Houses are living things. Maybe not quite as sentient as Encanto’s Casita or the literal living house in Monster House, but they have hearts—a pulse beating through the pipes, a unique personality built into the walls, memories ingrained in the foundation. There's credence to the saying, home is where the heart is. A tender proverb, its warm message has been proclaimed, sung, and printed in cursive swoops on home decor since time immemorial, as a comforting reminder that we’re never too far from home. I’ve been thinking a lot about memories and leaving lately (a side effect of life as a second semester senior), and, as I prepare to leave this home I’ve found in Providence, memories of my childhood home well up in my mind. They’re preserved, crystal clear but far away, like words on a distant sign I can just make out. When I think about that house, I feel its own memories tugging at my shirt all the way from Manila, beckoning me back from a 17-year separation: “You can always come home.” But can I?
Homecoming is a bittersweet thing. One lazy summer day when I was 15, my dad gathered my family into the car and drove us down a side road in Rome, Georgia, coming to a stop in a cracked asphalt lot by the projects. The compact, identical housing units squashed into long brick rows were a familiar sight to me, but to my father, they were more than that. His childhood home stood somewhere before us, indiscernible to me from the other units, but my dad remembered the way. He guided us through the gridded neighborhood until we reached the end of one unassuming building—the place where he grew up just over 70 years ago. As we stood in reverent silence, I tried my best to conjure images of his youth. I could almost make out his ghost playing with his five siblings in the tiny yard plots and making soap side-by-side with his mother behind the house. As I watched him walk the perimeter, I knew my visions didn’t hold a candle to what he could see so clearly, what the chipped-paint door and concrete steps whispered to him, how happy the windows must have been to see him again, and what familiar voices echoed out to him from behind the brick. And yet, that was where the homecoming ended. There would be no entering the home, no heartfelt tour of the rooms and the memories they carried. After all, that unit was now home for another child, and who knows for how many other children over the last half-century.
Visiting my mother’s childhood home wasn’t much different. We approached the apartment building, dwarfed by the nearby Tokyo Skytree, in a similar air of silence. My mother stood before us and wordlessly scanned the building up and down, leaning this way and that, hoping to sneak a peek inside. A car horn blared in the distance. She turned to face us with a sigh and smiled. “The place has changed,” she said. As glad as my parents must have been to see their childhood homes, and the homes glad to see them, a look from the outside was as far as the reunion could go; there was a barrier that could not be overcome any more than time itself could be rewound. They had returned, but they hadn’t come home.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to see my own childhood home again. It stood at the corner of two streets, hugged by white concrete walls and petite palms in a Pasig City suburb. Inside was a wide space, serving as both kitchen and common room, with tile floors that cooled your feet and a staircase along the wall that faced the sunset. A wooden table with benches for chairs sat like an island in an ocean of comforting scents—the soothing blend of coffee and oak, the gingery warmth of tinola, and the sun-scorched concrete outside. That house is where I hosted my first birthday party, tried to slide down the stairs in an inflatable tube and crashed into the wall, wore tank tops at Christmastime, watched my dad venture into a typhoon to help our neighbors whose house got flooded, fell in love with gymnastics, shared a room with my sister, and rode bikes with the neighborhood kids. These memories are tinted gold in my mind, precious stores of sensations that represent the prime of my young life.
But then we left. Left our belongings with friends, unable to carry them with us. Left the first home I knew. Left a part of me behind to leap halfway across the world to rural Georgia, near where my dad grew up. When I’d ask why, the answer was always the same and delivered matter-of-factly: “God told us to.” It was a sufficient reason for my parents, who’d been working as Christian missionaries and had built their trust in a higher power, but it was one that my young mind could hardly wrap itself around. Even today, I’m still a ways away from fully understanding it.
Though I was only five, a longing stirred within me. It lingered quietly but ebbed into waves of yearning when winter nipped at my cheeks, dried mango tasted phoney, and my sister and I rode bikes alone. To return would mean to wrap myself up again in a blanket of security, yearlong warmth, play, and carefreeness, unwrinkled by change. If my heart is there, how can I call this new place home? Nowadays, having seen for myself how homecoming isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, I’m left wondering if it’s even worth the return. It’s why I sometimes feel a subdued envy toward friends who have lived in one place their entire lives. There's an irreplicable quality to a house that has grown and changed with you since birth, that has soaked in and is brimming with all the soul and character of your family.
I imagine how the house has memorized the placement of your steps up to the front door; how proud its walls feel holding up childhood photos arranged lovingly with the slope of the staircase; how it moves in tandem with you through the cadences of bustling mornings and lazy evenings; how it remembers the echo of your voice as a child, your laughter bouncing off its walls in the same way now as it did then; how in bad weather it reminisces to when you were scared of thunderstorms, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you again”; how it holds your dad’s hand on the railing ever since he fell down the stairs that one time, how it’s proud of your sister for knocking on your door after a fight, how it greets you coming back for break the same way it did after your first day of school, “Welcome home.”
Leaving is a part of life, something each of us inevitably has to grapple with. There’s a quote that has stuck with me from one of my favorite movies, Celine Song’s Past Lives: “If you leave something behind, you gain something too.” The main character, Nora, reckons with the life and the younger version of herself she left behind in South Korea when she immigrated to Canada as a child. On my first watch, as I reckoned alongside Nora with what I’d left behind, the near-empty theater blurred into somewhere far away. I saw a wild-haired toddler banging his hands on the table in demand of breakfast in a stout suburban home in Japan. There was a 5-year old boy with Olympic gymnastic dreams walking down the stairs one step at a time in a house in the Philippines. A 9-year old searching for new dreams while gathering fallen pecans in his front yard in rural farmland Georgia. A newly-turned teenager doing assisted push-ups behind a closed door in a shared apartment room. All my little past selves, still haunting their respective homes. In leaving, I felt like I had to abandon the child I was, lift my chin up, and replant my roots.
What’s more important is where I am now. Holding on to the past was too painful, and it felt easier to sever myself and start anew. I’d left my past selves behind, and they’ve been in limbo, waiting for me to acknowledge them and come pick them up from their long stays away. Over time, I’ve gone back to reclaim all of them—except for that 5-year-old boy. His presence looms in my mind like the final boss of my past. Should I go meet him again, I’d have to bear the weight of my entire life’s trajectory thus far, how I’ve grown in ways that I wouldn’t have imagined, and how I’ve made choices I promised I wouldn’t. But there’s little point in wallowing in the melancholy of departure, because every parting is paired with a new opportunity. I’ve found that leaving tends to offer a refreshed sense of purpose.
My father came along to help me settle into my first semester at Brown, and as he was leaving my dorm for the journey back south, he left me with a maxim, one he’s repeated on almost every phone call home.
“Remember what you came here for.”
I thought I knew what that was, but my reasons for being here have shifted, somehow both narrowing and broadening over the last three years. Still, I have found purposes that exercise new facets of myself, facets that may have remained dormant had I never left the Philippines. I’ve found places and people that have helped me build the courage to invest my heart regardless of where we’ll be in the next year. Though I didn’t realize it as a child, I gained more from my time in the Philippines than I may have lost. There are people who remember my family and keep in contact over Facebook, always offering their homes for us whenever we may visit. I have a friend aiming to represent the Philippines in men’s artistic gymnastics in the 2028 Olympics. I’ve seen and remembered the impact of small kindnesses leading strangers to found families. I know what a real mango tastes like. I’ve learned it’s a gift to have somewhere to return to.
I asked my father for the address of that house in the Philippines when I turned 22 this year. I haven’t seen it in seventeen years, and even though Google Earth is right at my fingertips, I felt no urge to see it again. Not like this. I want our reunion to be in-person, to come with all the dredged-up emotions of confronting a past life face-to-face. I can see it now. I’ll put the address into Google Maps and be carried by taxi from airport to suburb, echoes of the past leading me down the right roads with nary a glance at my phone screen. My heart will quicken, and as I step out at the hallowed sight, it will slow. The corner will look a little smaller than I remembered. I’ll finally be tall enough to look over those surrounding concrete walls. The floor will be hardwood now. The streets will be quiet and still. As I walk along the outside, I’ll hear my mom call us down for breakfast, soft but clear from behind the walls. I’ll see the arc of hose-water rainbows offering cool relief from the glaring sun. I’ll watch my friends and I tear down the street on our bikes to the neighborhood pools. I’ll catch a whiff of tinola in the air and a whisper of the Disney Channel theme song from the TV inside. I’ll taste a long-lost childhood in a heartbeat and then be reminded of reality in the next. I’ll watch from the periphery. I’ll have returned, but not come home. But it’s a gift to have somewhere to return to.
