memories: eighteen
When I was eighteen, I disappeared.
After dinner one day in April, years and years ago, during the summer before my college sophomore year, I left my car in the school parking lot and took a taxi to the Pasay bus station. I picked a place at random, and bought a ticket. And then I got on the crowded bus and didn’t get off until the very last stop. An eight hour ride which left me in a pockmarked garage in Baguio.
I hailed a dingy cab and asked the driver to take me somewhere cheap. He drove me to an old house with three floors, each one sinking into the other. There was a darkly furred cat, and darkly feathered birds. There was a doberman by the gate who looked only half-alive. The house looked haunted and foreboding, but it was 2:30 in the morning, and I was tired. I told myself it was okay. I had always been used to ghosts.
At night, that house creaked with ghost-steps of a fat black cat’s paws.
It was an old house, whose glories were all former and faded, an afterthought rented out to transients – there was a cardboard sign on the gate saying as much. Six windowed boxes let out to the strangers who flitted in from who knows where, each room with one or two single beds, and two bathrooms on two floors to be shared among us. I had only ever seen three other guests, but would hear the creaks and bed-moans of more. There was a kitchen which we could all use. It was passably clean to my eyes, but at that age, I didn’t really know how to look too hard.
In the bathrooms, there were pails under both perenially broken showers. In each pail was something that looked like a large plastic ladle. There was no hot water, so you took one of the large kettles to the stove, and you poured its heated contents into the pail, and mixed it with the icy water from the tap. You scooped the ladle-like thing into the pail and poured the water over your head. You always kept an eye out for how much water you had left, because using too much too soon would leave you rinsing in the cold.
Yes, there was the cold. Because there wasn’t a continuous stream of heated water pouring over you, bathing could be an ordeal. The breeze could easily slap into your wet back, making you break out in goosebumps. I was always a mass of little shivers when I emerged from the bathroom, my thin towel, bought too cheaply at the minimart down the road, was often wetter than I was. I marveled at how cold it could get, how temperatures could drop as far down as 13 degrees Celsius. Siberia, for the tropics.
In that small town masquerading as a city, high up in the North, I rode taxis tuned to the kind of radio stations that taxi drivers of that time favoured: Michael Learns to Rock was popular. So was Bon Jovi. Vaguely anthemic, lovelorn ballads with some kind of working class ethos. I was a sheltered girl newly minted from a posh private school. Up until a few months before, I hadn’t even been allowed to take public transportation. It was all so very strange and exotic to me then.
Naturally, I didn’t know how to ride a jeepney, the cheap form of mass transit everyone used, so sometimes I walked. I walked for half an hour to get to downtown, and half an hour back. And in between, I’d walk too, from the more sanitised enclaves of Burnham Park to winding Leonard Wood Road, to picturesque South Drive. And then to the little pockmarked alleys of General Pack, and market-crowded Zandueta and Shantug, just pass the tired building of Abanao Square.
Once, on the road, I saw a hearse. Traffic slowly came to a halt as everyone let the long procession of walking mourners and condoling jeeps make their way. No one blew a horn. No one shouted. We all sat in the quiet, and waited for the dead and the sadness to pass.
Sometimes, I would wake up at 3 in the morning, and I would walk to the corner of the street, down a small incline, and wait for a cab. It never took too long, although the road always seemed to taper off into places unlit and asleep. I would get out at Session Road, where there was a smattering of 24-hour restaurants, mostly serving coffee and pizza and beer. All day waffles as well, and big tumblers of fruit shakes.
In the wee hours of the morning, Baguio’s main street was quiet, but never empty. There was always a knot of people on some adjacent table, talking low over caffeine or alcohol. I loved Baguio that way most of all – eating waffles with the faint taste of bananas as I stared into the steep Cathedral steps jutting from the side of a hill, snuggled within the comfort of a forgotten boyfriend’s sweater, alone in the 4am small town dark.
I was eighteen when I first disappeared, and I seem to have been constantly disappearing ever since. I still reminisce about the way I could disappear into strangers’ beds and strangers’ walls. I’m still most content when no one knows where I am. I still feel most myself when I am as alone in the world as I can possibly be, and I can be a different person in every place, with each stranger, with each iteration of each day. It’s still the best way I know to feel free.
memories prose lit writing baguio travel
Originally published on Tumblr, April 2012.