Homes

When people ask me about home, I always think of my parents’ house in Cavite, where I grew up. I was 16 when I left that house and moved to Quezon City for college, and I have been living away from home ever since.

Younger, I used to go home every weekend, meeting my parents at Alabang Town Center or Southmall before heading home. We’d have dinner together Saturday nights and watch whatever was on TV later. Then we’d all head back to Quezon City together Sunday afternoons, because that’s where we all live during weekdays: My sister was in Pisay at the time, and Sundays I usually helped her haul her stuff into her dorm room before going back to my own dorm on campus at the University of the Philippines, which was home for more or less three years.

After graduating from high school, my sister got into UP and briefly, home was a rented room on Maginhawa Street. I always talk about my years living in that room with a tinge of disbelief: Had I really been that girl? In those years I smoked too much and drank often. Looking back, I think I was looking for something and I never really found it. Maginhawa was Heartbreak Street, and I spent three years there before deciding to move to Makati.

I don’t remember anymore how I saw my future when I was a child, but I do remember a handful of old playmates saying something about working in Makati. In grade school and high school, I was so preoccupied with academic achievement that I never really saw past college graduation. Some kids had lofty dreams of being these future people—doctors, engineers, teachers. I didn’t. Early on I decided I would just take my cue from my mother and do whatever it was she did. In my grade school yearbook, I said I wanted to be a businesswoman because that’s what I thought my mother was. I graduated in March 1997, and by November she was dead. Now what?

Whatever my original childhood dreams of the future had been, I’m certain they never included living away from my parents and siblings, much less moving out of our Cavite house. I remember having been so petrified at the prospect of living with strangers so far away from home when I was 16 that I actually spent my first few nights in that dorm sleepless. I was just a girl—what chance did I have in that place?

It’s been 13 years since I was that girl. I took up journalism because I was in the school paper and figured that writing was something I could do while I figured things out. I read somewhere that if anybody wanted to make God laugh, she should tell Him about her plans. I supposed God was already laughing anyway, so I didn’t bother. I just took whatever came, and years later, here I am. Not bad, God.

I never really saw myself as a city girl, having been raised in a sleepy subdivision, but these days when I wake, I look out the window, stare at the buildings and think: This is home—busy streets, confusing stoplights, harried pedestrians and all.

People say home is where you make it, and so perhaps there are many ways to answer the question “When was the last time you went home?”

The last time I was home, it was All Souls Day and we visited my mother’s grave. The old Cavite house was smaller than I remembered, and the faded photographs hanging on the walls reminded me just how much I have grown.

The last time I was home, I spent a Sunday with my parents and my brother in their new apartment in Quezon City, near the hospital where my sister is studying medicine.

The last time I was home was last night. Arriving from work, I opened the door to our apartment and found my partner drinking tea in the living room. She’s painting again—a watercolor still-life of a bouquet of flowers. In our seven years together, we have moved rooms thrice, and each room was home in its own distinct way, marked by the hobbies and obsessions of that particular time.

Our latest home has a window overlooking the city, and on nights like these, when we see each other after our long day, we like spending the last quiet hours making the most of it: making art, making a life, making a home.

Kate Pedroso, 29, is a researcher at the Philippine Daily Inquirer.