Independence Day

One more full day and I’ll be off to my hometown. My first time to go back after seventeen months.

I feel so excited, but suddenly the thing that had been nagging me at the back of my head comes to the surface this morning when my fellow housemate who had just arrived in our hometown texted me. She said that when she saw our hometown after a year, she felt like she was in odd surroundings. She said she couldn’t help but compare it to the big city and she suddenly missed Makati.

Now I understand why people would refer to our place as a “province” even though it’s technically a city. It is way too primitive compared to the big cities of Manila, Cebu, Davao and Cagayan.

I wish our place would prosper, but there is something seriously wrong with our businessmen and officials. SM can’t even get in there. That is why I know that after living here, I don’t think I will ever be content in our small city which was actually good enough for me while I was growing up.

The saying holds true: “Though it may be true that you don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it, it’s also true that you won’t know what you’ve been missing until it arrives.”

Of course it wasn’t this happy in the beginning.

When we first came here, we three girls (Gay, Zenie and me) were all broke, all having jumped at the chance to come here in a week’s time.

Yes, pretty impulsive. Imagine, I tendered my resignation effective two days from the date of writing it. But we just felt this “now or never” urgency.

Besides, I couldn’t stand my tellering job and my awful officemates anymore.

It was a pretty big risk coz we weren’t even sure we’d get jobs and we had no relatives here, only a few classmates who were also just starting up.

Plus there’s this image everyone back home ingrains in you when you say the words “live in Manila.” The image is of you earning a salary that would not be enough to cover the very high cost of living here. The image is of you being held-up or killed while walking on the streets.

But we were desperate enough to risk going despite that image.

When we got here we bedspaced in a really uncomfortable boarding house owned by the evil couple we called the Dursleys. Zenie even thought of going back home to take the bank job she was being offered. But somehow we held on and started applying for jobs. Zenie and I got hired in KPMG in less than a week and Gay was hired by SGV a week later.

For the first month or two we barely had enough money to live on and for meals, we had to endure eating instant noodles, sandwiches and half-viands with half rice, to which Nald would say, “gusto mong umuwi sa ZC na half ka na lang?”

I remember how Chu and I, who were departmentmates, would decline our officemates’ invite to lunch at our own 9th floor and make up some excuse about meeting someone when in reality we just wanted to go outside to the BPI canteen where meals were cheaper.

I also remember accompanying Chu to Ministop to buy sardines and rice which he’d eat there. So poor where we that we couldn’t even afford to eat fastfood!

But after a few months when we had adjusted to city living and had bought all of our start-up stuff already, you could see the change in our lifestyle.

Fastfood meals were no longer considered “supreme cuisine” because visits to restaurants were no longer such rare luxuries.

We no longer cringed when invited to watch a hundred-buck movie or asked to cough up P500 on gimik night.

Our apartment, which was completely bare when we moved in, started to fill up with furniture and appliances. Our refrigerator is always crammed with food, some of which are beyond expiration date already. Our personal belongings started to multiply too – clothes from mallwide sales, cellphones, gadgets.

Sometimes when we get together over coffee in Starbucks or over food in a new resto we decided to explore, we’d talk about the days back when “bien pobreza gad ta!”

We’d laugh and lean back in amusement and amazement. We never tire of this conversation and I have a feeling we’ll be telling this story over and over again to the people back home, who will not really get it. I know coz I was one of those people back home. No matter how many times you’ve visited the Metro you will never understand it unless you’ve actually lived here as a working citizen.

I guess all I’m saying is I can’t believe what a long way we have come from being the poor, broke, near-starving people who first arrived here.

And yes, I am proud of us. Proud that for the first time in our lives, every single piece of belonging we have in our house now, from our beds to our clothes, belongs to us and us alone.

We no longer rely on our parents. None of us used connections to get our jobs. We come and go as we please and we can do whatever we want without having to answer to anybody.

We are free. We are independent. And we are loving every second of it.

Oh sure, sometimes I miss my hometown, the loved ones I left behind and some of its other delights. But right now, I consider it a great place to visit… but I wouldn’t wanna live there. Not anymore.

Yep, I definitely don’t regret that impulsive, risky move we made seventeen months ago. It was the best decision I ever made. The image was so wrong.