I’m currently on a boat bound for Cagayan de Oro, it being sem break at last.
This after hours of checking under the bed, rummaging drawers for things I might have forgotten, and cramming piles of clothes into my little maleta, where they barely fit. And still there is a wilderness of schoolthings on my desk. They refuse to be packed. On the walls are three pictures I took one June sunrise in Rizal Boulevard, a picture of my dog Padfoot, and Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”
The dorm grew lonelier and lonelier as the day of departure neared. So many friends had gone ahead of us. Already, janitors were cleaning up rooms, sweeping away the trash left by the careless inhabitants, putting away bedsheets till the one piece of evidence that anyone had lived there at all was the note on the door: “Please leave your footwear outside.” Where, naturally, nothing was left.
I found I needed a moment to take it all in. The halls, the cream-colored walls, the gray doors, the red floor of the rooms. The verdant campus lined with acacia trees. This peaceful seaside city, the site of so much learning, where I made so many friends, which I would all have to leave behind. Until I get back next sem, at least.
As I left with Franz and David for the pier this morning, it struck me how, in spite of all the “gimingaw na kaayo ko ninyo” (Cebuano for "I miss you so much") talk with high school friends, I found myself clinging to these last moments in Dumaguete. It all became clear: I didn’t want to leave yet.
Shortly before we leave, a place begs us not to go. Brings out all the big things we love about it, the small things we didn’t notice, which add to its charm. Busies us with last-minute obligations: an errand from a friend, things to put away because someone else is sleeping in our rooms. And yet, somehow, still leaves us with enough time to look around, one last time.
Just as we keep souvenirs of a place, a place also keeps souvenirs of us in the form of the things we leave behind by accident, choice, or necessity, and displays these on the walls and on the table for future guests to see. Perhaps this is its way of remembering us, of showing that one day it hopes to return to us as we return to it.
In the end, it accepts, far more than we do, the inevitability of our leaving. Gives back what we lose, on the very day we have to leave. In my case, the slippers I hadn’t seen since June.
Because, whether we like it or not, we will always be leaving. Leaving to live.
