One Way Ticket

A Sour Taste

I remember the day we left home. I recall having sat in the back of a hired jeepney, waving a smug goodbye to Tito W. With confusion, I watched his face contort to resemble that of a grieving parent, whilst mine was adorned with an excited glow. Little did I know how naïve one of us had been.

It all started so well. I hopped off the plane at LHR (no, I'm not just quoting Miley Cyrus lyrics) , and for the first time felt the embrace of a cool autumn wind around me. The air was fresh - not a hint of gasoline or fried fish in sight. In place of the usual blanket of rainbow coloured candy wrappers, flattened iced tea bottles and the assortment of Gatorade labels I was used to, the ground was instead littered with brown, lifeless leaves that had abandoned the outstretched branches of the naked trees (jk autumn's kinda pretty). 'Twas an experience so foreign to my senses.

It was the moment I put the twirled up fork of that spaghetti in my mouth from my new school in London that it really hit me. Sure, in London the air smells fresh, all the houses seem to look like mansions, and there are no screaming neighbors lunging at each other's throats during the night, but that spaghetti sure left a sour taste. Literally. It was not like the sweet, mouth-watering, joy-inducing, smile-producing Jollibee spaghetti that my palate had been accustomed to. Instead, it really made me miss and yearn for the familiar aroma of smoke and gasoline when you walk out onto the road, the comfort of hole in the house that we could play hide and seek in, the entertaining sound of the chismis from next door which was music to my ears.

But to be honest, things started to go downhill way before that. In retrospect, things tasted sour (or at least, didn't agree with my palate) as soon as we tried to unlock the door of our first flat. To be fair, London was a new place and I had to cut it some slack, wear it in like a new pair of shoes and give myself time to settle in to adjust to my new surroundings; but to be real, it's been like ten years mate, and I'm about as settled as a fish out of water.

It was Monday, September 10th, 2007, and in front of us stood the door to our future. Only problem was, it was locked and we had the wrong key. Literally. Well technically, we had the right key, just the wrong door. We were on (what we thought was) the first floor of the flat building, trying to turn the key every which way but the door just wouldn't budge. Turns out, this was England, and so when someone says your flat is on the "first floor", it. is. not. the. same. as the "ground floor". When we finally got into our actual flat, wow oh wow was it a beaut. Too bad that the company that hired my dad only agreed to pay two months rent to that palace of an apartment. And not that I'm complaining, but putting us in that good of a living space just sets really unrealistic expectations and false hopes for the rest of the places in London that we were going to live in. Not that any of the places we lived in were actually bad. They were pretty decent. Yet, they weren't home. They had glass windows and carpets and toilets and baths and showers. They were too comfortable, and that made it uncomfortable. They didn't have the same creek in every step on the rotting wood. They didn't have the sheet-iron roofs that amplified the rhythm of the rain. They didn't wake you up with clucking chickens or the shouts of someone selling warm corn on the cob. They were houses. Not homes. (acc they weren't even houses, just flats)

Though a five year old me was really just chuffed and dumbfounded at how I could walk barefoot in the bathroom because it was actually tiled and not just moist, gravelly concrete with a hole for a drain (but at the same time felt that a part of me was lost because I was no longer supposed to pee on the floor), looking back on it now, dammmmn. That first flat with the wood floors that didn't creek, door-sized windows with white cotton curtains, and two separate bathrooms. One with a bath and a glass sink, and the other in my parent's room which had little jet blaster thingies that squirt water on you from the walls of the shower. There was running hot water and I even had my own bed in my own room. 'Twas pretty dope. But it wasn't long before the pessimist side of me kicked in and suddenly, the wood floors were just something to slip and fall on, the door-sized window was just a huge view of the unkempt graveyard across the road, my unaccustomed hands getting startled and burnt when hot water suddenly started streaming out from the faucet. Granted, the first time I felt that running hot water from our own kitchen in the flat, I got so excited and screamed the words I hard learned to formulate from my limited vocabulary in my little Filipino accent - "it's getting hotting!".