Literally or literarily

It still comes as a mild surprise to me whenever lost in thought somewhere, I stumble upon the fact that I'm nowhere near home. For that split-of-a-second there, something just taps inside me, and it lets loose what I gather as scales from that day-to-day casualness of my having to be alone in this city, its name I only heard for the first time the day my childhood friend decided to study here for college. As it happens, I look around, find my feet still walking the familiar streets of what I now consider my home. And once again, I am giddy and raving and ecstatic at the decision I made.

A year ago, around May or June as I recall it, I promised myself a dare. I dared that by the time I reached twenty one, I should be away from home. Far from it. Miles and miles away from it. That time I thought the prospect was just too ambitious. Picture a fresh grad who just drained his mother's pockets and everyone else's around him setting off somewhere to start an epic journey of his life at twenty one, all these crazy carpe diem! ideas running frantically in his head thanks to those movies and stories in college, a borrowed bag in tow, and no cash. It's ridiculous. No. No. It's a self-centered, egotistic, selfish impulse, like a sexual orgasm actually, unable to contain itself now that I think about it.

Unmistakably, there's always the usual heart-wrenching question nowadays: When are you going back home? Always, I tell them, "No plans, yet. It's too early to go back." And mind you, I say this with a light heart plus a quick offhand gesture. Poof. (No, I don't really do the hand thing. I like it there for the sake of effect.) Then: Don't you miss your parents? your friends? It must be hard living by yourself. Which reminds me about the phrase I heard one of my writer friends say about living literally or literarily. It's quite a distinction, actually, one that kept me pondering even as I am writing this. In Susan Orlean's words, she has this to say about traveling:

Is it that when you travel you can invent yourself anew, and the new person you become is freer and more engaged and more engaging than the persona you left at home? And even if you're not in love, is this still what makes travel so seductive - the creation of a new buoyant version of yourself, unpunctured by the familiarity of people who know you and know that you have another self?

What I consider living by myself is, in a way, what I consider too as traveling. I experience what it feels like to go home from work, to switch on the lights and find at ten o'clock in the evening my unmade bed, the sheets still tousled from last night; the dumped used shirts on one corner, the clean ones on another; the eerie quietness of the place when most of the nextdoor boarders have gone home, the racousness when they're back; the barking of dogs; the gurgling sound made by my cheap water heater as I try to cook instant noodles; the loud groaning sound of passing motorcycles outside the gate.

Or the site of men stationing themselves along Meciano street, drinking; boys my age gathering, strumming guitars, the beat box following the rhythm, the chorus of glee boys and girls singing Huling El Bimbo; the tired looks of old men and women watching them, oftentimes swaying their heads, perhaps in dismay at the noise; the twenty-four hour bakery station, the lady with the long hair inside, her round face and the bulge of her cheeks protruding in this irritating, sometimes frightening way whenever somebody wakes her up at three o'clock in the morning to buy bread.

So yes, I may possibly be living both. I want to think I am.