You Belong With Me

According to Plan

Mira

Mira was awake again by 6 a.m., which was the plan, which was good. She could still stick to plans, no matter how the days had been bleeding into each other in the past month, or was it three?

Depends on what we're counting.

One month since she came back from Dubai where she'd been working most of her adult life. Two months since she'd left her first and only company, a job she excelled at and loved and hated in equal amounts. One month since her boyfriend of three years left her for someone else.

Time required context, she'd realized. The past month had lacked this, markers she was familiar with. When she arrived, she went straight from the airport to her parents' house in Balanga and hadn't left since. There she had no meetings, no deadlines, no organizational 'Game of Thrones' and moods of bosses to look out for. No dates to go on.

She'd seen a few friends, those who stayed in their small town and did not move to Metro Manila the way she and her brothers did in high school. She had not seen her brothers, all three of her kuyas neck-deep in their doctor and family lives in the city.

Somehow that had happened in the 12 years she worked abroad—her kuyas got their badges in their medical world, got married and had children.

While Mira at 32 was...well she guessed she was retired, for the moment.

It had been a quiet month, punctuated by her mother's nagging and her father's playlist that never changed. It had been nice, a welcome nothingness.

Until she was itching to move again.

"What are you in Manila for?"

Johan asked her from across his dining table, over breakfast. Breakfast that she'd found him making at 6 a.m. It was probably the sharp, tangy scent from his kitchen that invited her out of slumber.

"I thought you were staying in Bataan for good."

"How did you figure that?"

"I asked when I could see you in Manila. You said, 'hng'. I said, 'okay, I'm coming over'. You said, 'hng, no'." He speared a piece of fish with his fork, gaze fixed on her. "Are you building yourself a fortress over there? No one gets in or out?"

She slurped a few spoonfuls of rice with soup before she answered. "No. And no, I'm not staying in Bataan for good. That's fake news. There is this important thing I learned in my years abroad."

"What's that?"

"The way to improve a child's relationship with her parents is to live apart from them."

She laughed. She'd sobbed her fair share from missing her family in the years she was away, but living with them the past month reminded her how she treasured the simple joys of not having to explain why she was laugh-crying in front of her laptop at two in the morning, or her life choices.

Johan looked at her with that gaze, those eyes that sparkled. She always thought it was from amusement. That in all the time he'd known her, she amused him.

"I miss my mom some days, though," he said. "I miss dad's cooking."

Johan was a Metro Manila migrant too, a boy she knew in Balanga, since the day he and her Kuya Migs were seatmates in Grade 6 and realized their common love for Ghost Fighter and Dragon Ball Z. She had seen him in the malls and at birthday parties in the city when it was her turn to attend school there, being three years younger. She had seen him date all the cool girls in college, being the best cool boy himself.