Coming Home
It all feels like a dream to me. Either I imagined this incredible trip to the west, or I'm still in a state of fantasy during these couple of days back in New York City. Perhaps it could be both.
I spent three days in the Los Angeles area, a day in Las Vegas, four days in the Bay Area, and surprisingly, a couple of days now in New York City, acclimatizing myself to the quickened-pace of the city. New York will not wait for me to digest my few days vacation, but I will try my best to understand what I have gone through.
Right now I am in the motions of work and living in the city as if I have done it all my life, and yet I am not the same. I honestly think I've changed these past few days, remembering where I had been through in Los Angeles with my relatives and living the promise of being with old friends again in the Bay Area. It felt that I had been living with all these people all my life. I even took a trip to Vegas, a place I visited fairly regularly when my aunt used to go to church there. There were many faces and events I encountered along that lonely road to Sin City that never ends.
But most remarkably, I believe I had a chance to look at myself as the world around me changed: from the cradling confines of a cavernous metropolis, to the wide open fields and freeways of the sunny states of California and Nevada. I came away seeing where I'd been, but also where I want to be. For some reason, I wanted to take my trip one ocean further and be with my mother in the Philippines. Coming back into the city as my plane approached JFK just over the Atlantic, I watched Manhattan lit up so gloriously you could see the grids and bridges as if it was drawn from a map, and I wondered: is this home? I don't know. New York feels like a stranger to this wandering alien. I think it's time that I find out where home is.
It is clearer to me now what I need to do for the next year or so. I have been driven to complacency over the past year, but I think I understand now what will make me happy in this world. I will spend a good deal of the year making arrangements for the day that I will touch my mother's face again. And then from there ... who knows.
