food scene with my cousins. Time to find clarity about the creative job I'll spend my days doing, the city I'll live in, and the lifestyle I'll thrive in best.
Whether I've given myself enough time is a question I'll come back to.
Whether it took luck has no bearing on whether it worked. In its own way, it did. I got the direction. I haven't got the stability, not yet. But even if I don't know yet how I'm going to do it, I know where I want my life to go next.
I came here tired.
My mom and I turned the dining table into our makeshift craft space. We started after breakfast. Containers displaying a rainbow of embroidery thread sat alongside piles of hoops and bags of tiny sparkly beads. Me Before You, one of the movies I've seen a thousand times, streamed on my laptop, and I half-listened to the witty banter in British accents as I stitched.
My mom was threading beads onto an embroidered tapestry that would later hang in the bay window of the living room. I'd look up from my fabric and laugh at a joke from the movie while she sat next to me, quietly sewing, pausing to sip her afternoon coffee.
It got so dark in the room once the last of the natural light faded that we turned on the overhead lamp. The end credits began rolling as I held up my work to get a better look. I had finished sewing white and purple freshwater pearls onto an embroidered doorway framed with wisteria.
It was the kind of rest I thought I couldn't afford in my American life, in the middle of all that hustling.
My parents and cousin were discussing plans to go out one day when my mom said something in Tagalog, then caught herself and laughed that she'd forgotten to switch to English. I only looked up at her once I heard the English. Whenever I hear Tagalog or Hiligaynon, it's safe to assume nobody's talking to me. Or at least, that used to work.
At the doctor's office last week, the receptionist didn't give me a second look before defaulting to Hiligaynon. She only got a few words out before I apologetically interrupted with the usual, "Sorry, I don't understand." Her eyes widened. "Ay! Sorry!" she said, and repeated herself in English.
The weekend after my parents and I got back from California, we went with the rest of the family to a local beach resort to get out of town during an all-day power outage. After a month and a half of the refreshing seventy-degree weather of the Bay Area, the heat felt even more suffocating. We'd only been there about four hours when it started to make my head pound and my breathing shallow. Even distracting myself with my embroidery wasn't working anymore.
I look like I'm from here, but my body gives me away.
My parents and I had gone to California because one of my titas, Te, had recently passed away.
A normal day began with a Pilates or yoga class. Afterward I'd walk to my favorite local bakery for a plum hazelnut danish, then spend the afternoon at a cafe studying and co-working with my other tita until my cousin got off work and joined us. We'd head home, sometimes stopping at Trader Joe's, and cook a meal filled with all the vegetables I'd missed eating. We ended each day on a Zoom call with the rest of the family, praying the rosary for Te's novena.
One small thing that made me feel like I belonged there was allowing myself to strike up conversations freely with strangers. I talked pastries with the cashier at the bakery, asked someone to dance at a salsa and bachata social, even looked at someone passing by and said hello.
One afternoon I took Caltrain into downtown San Francisco and arrived just in time for sunset. There was a free Cuban salsa event in Union Square, and a lead asked me to dance. Those three minutes of finding my footing in a dance I hadn't done since before I moved made me smile wide. I caught the lead's hand after he sent me into a spin, and in the middle of it all, I made sure to look around me: at the orange sky, the twinkly lights above, and the joyful people moving.
It was a week before I was set to fly back to the Philippines. I stepped out into my other tita’s garden to breathe in the crisp morning air. I realized how few days I had left, and that's when the ache arrived and settled in my chest.
I had the same conversation again and again that week. With my other tita at the breakfast table. With my cousin on the drive home from a barre workout. With my sister over video chat. They'd ask how I was feeling about going back, and my face fell the same way each time when I said, "I'm not ready." I told them all that I was going to find a way to move back. At some point that week, sitting alone and mulling over exactly how I'd make that happen, what came to me was a deadline. I recalled an announcement made during Te's funeral reception: a family reunion in the works, tentatively set for next summer. That could be my aim. A warmth filled my chest at the thought of returning so soon, and for good.
Here is what I'll miss.
An ordinary morning at home starts with walking into the kitchen and hearing the coffee machine brewing. Through the window I see my mom tending to her garden and my dad walking through the front gate with grocery bags in hand, just back from the palengke, the wet market. I hear cars zooming by and tricycles beeping along the highway just outside the gate of the property.
My dad cooks the day's meals in his outdoor kitchen. Lately he's been frying maya maya fish and chopping daikon radish, eggplant, taro, and kangkong for his famous pork sinigang, the sour tamarind soup, extra sour. The scent of onion and garlic wafts in from outside, and reggae is blasting from the speaker.
My tito’s dogs next door often bark and howl at seemingly random times throughout the day. My dad answers them with a long "Ooowwwwwww!!" to make me and my mom laugh. It makes dealing with the noise a bit funnier, even if only temporarily. The humor of the pitch and the made-up word wouldn't land in quite the same way if I had to explain it later over a call.
When my mom laughs, she pauses to let the joke sink in before this booming, gasping laugh escapes from the back of her throat. One of my dad's jokes usually sets it off.
I join in with my own laugh for a few moments, until I notice their white hair and slightly wrinkled skin.
We spent a weekend at a resort in Buruanga, Aklan. I was sitting on the top bunk in the villa, flipping through the resort's breakfast menu. The soft 7 a.m. sunlight streamed through the large glass door, and I could hear the roosters squawking just outside. My mom and cousins were exchanging phrases in Hiligaynon with the waitress who had come to take our order. The menu had vibrant, appetizing photos of breakfast platters, smoothie bowls, and coffees scattered across its pages. It looked like a wide variety of choices.
"Can I please get the veggie omelette?" The menu listed the ingredients, and I'd been craving some vegetables. The waitress replied apologetically, "Sorry ma'am, wala na..." and the Hiligaynon words that came after were presumably the spinach, mushrooms, and whatever else went into the dish. I frowned a bit, then asked, "How about the pancakes and bacon?" She frowned back, saying words I didn't know the meaning of but could guess from context: they didn't have that either.
"Okay, I'll just get the French toast, please. And can I also get the buko juice?" The waitress looked down and apologized again. No buko juice. Now that didn't make sense. We were in the Philippines, with coconut trees everywhere you looked. I gave up and asked for a peppermint tea instead.
An hour later, my mom and I were sitting at the dining table inside the villa, and I took the last bite of my French toast. Thankfully it wasn't too sweet. With my mouth half-full, I said, "What's the point of advertising all this stuff on the menu if they don't have it?" My mom put her fork down on the tocilog platter, sweet cured pork over garlic rice with an egg. She'd been picking at it for a while, disappointed by the so-runny-it-was-basically-raw sunny-side-up egg and the cold, hard rice. With an exasperated breath, she looked away and said, "Ay, Brianna," followed by a mix of Tag-lish. I caught "America" and "vegetables" and pieced together the rest from her tone: just hurry up and move back to America so you can eat all the vegetables they don't have over here. The spinach and mushrooms, I assumed.
My face didn't move, but inside I felt a little smirk coming on. I blinked, and my gaze drifted off to the side at the thought of scarfing down a piping hot spinach and mushroom omelette.
She'd said versions of this before. Things like wishing she could find cilantro at the grocery store. Or missing my sister and niece so much she'd tell me to find the job already so I could move back and be her place to stay whenever she wanted to visit them.
I'd been treating all of it like facts that couldn't be changed. This is the Philippines, take it or leave it. I'd already decided to leave. I just hadn't heard anyone say it so plainly.
Now that I have a date to aim for, my fear has shifted from not knowing when I'll be back to not knowing whether I'll get everything done before I go. It feels like both pressure and a gift.
The last time "not ready" showed up in my ordinary life, I checked my email and found no responses to any of the job applications I'd submitted lately. I opened my study plan anyway. The skills I'm studying are the ones I keep seeing in those job listings, again and again.
What I'm still unsure about is whether I've given myself enough time to prepare for another major uprooting. The realization that it's time to move on arrived before the concrete things that would make it easier: the job, the financial cushion, the place to stay. Clarity about the direction came before the step-by-step plan. I know I'm basically looking for certainty that will only reveal itself after I start taking action.
The ideal version goes like this: I'm at the airport with my passports in hand and one neatly organized suitcase ready to check in. I've scheduled time off from the remote job I've secured to account for being away from the computer during my travel time back to the states. My parents are the ones to send me off, smiling sad smiles while I fail to hide my tears behind a smile of my own. My carry-on has the baon, the packed lunch, that my mom prepped for me, complete with a chicken salad sandwich, a fruit, and whatever baked good she made that week.
And here's the real version: I'm at the airport with my passports and probably two chaotically packed suitcases headed for the check-in counter. I text my other tita, whose spare room I'll be sleeping in for the first few weeks, maybe, to update her with my itinerary so she can pick me up when I land at SFO. My parents are still the ones to send me off. And my bag still has the baon prepped for me by my mom.
In either version, they say what they say at every goodbye, no matter how far I'm going or how soon I'll see them again. My dad says, "Be safe, be safe, God bless, love youuu." My mom reminds me to text her when I land, and says, "Love you."
But even if all these things are still unresolved by the time I sit down on that plane, I want to be able to say to myself: I'll be home soon.