A Life Between Two Streets

Avery

It was roughly 7:00 pm in the bucolic town of Silang, Cavite, around 60 kms south of Manila when I decided to go out of my way and greet the stars. And on this particular day, they were simply amazing. Seeing the night sky is something I haven't had the opportunity of doing when we lived back in the city. There was just too much light and everything seemed to move faster even when you're idle. 

I breathed in the fresh midsummer night's breeze and started walking down the dimly lit street where we had just moved in. May was one of my favorite months of the year – there's just something about the crisp air and the looming anticipation for the 'wet season' to begin. The Philippines had 4 seasons. Dry, drier, wet, and wetter. Sometimes we would be lucky and the seasons rounded down to just dry and wet.

I scanned the empty lots and the scarce number of houses that dotted the new 'block' of the subdivision where my father had 'invested' in – He was adamant that we had bought the house and lot at a very favorable price and that they were bound to appreciate in value given the province's steady growth. 

Why he would even care about the resale value of the house, I couldn't understand. Isn't it enough that we had left our previous home already? My butt had barely left a mark on the new furniture they had installed and there he was concerned about moving out again.

I had nothing against moving out of the city, what worried me though was that my father had sold our ancestral house to some developer who was planning to erect a commercial tower on the land where it stood. I couldn't blame them though, our previous home was like a sore thumb in the middle of the semi urban high rises and malls nearby. My grandfather owned the house when he was alive and had insisted that it would be passed down from son to son notwithstanding the sheer growth and change the city has experienced since the house was built way back in the early 60's. I loved that house. It was my entire childhood. This was the first time we have moved since I came into being ... and hopefully, for now, once would be enough.

I'm not one to hold grudges about our new living arrangements. It's just that moving out of the city to live in the province was something I had not expected to happen to me during the high time of my adolescence. And by high time I meant before this blew up I had been planning to go see the new art installation at the nearby university from where we live, used to live, rather and hang out at the sunken gardens near the same university's student center, that's where all the kids from our high school and the kids from the neighboring schools spent their free time, trying their best to blend in with the college kids by populating the benches and doing college-y stuff like read a book or make out.

I'm going to be a senior now in high school and it's supposed to be the best time of my high school life. Now I have to think about where the good places for hanging out are, where the other kids went to, what kind of people lived here, who were our closest neighbors, and what about school? I just had so many questions that needed to be answered.

I'm no shy kid, I wasn't worried about getting to know new people. In fact, I think that's the one thing that I had been looking forward to when we moved here. We've only arrived 6 hours ago and here I am already loitering the street hoping to bump into someone, which is now proving to be both futile and exhausting. 

I guess it's part of the developing executive-village-inside-an-executive-village package, outsiders couldn't just enter the subdivision without prior notice and from the looks of it, none of our nearest neighbors had the same idea as I had. I awkwardly stopped at one of what seems like the older houses around the area and tried to paint a mind's picture of who lived inside.

They must be loaded if they have a 3 car garage. I mused to myself. From where I stood the house looked magnificent. The yellow spotlights that blasted from the hedges that were neatly gathered on the front lawn accentuated the house's elegant exterior. I now noticed that the houses here were lined up neatly and that there were no empty lots in this street unlike where our new house stood.