A dash of nostalgia, two cows by a lake, and illusions warped in a white car driving through the middle of many old cities.
Time these days feel more compressed than ‘single-existent’. Rather than there being just a single point—the present—in time at a time, it feels as if there are several (sometimes, countless too many) different points intersecting, forming one amalgamated circle at any given moment.
Imagine: many smaller dots forming one dot; or this differentiated but equally real visualisation: many dots forming an even smaller single point. That single point being ‘this moment’ that we speak of.
This moment where it feels as though one place is of more than one. Its realness is compounded by and with both nostalgia of memories and the lack of such thing in the recent past.
Consider this: I sat at the back of my parents’ white pick-up truck in a half-daze, only partially awakened by the brown cow taking a bath in the lake we were passing by. The cow’s whole body, save for the uppermost half of its head, was completely submerged in water. It was so deep into the water and so still in its movement that I had wondered if it was drowned. There was another cow that seemed to be watching over it, however, and by the looks of that one, the former’s truer state of being became apparent to me.
All that thought took less than three minutes. Maybe even just a minute—I don’t really know. These estimations are all assumptions about the quantifiability of time… an illusion about something I had recently gone detached from.
Perhaps it was the impermanence of that lucid moment that made the memory’s imprint so strong. It was a minute mundane and gone, yet the minute lasted so long and took me in so deeply in experience that I wouldn’t be surprised if years later this exact scene resurfaces, just like how things from what seemed like lifetimes ago did throughout the course of this fateful Sunday. And the thought that I could have made it last longer more concretely. That though a piece of instant film is no less prosaic, it’s still more tangible—therefore, less gone—than simply my thoughts. If only I had woken up from my nap a minute earlier.
But, alas! That moment had gone. At the second minute, right after my attention had turned from the cow in the lake to the cow watching, the tail-end of our car passed by both, carrying on its ragged journey slowly but consistently. There was not a moment’s hesitation in the car’s movement that was long enough for my own timidity, in getting the camera from the bag just inches away from my hand, to pass.
And there, again, was I stuck. In that point. That point that was merely half a daze. But anything not-whole crumbles as it moves along, and that was my attention as we went on our way. The scenery had changed and I didn’t notice until the whole countryside was gone and we were back in the industrialised province of Tarlac. Do not, however, take my word for that: that this place is Tarlac was a hearsay. I had no idea what Tarlac was, besides basic information like where a number of my relatives on my mother’s side resided, where we used to pass by, through, and over, frequently when we would go home to my mother’s home, making our own new abodes by the seas of Baler and Pangasinan when my grandmother was still strong and could go anywhere.
Now, grandmother is gone and no where. No where, too, is that more distant sea of Subic, Zambales: now farther both in miles and memory.
It was so far off my memory that I did not recognise it at first. The sharp sensation of cold December breeze on my nine-year-old self was clear, but I wasn’t aware of the fact when I first glanced at the alley of stores and restaurants along the streets of Luisita, at the opposite side of the road from the car window where I was at. When I had looked at it and gained awareness of my senses being transported in time and through space, I was not sure if I were on the way back to Dubai in 2019 and the lively commerce of the city where we stayed. There you could smell the freshly roasted meat, heavily spiced and brought around the city by the strong winds assuaged by the morning sun.
No, it was similar, sure, but definitely not that. Not downtown Singapore either where in my later teens I discovered true middle class. Or ‘became enlightened’ to, rather. ‘True middle class’—the boundary of the blindingly rich surface and a malnourished core of many Southeast Asian histories.
I went further back through the lanes of my childhood and took a quick stop at Disneyland in Hong Kong—the exact year, I could not recall. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t recall anything from that trip besides cartoon-shaped food, patches of pumpkin in a cloudy haze, and my grandmother posing beside the said patches of pumpkin. Was she there, in her signature 3/4s stance and confident smile, with me? Were we both standing beside the feature or was I the one who took her photo? I couldn’t recall. I don’t even remember now if she was really there with us.
The more that I think back to that point, the less of it I seem to be able to hold. That might be the reason why I had never once went back to that trip to Subic until this Sunday. I couldn’t remember anything from there, not even if it had happened before Hong Kong or after.
In Hong Kong, my prepubescent self felt poor and shy, fat in my itchy grey cardigan sweater that I loved because I liked the feeling of being cosy and covered up. I wanted to wear loose clothes even back then—an unexpressed sense of fashion from an early age that never seemed to have left, fortunately, but both the lack of knowledge where to get thicker, loose jackets and money to buy them were unbeknownst to me. If my mom knew or had, she certainly did not let me wear anything but the tight-fitting.
Yet in Subic, I wore a sleeveless collared blouse, honey-coloured chino that went well with my khaki capris. Around my neck was a pair of binoculars, my dad’s souvenir for me upon coming home after his first work session in South Africa, someplace where he found better pay and allowed him to come home more than once in twelve months. Before that, I would only see him every one or two years; this time, we got to take a family trip and I watched mountains and waves of the sea up close with him beside me, the binoculars in front of my eyes. It was also a time before I started wearing glasses. I can’t recall if he had always had his then.
Oh, so there goes my query: I didn’t have glasses back in Subic, yet the memory was crystal clear, while Hong Kong was dark and gloomy even through my grey square-framed lenses. The most absurd of it all was that I couldn’t make out how in Subic, while in a quiet, humble steakhouse, lunch away from our mediocre hotel room, I felt rich. It was our very first family trip with our own car, a red Vios, also average, but every ride there made me think there was thrice more money in our bank than it did. Yet abroad in my expensive sweater and more expensive glasses, I thought myself shy and impoverished, all while partaking of overpriced amusement park food.
All of these thoughts ran through my mind, curious but satisfied in knowing that there were no answers. I could barely recall any of those moments, anyway, what would I expect? Yet how they—each and every single one of those metaphysical dots—feel so alive… how they were brought back to life with just one glance at an out-of-place fine dining in a building we had just passed by amused me, until we reached the next Starbucks and my thoughts passed through that one, too. The way the outdoor chairs and tables were arranged brought it another form of consciousness that overwhelmed me, in that tiny seat at the back of the pick-up truck, and I wondered what this one’s smaller points were.
