Sense of place.

I woke up in a different bed today from the one I got out of last Saturday. Last Saturday’s bed was different from the one I got out of last January, which in turn was different from the bed I woke up in on the same day five years before.

My real address has changed far more often than my online address: my reliable Hotmail account is still the same it’s been since 1996, but I’ve been making the rounds of different residences – and different countries – since then. Xavierville. Tandang Sora. Singapore – Bukit Batok, Grange Road, Bayshore Park. Then back to Tandang Sora, with a month’s respite in a neighbor’s house while we were having ours renovated. The constant moves have made me a sure hand with large cardboard boxes, packing tape, and the nuances of fitting odd-shaped objects into compressed spaces. Minnette has filled in the gaps in my packing knowledge; our glassware has made the trip intact thanks to her practical wisdom (and her Internet research), though I worry that the shattered ceramic mask she unwrapped yesterday may have slightly dampened her confidence.

I’ve switched addresses more than most people switch jobs. Not that it’s an entirely negative thing; I’ve learned to base my sense of place more on the people who matter to me, instead of the walls that bound my night’s rest. I haven’t been as flighty with the people I hang out with, the family I call (all the way in Davao City, a place that a tiny part of me still calls home), or the person I wake up next to. Ten years after college, I’m still downing beer with Mon and Peejo; nine years after my first interview with my boss and mentor Dennis G., I’m still producing radio scripts in his studio; five years after really getting together as a couple, Minnette still begins and completes every day of my waking life.

Yet I don’t really have a home base, don’t really have a psychic center where I’ve built up a good store of memories. Xavierville might have been it – this is where Nette and I first lived together, where Abu first crept his way into our lives, and it was close to where we went to school and met – but my parents needed the money from its sale more than I needed the nostalgia.

So here I find myself, the veritable vagrant of Quezon City. I’m learning to make my home in the middle of Tandang Sora, where tricycle drivers park on the sidewalks (what little there are) and where the next door neighbor is a creepy Born-Again Christian who claims to be wealthy beyond measure at one moment and wants to borrow money in the next. The place has its charms, yes, even counting the creepy next-door neighbor – who else could the wife and I bitch about when we’re settling down to bed? And as long as it’s still the wife I see the first time I wake up, still Abu who pokes me insistently in the mornings for his daily walk, then why would I want to call any other place home?