Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better? But because I knew you, I have been changed for good.

– For Good, Wicked (Stephen Schwartz)

In Singapore, Filipino contract workers had a slang term that referred to the act of going back to the Philippines at the end of a contract, as opposed to on a brief vacation or to process a change of visa in between contracts: Porgud, they would say, a pidgin amalgamation of the English words “for good”. Even my housekeeper, Ate V, picked it up after a year – Rei, she said once, Tina’s going porgud next month, we’re going to throw a goodbye party for her.

I found that interesting, because in Filipino, the word for going back to the Philippines (regardless of purpose or intent) and going home is one and the same: uuwi ako, I am going home. Contract workers who were done with their contracts, who had been laid off from work, who had had enough of the golden dream of going overseas to work, must have needed a way to convey to their friends that this was a more permanent departure. This time they were going home – not for a vacation, not to attend someone’s wedding or graduation or funeral, not to renew a contract – but to stay.

Of course, Filipinos being Filipinos, porgud doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “for good”. Just because a worker was done with Singapore didn’t mean she was permanently done with the entire overseas work thing, and sometimes a few months after someone had gone porgud you’d get news that she was now in Dubai, or Sydney, or some other place. All porgud meant that you were done with this place for now, and you were going home to regroup and recharge.

I think of that now that I’m starting to think very seriously about going back to Manila. It’s been the thing, among my work friends, to do countdowns: a friend started her countdown a year before she left her Post; another one is counting down her last 100 days. I imitated both, because it’s a fun idea, to document your last everything – and things took a serious turn last night when I started counting days and realized that as of today I’ve got 75 days left. It came as a huge jolt, especially since I’ve been looking Manila-ward with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension: the things I must do, the people I need to spend time with, the quirks and routines I’ll need to re-establish, the small details I must catch up on after being away so long. For the past year I’ve been swimming idly between the two poles, and last night I thought this is it, this is real, I only have 75 days before ‘what if’ becomes ‘what is’.

For the past 200-some days I’ve been documenting my path home with photos on Instagram, tagging them so that when I get home I’ll have memories I can put up on my wall. The closer my departure gets, though, the more intense my preparations get, and photos are beginning to feel inadequate.

Last year I sat with a group of Filipino-American writers, watching them try to think up a theme for a book festival they were organizing. We want a theme that bridges the work of our community here to the culture we come from, the committee chairperson urged. We don’t necessarily always write about the Philippines, but it does inform the nature and bent of our work, and our theme should reflect that.

A moment of silence, a beat, before one woman, Barbara, offered: What about ‘Writing A Way Home’? It’s what we all do, and it’s an open-ended theme, because it could go so many ways: the diaspora writing about the motherland, the diaspora writing about their new homes here, the people in the motherland writing about the diaspora …”

They used it, of course; they would have been crazy not to, because that is a beautiful phrase. I still think about it to this day, loving the many ways you can interpret the words, but in this context it is precisely what I intend to do: write my way home. I started this journey telling stories, so it feels apropos to go back to that medium to document this transition and all the things I feel and think about going porgud.

There are tons of stories, too, things I’ve seen and done and experienced over the past six years, and I need to get them down, get them out, before I go home. Someone once told me that intense experiences need to be followed by debriefings; this, then, will be mine.

I’ve been ambitious and titled my project before I began: 50 True Stories, to keep me focused on what I need to say. There are more than 50 stories, but I haven’t blogged in forever and I only have 75 days, so I’ll start with that and see where it leads me.