I spent an entire month of the past year in New York City - soaking up each second of the steady big city hum, rumble and roar with silence ever elusive, watching the colors change across seasons from flora and foliage, complexion and timbre, tracking up soot, soil, scum and God knows what else from so much walking, always walking as fast as the raging sidewalk current took me. New York City was balm to my wounded soul, my happy place in this country.
Looking back, everything was a blur, spending a good twelve to fourteen hours of my pandemic working days at home, pedal to the metal - struggling to out of bed in the mornings, slamming my laptop shut late at night and fighting the mind’s overdrive to slow down, to even get some semblance of sleep. Work consumed all of me as I helped launch the biggest campaign of the year and spearheaded one I’ve nurtured from brief, ideated to concept and birthed into fruition.
What I clearly remember was the inability to deliver one presentation, one that I knew I could finish in an hour, but spent over a month pushing back on deadline, putting aside in favor of other more urgent tasks and mulling over, flipping tab over tab, task over task. The answers were on the surface. I didn’t need to dig deep, but there I was advertising garden spade in hand, poking shallow holes and stirring up dirt all over the place to no particular end.
I was floating, yet I was drowning.
I thought about my boss, my teammates and my clients. I let them down and continue to do so. How could I abandon them now? They too were drowning, but, here I was, breath slowly dissipating. Every night, I curled up into a tight wad of rubber - a strip stretched over and over, wound round and round, once supple elastic edges cracking, dry as bone, on the verge of disintegrating. My hands started shaking that later spread to my entire body. Day after day, it did not stop. Swim I must, but life was slipping away. How could I help them if I clearly could not even help myself?
I am overwhelmed. I need time off. I typed on my phone, then deleted. Can I even asked for this? Is this even the right thing to do? I knew something was not right, but didn’t even know if I deserved it. Would I end up being deadweight? I was Atlas. Was I doomed to forever carry the weight of responsibility and the guilt of the scramble to redistribute the weight of my work amongst teammates on my shoulders? I typed it again, pressed send, still having misgivings about asking for week off. I had to take a chance.
Realizing how short a week was, I then asked for two.
I was in the clear to travel, two weeks after my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in April of 2021. I packed all that baggage and then some into the single carry on. I paid heed to the gut’s call to be with my people, who coincidentally all lived in New York City.
I can’t say that I am one of those people who thought that all roads should lead to New York City, the center of their universe, that it is a dream to live there after watching “Sex and the City” on repeat, dreaming of walking the streets and glossing over the fact that debt saddled Carrie Bradshaw got tire splashed with idle curb water by a bus. Ew.
Living in the USA was not even in my dreams, yet here I am.
New York City was over a thousand and five hundred miles away from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, where I now live. It was still simply pictures on the TV. Yes, the same endless “Sex and the City” reruns on E! until the Spring of 2014, when work called on my husband to head to New Jersey. I tagged along, sat through the day’s drive through the South towards the east coast. I was in charge of research for places to see and eat at and navigation, taking into consideration the former onto our route.
Now travel in 2014 was much different than it is today. I carried a Blackberry phone with unlimited texts and a 200-minute call time limit. No access to data, to Google maps or any map for that matter. Yes, the Internet very much existed, but only through my laptop and free wifi.
While my husband was working, I walked the sparse strip malls around the Holiday Inn in Piscataway, NJ, exploring within the 2-mile radius. The Lowe’s, the Ross, the Chipotle, the Target, the Asian Lion - the only Asian supermarket in the area. I combed through all the aisles, learning more about the township, the county, the state, the country. The scene turned as dull and monotonous as the weather. I then learned I could whisk myself to the city in a single train ride.
I researched the places I wanted to visit, learned that Manhattan was easily navigated through its block system on foot coupled with the network of subways, the throbbing veins of the island. So I lumped all the places strategically, so that I could cover as much on foot, then wrote down my subway routes on paper with pen. I reached out to friends I knew lived in the city and asked if I could crash on their couches for a night or two. I forecasted a budget for train fare and food. I told my husband about my plan, to drop me off the Edison station before he headed off to work.
After hundreds of hours spent in the passenger seat of our silver VW Passat, a wave of comfort tided over as I sat inside the rattling train car alongside the nodding public, struggling to sleep and still stay alert, before they set foot in the city for work.
Public transportation - trains, buses, shuttle vans, jeepneys, tricycles, padyaks - was my jam. I rode them all by choice with much gusto. I could’ve chosen to buy a car and drive myself to work, but I didn’t.
All my best ideas at work were conceived, seated at the back of the FX, listening to whatever radio station the driver tuned in to, eavesdropping on conversations, observing fellow passengers, looking out the window, watching the traffic crawl and piecing things together in my head. I read through Hunger Games trilogy, heaving corporate turtle shell on my back, book in hand, balanced in a straddle stand on the peak hours packed G-Liner bus. Tears streamed down my cheeks, reading the last pages of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” as the FX slowed down to unload passengers at the corner of EDSA-Makati Avenue. I bumped into friends who alighted the same shuttle service and caught up with them on the ride. I felt the throbbing pulse of humanity, fed on it like a ravenous vampire. It gave me life because I was in the thick of it. I was there, even when in my head, I wasn’t.
There was no time to think, swept away by the morning rush, as I alighted off the double decker train at Penn station. The City shared the same New Jersey overcast skies everything was in full living color, smell, texture and sound.
With my overnight backpack, I walked, embarrassed to take my camera out and put this New York City lightning in a bottle for me to take home back to Texas without looking like an eager tourist. I wanted to be that nature photographer who blended in, observed her subjects in their natural habitats without any disruptions. But New Yorkers didn’t seem care, give a F, as long as you weren’t in their way. I stepped away from the sidewalk, hung my camera around my neck, then melded back into the soup of people, who all looked, moved, dressed sounded different. Life in vivid color. The gradients in variation create contrasts, textures and exhilaration.
Everyday I stroll around our neighborhood to walk the dog, to clear my head. At the stroke of five, from Monday to Friday, cars start streaming into the apartment complex and the community beside it. Drivers and passengers get down from their vehicles then enter their cocoons. Same thing in the morning, on repeat.
My jaw dropped on the sidewalk as I realized Pleasantville existed in real life. And I’ve been in it for almost decade now.
We lived out of four suitcases and on a blue, once fluffy, now threadbare windowpane duvet cover that was left behind by a family who moved out of state. It’s end with them was a beginning with us. I lay it over the carpet flooring every night to use as our bed.
We were a family of two and no other. A handful of friends, who learned we now lived in the area, reached out. Some even introduced us their family and friends to help build the support systems we left and lost across two countries. It was just myself and my husband.
There was no one else I could call for a late night shawarma run. There was no one else to have a one-for-the-road session to unwind with a cold bottle of San Might Light and a sizzling plate of sisig after a stressful day at work. There was no one who was just a walk up the stairwell away from to hang out with. There was no one else I could truly let go, be myself and trust just yet.
It was a blank slate, ready to be painted over.
We were invited for lunch to celebrate our arrival, a home cooked Filipino meal. The beginnings of the United States migrant journey exchanged. The uphill battle of starting with nothing, some scars and, ultimately, victory of belonging here as certified by the coveted blue passport that meant access to riches, safety and ease of passage.
A dusty Hoover vacuum and a once immaculate white, glass covered slow cooker were turned over. They were planning to replace it with a new Dyson and another Saladmaster pot. I’ve never heard of this brand of cookware. Then the host pointed to the shiny, metal spread that sat on the dining table, explaining that the lunch was actually a demonstration of the benefits of this range of cookware. She’d get this new pot in exchange for it.
We were still living off the remainder of the pocket money. Income did not flow into our bank account just yet. A few more weeks, a month, who knows exactly when? In this new home, uncertainty begets frugality.
She hand cranked the food processor, shredding the carrots, explaining how easy it was to clean up afterward. She tossed them into the branded pot together with other vegetables and a packet of glass noodles, explaining how pot preserves all the nutrients and that the natural moisture of the vegetables will be the only liquid needed. She heated water in three pots - a teflon one, a stainless steel one and a Saladmaster, added a teaspoon of baking soda and let us taste, explaining that the materials used to make the pot, including titanium, allowed the water to retain its taste.
She kept repeating that it was an investment in your health as you start your life in the count to the tune of $3,000. How much titanium is in the cookware? What percentage? I asked, thinking that it was this that made the cookware special and worth three months of rent. An awkward silence. Then she quipped, I’ll get back to you.
We ate heartily, thanked her for the demonstration and wrote our email and phone numbers on the contact sheet. I was pretty much sold. It made sense. Maybe it was worth it, despite the steep costs against the fact that we didn’t have income yet.
We were invited to several of the same dinner and a show meals over the years by different friends, acquaintances who lived in the metroplex. A free meal, sitting down to watch the exact same dishes cooked - pancit, pan fried salmon, slaw and steamed jasmine rice - eating while listening to the same schtick. I asked the same question about the titanium, but never got an answer.
I told my husband, as much as I loved a free meal, I won’t join another one of those. Ever. But I kept an open mind and heart about community here. Maybe there are other people who won’t sell me pots and pans. I turned my no’s into yeses.
But I got sold even more multi-level marketing and Jesus. Jesus! I’m Catholic!
My husband and I were walking one evening, when my stride was quicker, leading me two body lengths ahead of him. A bespectacled white man, salt less pepper flop of hair on his head, beer belly protruding, sitting on the waist of his wrinkled cargo shorts, whom I shared the trail with every morning as he walked his equally potbellied and elder dog, called out “Aren’t you supposed to be walking behind him?” He laughed and went on his way, turned the corner, back into his own suburban bubble.
In Texas, cars are a fact of life, a means to get around - to work and to play.
We traverse through neighborhoods, towns, cities inside these metal pods on the concrete arteries of the state. Worlds collide only in the crush of metal against another. Or for a few minutes in a crowded parking lot. There are trains, buses and yet hardly any human life is pumped into them. They didn’t share the same pulse of life, the one connected into the stream of blood that flows through the veins of humanity as it did in New York City.
One evening, I slept on the floor, beside my friend’s single bed, up in the attic of her boarding house in Woodside, Queens. The other, I moved into another friend’s basement in Astoria, Queens.
In later trips, I was welcomed into the home of one of my best friends from high school in the same Queens neighborhood. Many days I woke up to the sunshine streaming on my face to the squeaking brakes of the yellow school buses lined up in front of the public school across my friend’s pre-war apartment building. Children laughing and squealing in delight to see their friends with the thump of their footsteps on the concrete sidewalk, while their parents and guardians called out their last minute reminders.
The sweet song of human life.
Seated at a quaint yellow doored gelato place in Little Italy (R.I.P. AB Biagi), savoring a tiny cup of gelato and resting my tired tourist feet after miles of walking in the city, the owner of the place came in, along with his parents, who flew all the way from Brazil. It was their first time to set foot in their son’s shop.
The owner's father, a snowy haired Westerner, dapper in a crisp button down shirt topped with a wool vest, sat down beside me with a gelato cone in hand and engaged me in conversation. He asked about the Philippines and Filipinos and gave me a history lesson on gelato. Then he said "Isn't New York City beautiful? Here we are, me - an Italian from Brazil, and you - a Filipino from Texas, seated on the same bench, sharing stories"
I smiled. No, my soul smiled the biggest smile that it could.
Yes, New York City is so much more beautiful that way. I have never heard and can never imagine those words come out of the mouths of fellow expats in Dubai on the street, who would always give you a stare down and then look away, or here in the thick of the North Texas suburbs.
This siren song of New York City that lures me in every single time. I can’t wait to return.
What I am reading:
As I struggle to sit down and focus, reading books isn’t the same anymore. I could once gobble up a title over a weekend, but now it’s only a page or two at most. I queued for “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again” by Johann Hari at the public library months ago, when I heard him speak with Kris Boyd on Think by KERA. Once the library notified that it was now my turn, I drove down to pick up the copy and devoured it over two days. A miraculous feat! All because I followed tips he gave. This book is critical reading for these days. I urge you, especially if you are raising children, to buy or borrow a copy should your library have one. Well, honestly, for your own sanity really.
I also wrapped up the new book from Susan Cain of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” fame, “Bitterweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” It is essential reading for those who’ve ever tried suppressing their sorrows and longings, but finding them bubbling up into the surface in one way of the other. I was in tears going through the last chapter. It was glorious.
The topmost photo is from Quoted Magazine (Also RIP) And this quote from Casey Kelbaugh haunts me in the most romantic way.
I wrap up my days with the phone in another room, turn on my reading lamp and read one essay from “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York” edited by Sari Botton. So you know what inspired today’s entry.
What I am watching:
“Indian Matchmaking” Season 2 on Netflix. Everyone needs some easy watching every now and then. So please don’t take this too seriously.