i'll tell my daughter about you

Y lleva así, lleva así mucho tiеmpo / Ya lleva así, lleva así muchos año

I can picture vividly in my mind that warm June evening, lounging at the veranda with my daughter. She’s home from the meager two weeks she has for summer break. The rest of her season will be spent in Kenya for a research project her professor strongly advised her to pursue. We spent the entire afternoon sorting out laundry and stuffing rolled up shirts into her luggage. It was such a frantic affair that I barely had the time to take it all in.

In many ways she takes after me: A dimple in the corner of her lower lip, a hearty laugh she can never keep down, wider set hips that ran in my mother’s side of the family. And as she gradually grows into the shoes she’s meant to fill at 22, I see that her penchant for adventure and desire for a life bigger than herself are all echoes of the hunger I once felt around her age.

We’re sharing a bottle of pinot noir between ourselves, along with a grazing board of leftover fruits, brie, crackers, and the 64% cacao dark chocolate her father had neglected to finish. All haphazardly arranged on a wooden chopping board. He’d be exasperated by it. For the meantime, though, he’s in a different time zone for a company project in Hong Kong, and we’re happily spreading fig jam and cheese on rye crackers.

After downing the last few sips of wine in my glass, I confess to my daughter that I might cry when I drop her off at the airport this time around. I immediately reach for the bottle and pour myself another glass. She grimaces—she looks so much more like me when she does that. Of course, this isn’t her first time travelling by herself. For her 20th birthday, she insisted on backpacking to the Philippines, and we weren’t as anxious about it knowing we had family she could contact in case of emergencies. But it’s different this time. I swear, just yesterday, her father and I were building her crib and bickering over the instruction pamphlet. Now I’m helping her pack for a research trip during her last year in university. Twenty-two years is nearly a quarter of a life, but it feels like merely a flicker of the light.

But since she’s 22, my daughter, and takes after me, she cringes. That’s to be expected.

I do remember my first trip by myself. It was around her age. It was my last week being 23 years old, and after saving up a portion of my salary for a year, I finally got to spend a week in Kyoto. I had dreamed of it ever since my first time. A day trip in 2014. When we went last year, just us two, I had taken it upon myself to show her the exact places I had gone to. We frontloaded the touristy things in the earlier part of the week and woke up at 6 AM sharp to beat the crowds. Despite our best efforts, Gion was still crowded, the streets sprawling with other tourists. It was easier to manage at Fushimi Inari Taisha, with the crowd thinning out the further up we hiked. More enjoyable were the pockets of calmness, the stillness of Kamogawa at sunset. Sure, we still dream about those kaiseki dinners while overlooking Pontocho Alley and the wagyu from our day trip to Kobe, but perhaps the most memorable meal we had was an improvised picnic out on the riverbanks.

She was struggling to pick something out at 7-Eleven for dinner until I jokingly suggested getting everything she set her eyes on. Nearly 10 minutes later, she’d done exactly that, beaming proudly with a bag of sandwiches, rice balls, and packaged desserts. Drinks, she’d negotiated, were on me. And so there we were, the food laid out on our scarves sprawled on the asphalt between us as we sat there along the steps. The spot was about a thirty-minute walk from our hotel next to Kyoto Station. At nearly any point in the prefecture you could find your way back to that river, and there would always be other pedestrians sitting by the banks to enjoy the view. Others would breeze past on a run or on their bikes, but most were quiet in their solitude. Gazing into the water, the ripples illuminated by the city lights.

Sobering up from the wine, I tell her I’ll likely welcome home an entirely new version of her when she gets back. She’s skeptical, chalking up my musing to dramatics. But it’s true. We had travelled to different parts of the world together, a piece of home always tethering us back to the lives we led back here. Being somewhere new all by herself would be fundamentally different. So much of who we are sometimes can be linked to who we’re surrounded by. It’s not so much a matter of codependency but our inherent sociability. Here, I am her mother, she is my daughter. I am at times overbearing, anxious, doting, easily swayed by her wit. These are qualities within me that she draws out, the same way there may be parts of her unknown to me as just her parent. Each person is multifaceted, painting connections in different colors. What remains untapped in her could bloom into something beautiful once she’s on a different continent altogether as her own. And the places we go, the canvasses to the final pieces. We’re museums of every corner of the world we’ve travelled to and every person we’ve met. Paintings, sculptures, refrigerator magnets, I <3 NY t-shirts.

She isn’t entirely sold, so she says if I’m so insistent upon my beliefs, then I should give an example from my many trips. In that moment I can hear a clock winding backwards, memories flickering through my mind: Four days on a motorbike in Ha Giang. A piping hot bowl of mapo tofu in Chengdu. The ruins of the ancient Egyptian empire over the sands of Luxor. The gruelling journey along the Camino de Santiago. My first time at Dodger Stadium on my birthday, a warm spring evening in Los Angeles.

I’m sitting there, fifty-five, the life I’ve built materializing into this very house, dreams made flesh with my daughter looking back at me. And yet I go back over thirty years. The same asphalt steps by Kamogawa, thirty minutes from Kyoto station, twenty years before I had gone with her. You sat there next to me on a Saturday night, the day before my flight back to Manila. You walked the stretch of Kamogawa from further up north, where the river forks past the delta and flows down two separate streams. I remember: I bumped my knee to yours, and you did the same before I rested my head on your shoulder, the bustle of the city center distant from us. In fact, it was so quiet I could hear the whir of a bike meters away, and the mutters of strangers all the way on the other side of the river, watching along with us.

We spent that week together, holding hands and singing to Britney Spears late into the night while we rushed to catch the last few trains. At every stoplight, you’d kiss me, and though no one would be awake to see, I was still worried someone could be watching. A cultural difference, a sense of shame, a mixture of both. Knowing we aren’t together, but being seen as such. Anyone who’d seen us would have thought so. Seated next to each other at a booth, talking over warm bowls of tonkatsu, pouring each other glasses of water and swapping side dishes. Swaying in each other’s arms in front of Heian Jingu. At a park bench, overlooking the Sagano Line. I still remember pretending to wish upon shooting stars every time a train passed us by. Despite the circumstances, I’d hoped perhaps we could meet again someday, somewhere, and we could catch up like old friends over a meal. Maybe in my hometown, or yours, and I would get to know the places embedded in your muscle memory. Where you had your first kiss, where your family liked to have lunch on birthdays, the park where your dog likes to run around.

I was 23, careful, guarded, square, so rigid and mindful of tens of rules I had written for myself and constantly worried about breaking them even in the absence of consequences. You were 24, carefree, crossing the street on a red light, grabbing my hand and swinging it backward to wrap your arm around my shoulders, telling me to live a little. On the night we met, we were both thoroughly confused by how comfortably we’d fallen into each other’s rhythm. I doubted you when you said this rarely ever happened on a first date. I had just assumed you were the type, full of charm and attuned to all the right ways to land a second date with someone. Even as we switched to the wrong lines on the train and took over an hour to get back to my hostel, with you insisting it wasn’t my fault I got us lost, I hardly believed you. By the time I was getting settled in my room that night, I had broken three rules:

1. Do not kiss on a first date.

2. Do not kiss in public.

3. Do not see anyone a second time on the trip; they will get close, and the ending will hurt.

The rules were not without reason. Beneath the suspicion and cynicism, there was a romantic hiding, waiting, scorned by hands that were careless with her heart. And yes, I was 23, too young to be rejecting the notion of love and romance in perpetuity, but I’d had a handful of experiences leading me to think perhaps I just wasn’t built for it. I would have my fun but keep my focus on myself, shelf the serious stuff for when I was 30 and finally worth it. But that was a front, and quickly within two hours of meeting you, you had seen right through the cracks.

I never deliberately put you to the test, but there were moments I felt a timebomb ticking beneath my own two feet, thinking perhaps, at any given moment, the sweetness of the affair would turn bitter and we’d be blown to shrapnel. But every time, you knew which wire to cut in two. Whatever worries I had dissipated with just a brush of your fingertips on my forearm, or your smile in our reflection on a window. Your voice rang clearer in my head and the rest of my thoughts had been silenced in your presence. I could never say the wrong thing to you, and you held space for that candidness tenderly when it had once been cast aside.

I had my own conceptions of what love might be like in its early stages, but soon it had taken shape in that city. It was the flutter of my heart seeing you once I turned the corner of the street, your hand already held out for mine. The steadiness it pulsed into when we laid next to each other, talking about our dreams and the existential dread that overcame us on our birthdays. The heaviness of it as it grew, making room to fit the shape of you. And the emptiness it soon felt after I watched you get on a bus back to your dorm for the last time.

You always said it felt like a movie. And many times I did wish it was fiction. I can pretend it is, now that time has created so much distance between me and such a memory. But going back to Kyoto and sitting on those steps reminded me what it was like to be 23 again, finally coming to terms with how much I could want. Because it terrified me, the depth of my own desire. Had I not been careful, it would have swallowed me whole, and whenever I looked into your eyes, wordlessly, you had told me you felt the same. It made no sense to meet you for as short of a time as I did and somehow know you like the back of my hand. What had taken many years for some to understand was matter of fact for you, the way the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Strange, it was strange, the way it felt like I’d been woken up from a years-long slumber, and I could no longer go back to who I was asleep.

At this point, my daughter says I speak in superlatives. But undeniably, I was no longer the same after that. I wept on the train ride to the airport the morning after we said goodbye. For weeks, even months, I’d picture you in the places I’d gone to. How you’d dance after two drinks in, or what you’d think of the mountains we hiked in Rizal. There were days I wanted to run away from the world and forget who I was for a moment, to escape the pressure of being an employee, a sister, a daughter; and I would imagine talking to you at a park with a can of peach chuhai in my hand again. I would find solace in the fantasy, because around you, I was just me. And whenever I felt I wasn’t good enough or would begin thinking lowly of myself again, I would borrow a bit of courage from our time together. You would’ve hated to see me fussing over such trivial things or wallowing in the lies I told myself. When I needed to remind myself that I was beautiful, I used to think of how you’d stare at me. I would never be too much for the right person. I was never too much for you.

And I searched for you. Soon I began to realize that not every first date would feel the way ours did. Conversations with you were remembrance, not discovery. When we were together, you said, it was a world of our own, a place entirely separate from the reality we existed within. But our lives were not meant to unravel outside of that space. I tell my daughter that she will learn to reconcile such truths: That you can feel a love so profound you cannot keep it for yourself. That you know it was meant for a time, place, and circumstance, but not forever. You and I had known we had it good because it wouldn’t last. There were no expectations, no give or take, no standard to hold you to or punish me with. Though the danger in keeping it good for a short while left the risk of wondering. We immerse ourselves in possibility. It was perfect until it wasn’t, because we were no longer in Kyoto. We could not step into the same river twice. You were a ghost on my screen, haunting me from the past, and I was weed in your garden, keeping your heart from blooming in new soil.

This is the first time I’ve told her about you. Back then I would just say you were a friend I lost touch with. That word never quite fit right. But neither did love, at first. Again, it didn’t make sense. You frustrated me. I could not place you into a box, and you refused to be. And that was precisely why the rules had been there, to keep order. To accord a name to each feeling and wrap things up neatly. Infatuation. Lust. Love. Anger. Regret. Nostalgia. Love. Limerence. Lust. Love. Heartbreak. Love. Hatred. Love. Apathy. They took shape differently, like phases of the moon, and I would see a different side to the story each time. It was nothing. It was everything. It was meant to be. It was a mistake. It was beautiful. It was a shame.

My daughter echoes what I would have thought at her age. None of it made sense. Though life is full of such peculiarities. I thought perhaps I would live a life long enough to forget you, and while it doesn’t sting so much anymore to hear your name in a crowd or see Barcelona in photographs, an ache simmers beneath when I do. Like the ankle I sprained countless times before; though it had gotten better, I anticipate the pain with every misstep, even though I’m mostly imagining it now. When such things happen and when she meets such people, I tell her, she will run from the intensity. She may even be afraid of it. But you helped me realize that on the other side of that fear to be seen was genuine, earnest connection. A person who had seen right through the opacity of my pessimism. You let yourself get carried away by the moment, the feeling, the passion. You reasoned with me that night at the park: Once you felt something in the moment, it was real. No matter the brevity, nor that it would pass. Everything eventually did. That’s what made every encounter so precious. When you had put it that way, gradually I began to understand. And I had finally let myself go. There were no rules, no boxes.

Without meeting you, I tell her, I may have turned out differently. Or perhaps I would have turned out the same, taking a different route to meet who I’ve become now. I wouldn’t know. In this life, there was a time before and after you. With you, I allowed myself to be young, and I remain grateful to you for the way you drew that out of me.

Dramatics, dramatics. My daughter takes the wine bottle away from my side of the table now. She says I get overly sentimental when I drink, and that’s always been the case ever since. We’d been to Spain too, countless times, and yet she wonders why I haven’t bothered trying to reach you. There simply isn’t any reason to. I am sure you’re settled now, with children of your own. I can imagine you’re the type of father who’d be so afraid to even hold his firstborn, thinking the slightest motion would break them. You’d have them running out on the football field as soon as they learned how to walk. You’re patient, attentive, thoughtful. Honest, almost too blunt, but it’s because you care. The truth is your most valuable gift to the ones you love. I know they’ll love coming home to tell you stories about school, or the trip they took to the beach. Maybe they’d play a prank or two on you, and you’d be a good sport—but of course, on a random Sunday, you might take revenge.

And it’s not entirely impossible to confirm if all this is true. You’re a message away. Every year, on your birthday, an excuse presents itself, and I’ve pondered reaching out. But I never follow through. I simply wish you the best. One must imagine you happy. I move along.

My daughter grimaces, and I can’t help but burst into laughter. God, what an ugly face—contorts the same way mine does. Wrinkled forehead, smile lines deepening, a complete transfiguration of her beauty. Feelings are complicated, she muses, downing the last of her wine. All I can do is nod in agreement. I didn’t tell her to scare her, but to remind her to live. Let the world wake her up to the fullest of its potential. Every day, every place, every person brings her closer to who she’s meant to become. Kenya calls now, and she has to pick up.

We get up from the table, waddling over to the kitchen sink to stack up the dishes in the washer. She has some more packing to do in the morning, and I still have to call her father in two hours when his day at work wraps up. I kiss her good night on the cheek. Once upon a time, when this girl was much shorter than me, it would have been on the crown of her head. Those days have long passed. I clench my teeth a little too hard when I feel my vision blur.

I am eager to see what the museum of her life might look like. Which exhibits remain permanent fixtures, and which displays are seasonal. I neglected to tell her that ultimately, we choose what we get to keep for ourselves. I keep a photo of the warm pink sky over Gion, with a torii gate in the center, towering over the buildings lining the street. A charm from a temple that looks like the one I had given you. A card from the hotel. Two toothbrushes in one cup. A film projector, replaying the scene of you waving at me from the bus window while the stoplight was still red. My refusal to move until it turned green. I can imagine that maybe you’ve kept your own artifacts: A whiff of my perfume, a blurred photo of you at the bus stop, the charm from the same temple. A voice recording, Dulces sueños.

You made me promise to never settle, and now I have all that I’ve ever dreamed of. I hope you hold up your part of the deal and live a good life in your golden years, one day at a time, without fear. No tiptoeing around the truth, no sad birthdays. My friend, my friend. My friend.