by Justin Pacquing
Do you know where I am right now?
I’m sure you do. You’re the one who brought me over here after all. That huge oak in Prospect Park, a little off the road, right in front of one the entrances to the Ravine.
We had small mince pies. We talked about prom underneath that oak tree. At that point, prom was less than a year away.
From where I am right now, underneath the oak, prom is less than three weeks away.
And we haven’t really talked in eight months.
Underneath that oak tree, we were a few weeks away from becoming a world apart. We were heading to our homelands: yours, across the Atlantic; mine, across the Pacific. We both knew this. We both, to a certain extent, were looking forward to it. Maybe you more so than me.
You showed me baby photos of your first trip there, of you bundled in a coat and in the arms of your father.
My trip would be my first.
You told me stories of pillow fights with your cousins, gardening with your grandma (she would worry so much about you getting a sunburn), waking up to watch the sunrise over the beach from your balcony (before those damn condos got in the way).
You warned me about being the center of attention. “Ooooh, look at the New Yorker. Look at the man who brought back treasures from the New World. Look at how all the Filipinas line up and fawn for the American Boy.” (My uncle wanted to hedge me on about the village beauties who wanted to know what American dollars looked like in real life. Salamat po, but no thanks, Tito.)
I got embarrassed. You know me. I’ll only seek the spotlight on my own terms, if I ever.
And you laughed.
And the Breeze came.
The leaves started to shake and rattle. Like crunching, falling leaves. Fall was coming. The leaves were falling. By autumn, you would have left. By autumn, we would have started to fall out. Words started to fail us.
You saved my life, and then you were out of it. But for now, you were laughing and the Breeze came.
We were looking forward to our trips, but what we had failed to see was that we would be stuck on opposite ends of the Earth. At least I would be stuck. And trying to shout to you from the tip of Mindanao across the Pacific—across the continental forty-eight, across the Atlantic—wouldn’t work out, no matter how much you would like to hear my voice.
I told you how I was worried about never coming back.
Maybe on the trip from Davao City to rural Davao our 1990 Toyota pickup would veer off that winding, unpaved road of the mountainside. Our escorts, gone. My mother, gone. Me, lost. Lost in a country that’s never been mine, in a country that speaks a tongue I never tasted, in a country that resents that I’ve taken their blood, their beauty, their culture wholesale and never claimed responsibility for their poverty, for their corrupt politicians, for their isolation as a nation of thousands of isolated island masses.
Of course, the Filipinos are the nicest people in the world. Maybe it’s a self-imposed guilt; does guilt being self-imposed make it any less valid?
I feel guilty for not knowing what went wrong.
I came back from the Philippines in one piece. They loved having me. For brief moments, I loved having them. I loved having the open sky, the blue pacific, the rides on the backs of motorcycles and the sidecars of tricycles, the three Lechons in five days.
But I lost something out there. My identity? My sense of self? My summer self? I lost a piece of me out there, buried it deep in the ground of Mindanao next to the grandfather I never met and the bamboo shoots.
I came back, but the American Boy you knew all summer didn’t.
When I spoke, instead of him, you couldn’t understand what I was saying. I picked up a Filipino accent over there for a while.
I left you behind and I left behind myself and when it was all supposed to come back to together all we could find was miscommunication.
I feel guilty for not knowing what was going on.
But all that could wait another day.
Because the leaves crinkled, the Breeze came, your hair fluttered, and we both started to laugh. Then it was quiet, the sky blue, the grass green, the pies perfect, and the world ours, as it had felt the whole summer.
We weren’t on opposite sides of the world. We were together underneath that oak in Prospect Park, we were having a staring contest in that sandwich shop, we were watching Inside Out in the East Village, we were on that grassy spot in between the Central Park Mall and that flag pole, side by side, just reading. I looked up once in a while to make sure you were actually there and not just imagined. We got Jamba Juice right after and you laughed at me for getting us lost and for getting a smoothie with kale in it (don’t knock it until you try it).
All because I wrote you a poem and I was forgetting what your voice sounded like.
Now I can’t forget it.
I would respond with your name in that same, sing-song way you called out mine.
“Come back to sleep.”
You would ask why I kept calling back your name when you called mine, like a game of Marco Polo where you called out from Brooklyn and I called out from Queens at 4 A.M when no one else would be bothered to hear us.
Underneath that oak I only hear the leaves crinkle, you laugh, and park’s silence.
I can’t bear to keep hearing your voice.
When I hear it, I think:
Of beauty, of remorse;
Of nostalgia, of melancholy;
Of me taking the most rewarding chance of my life, of me knowing I fucked it up in the end.
The self-fulfilling prophecy: I was worried I was never going to come back.
And I didn’t.
You have a lovely voice, a velvet voice, a soothing voice. It embarrassed you when I told you that, but to be fair it embarrassed me whenever you complimented my voice too.
A lovely voice I can’t forget, for better or for worse.
I feel guilty for not knowing what went wrong, what I did wrong, what I didn’t do right. I feel guilty for thinking about it all the time when you told me to drop it and I keep telling myself to drop it and I’ll be able to listen days at a time until I remember again.
A man who for the longest time believed he had nothing to live for makes no memories, and when he finally encounters someone who is finally able to convince him otherwise he tries to make up for all the memories he missed, and when that someone inevitably leaves what becomes of those memories? Are they bittersweet or just bitter?
You have a lovely voice. I thought you had a sweet voice. Now that voice is bittersweet.
That’s why I like the memory of the oak tree:
I only hear the leaves crinkle, you laugh, and park’s silence. I feel like the world was so much simpler. There was only you and me and the pies and the oak tree. There were no oceans, no miscommunications.
There was only you and me and the thought that this could last forever.
“But if there was a way I could make this summer last forever, I would do it.”
Something tells me that isn’t true anymore. It used to be true.
“Whenever the Breeze ruffles your hair, or brings warmth to your face, I hope you think of it as a whisper from me.”
Something tells me I’m not going to be hearing from you any time soon. The Breeze has been cool to me ever since.
But it used to true that when the Breeze came, when the world seemed like it could stand still and there was nothing to worry about besides each other.
Do you know where I am right now? Do you know where I want to be?
I’m underneath that oak tree.
I want to be underneath that oak tree all those months ago.
