I am walking, alone and slow, and it is springtime in Tel Aviv. There are no flowers in the heart of the city, only trees lined up in polite rows on the edge of the sidewalk, branches still bare from winter.

There’s a black balloon trapped in the fork of one of the branches. I look up, the song playing on my headphones ends and there is a brief silence in which I hear the sound of my shoes hitting the pavement

tap, tap, tap

and it is the tail end of summer in Manila and the trees lining the streets of the university campus are lush with leaves. I look up as I cross the road and the sun filters through, tiny kisses of warmth on my skin. I am sixteen and the same gentle heat trickles through my heart whenever I see him, and I am so caught in the sweetness that sometimes I forget that the first thought I had when I realized I was in love was Oh, please, no.

It was very sudden, I remember.

Sudden isn’t immediate, only unexpected. No one expects to fall in love, especially when they’re not looking. I wasn’t looking.

How did it feel?

Time is valuable, my mother always said, and we were taught not to waste it. Every minute was accounted for, like money: an hour reviewing geometry, thirty minutes studying the conjugations of the Spanish verb ser, two hours of ballet class with an hour’s dinner break in between. I had a schedule for my life that shattered when we moved back to Manila, and spent almost ten of the years that followed trying to get back on track.

I wasn’t looking for love because it felt like something you should do while sitting in the sunlight, perfectly still, and I was always running.

Falling in love doesn’t always need time. Sometimes it’s an unexpected moment coupled with the tiniest chink in your armor, and that was what it was like for me. Oh no, I thought then with genuine dismay. It’s not time. I don’t want this.

Love isn’t about what you want, though, is it?

For some people it’s a gradual slow slide, a calm surrender to water; for others it’s a sudden hurtling through space, fear and anticipation and joy in spurts and occasionally all together all at once.

For me it was that brief pause after a song and before another, the tick of the stoplight as I waited to cross a road, the moment I looked up and saw sunlight trickling through the trees.

I stopped reading them for the same reason. The words peel open my heart and I am afraid of being vulnerable now.

Document the way your heart breaks.

Start with the moment of impact, the disbelief, the force that takes your breath away. Begin here, where you absorb the damage without feeling the pain.

Stay in that moment, voiceless and tearless. Stay in that moment for as long as you can, insulated from what comes after. Don’t forget to breathe.

Maybe you collapse, maybe you keep walking, maybe you crack. You don’t quite remember. In the aftermath you remember the tiniest details – the feeling that something is not quite right, the sensation of bones coming apart, skin tearing. Feeling trickles back in, pinprick by pinprick.

It hits, yesterday today tomorrow and all at once, and suddenly there is no breath in your body, no blood, no sight. Only pain. Only a hurt that is so overwhelming that there is nothing that alleviates it except more hurt. For moments, hours, years, you are lost to everything but sensation. You do not need words to scream.

Time heals, so you wait. Eventually, your words return, together with thought and reason. You can identify some of the things that hurt. Some of them you skim over, leaving them for someone else to name – someone professional, someone with the expertise to fix and heal. You fix what you can. You struggle to get as far up as you can. Lift your head, sit up, get to your knees –

– and the moment you can stand on your own feet again is such a victory that you cry as if you had lost everything.

Time heals.

Time heals.

Time –

One day, so far into the future you have stopped counting days, you wake up before the sun rises, curious to know what the day holds.

Another day you feel something even lighter in your chest when you wake. It takes you several days/weeks/months to realize that the sensation is anticipation.

You have stopped counting. You wake up and wait for the sun to catch up with you. The horizon looks like a finish line that you will be able to reach.

From this vantage point you can take a deep breath and look back – over the acres of damage, the expanse of struggle – and say thank you. That is the moment you sit down and begin to write.

Document your heartbreak, and the path you took back. You never know who will need the instructions.

Because, he replied laconically, After you’re done you can sit back and chill for at least a month, guilt-free.

Except I won’t, because in three months I’m leaving again, and that’s barely enough time to sort out everything that I need to leave.

Heart in a suitcase, once again. One day I’ll learn to make the leaving easy.

– “Castle on a Hill”, Ed Sheeran

Technically they’re just days, the same as any other, but on a calendar the time in between the sunrises and sunsets that happen in December and January make them seem so much more significant. You bracket a day with the slow rise and fade of the sun, and we bracket our lives with the open and close of years.

I tried writing about how we mark the passage of grief, but that needed more time and thought than I had, so for now I settle for the easy win: how I closed the year with gratitude and looked forward with hope.

It’s not something I’ve done before. In December I typically start out festive and bubbly, hopping from dinner to party to celebration, then – after some time, the energy runs out and I’m just tired and want to sleep, and that carries over into the first week of January. Christmas has not typically been a time of introspection, and the one time I did use it to reflect on my life it resulted in the end of a relationship, so – since then I haven’t been too eager to use that particular time of the year to think very hard about my life. In my head, I kept it simple: a year is ending, a year is beginning. Goodbye and hello.

This year, for some reason, something else kept on coming to mind: this is it. Maybe it was the people I happened to have Christmas dinners with, maybe it was the moments I spent looking out at the city lights from my apartment’s balcony. Scratch that, it was definitely the balcony: standing at the railings, thinking of nothing in particular, I had a sudden flashback to myself at fifteen, sitting on the window ledge of our school building with my best friend, on a night that our editorial team stayed late to finish the proofs for our school magazine.

It was quiet: the rest of our team had either settled down to nap or go over their respective portions of the magazine one last time, and the two of us were waiting for everyone else to be done so we could do our final checks and OK the proofs for printing. We were talking then of our dreams, what we hoped to be in the future. There was nothing atypical about our dreams: we wanted to see the world, make something of ourselves, fall in love – fifteen year old dreams, innocent and brave.

What shook me, last December, was how clearly my fifteen-year-old self had pictured what she wanted in her future, even if she didn’t have details: an apartment of her own, a life lived without needing to ask permission, achievements that she had earned, not received as a gift or inheritance. In my head I traveled back almost twenty years, looked at my present with my fifteen-year-old eyes, and was staggered by how closely it resembled what I had hoped so hard for, as a girl. I don’t know how to explain it, the feeling you get when you realize that everything you’ve ever done has led you to this moment, when your present looks exactly like what you used to wish for.

So that night, and every moment since then that I remember, I said thank you to my past self, that shy silly girl on the ledge who knew so little about the world, but knew, so clearly, what she wanted. Thank you, I said, for knowing me so well, for dreaming of such an amazing future. Thank you for working so hard, sweetheart, and thank you for being strong. I would not be here if you had accepted something less, or if you had let yourself be crushed any of the times you failed, were rejected, or told you weren’t enough. Here we are now. Here I am. Congratulations, and thank you so much. 

Here I am, indeed, the sum of a lost 13-year old girl long ago, and a hopeful 15-year old who wanted to see the world beyond what her parents allowed, and all the days in between her then and me now. Who would have thought, and who would have known? All these years, they were technically just days.

In the back of an Uber, at 5am on a Monday morning in the first month of the new year.

Really, Ed. Really.

– 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.

So I, to find my brother / yes, I, to find another / in my search for him, unhappy / lose myself.

– I To The World, Oh Brother!

I turned 33 this year, and for the first time since I turned 30, I had a travel plan. The years in between were neither kind nor conducive to traveling, so I folded my wings and waited it out: soon enough, I figured, traveling would be possible again, and then away I’d go.

Like most people, I travel whenever there’s an opportunity, but I also travel to mark milestones. Before I turned 30, I promised myself that I would spend my birthday in a city I’d never been in before; true enough, that year I blew out my birthday candles in Prague, triumphant because I’d also managed to visit several other cities in Europe, North America and Asia during the same year.

This year I was particularly determined to go places, for many reasons: I was getting cabin fever, I had friends and family to visit and catch up with, the obligations that kept me home-bound no longer existed, and – most importantly – I’m scheduled to end my tour of duty next year and report back to HQ in Manila. In a way, that’s a whole new adventure, but still and all, it’s hitting me that I’ve gotten through my first foreign posting, and I’ll never look at the Foreign Service the same way again.

In that context, this year I traveled not necessarily to see new places, although I did; more accurately, I traveled to give myself time and space to reflect and breathe. When you’re in transit, life feels like it’s held in temporary suspension: in the air, no one can call or text or email you; on the road, they can, but your ability to reply or act on their requests is extremely limited. I used to love transit periods for the space they gave me to anticipate my destination; now, I love them because in a way they cut me loose, let me live temporarily free of all the electronic leashes I’ve got on me. For the first time in a long while, I had time to dream and imagine and pretend, and it felt like falling back into a cold pool on a hot day.

I turned 33, but in many ways I felt like I was 10 years old all over again. In Orlando I pretended I was a butterfly; in Colorado Springs I caught snowflakes in the net of my hair; in New York City I flung myself onto the grass in Central Park and soaked up the sun, in a way that hasn’t been possible in San Francisco for a while because of the fog.

For six years I’ve been so careful, so polite in public: there are perks, certainly, to representing the country, but on the flip side sometimes it feels like your body isn’t your own anymore. I’ve grown to dread being introduced by my title, because people look at me differently when they hear it: suddenly I’m no longer Rei, but the Republic of the Philippines, and all that represents to the person looking at me. The way I dress, sit, walk, and talk; where I do these things; and who I do them with: they all become part of the image I am trying to project.

In some ways, it’s not at all hard. I love my country dearly, and if anything I hope that love is what bleeds through, regardless of what I’m saying or doing or wearing. Still, perception is in the eye of the viewer, and I am cautious anyway because I don’t want my carelessness to be misconstrued. I am not necessarily always the Republic of the Philippines, but then again I am not a taxicab, either, with a light to be switched on or off depending on whether I am ready to be judged. So: six years of steady breathing, holding my head high, of trying to be someone and something that my country can be proud of because who I am might not be enough.

I turned 33 this month, but have felt, for six years, as if I were living like an exceptionally cautious 70-year-old spinster. Eight months to go before I return to Manila, where hopefully I will fade back into the woodwork and just be me again. I wonder who that is now.