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This post is a draft, and currently being written in public. This block of text will be removed when it is finished.

There is no place else in the world where I feel inordinate amounts of paranoia than in my childhood bedroom. I grew up quietly then edgily while always being annoying––the you don’t understand me and browsing DeviantArt then /b/ far too young kind––with little trust to place in the world. Our house, in an unsafe neighborhood in residential Las Piñas, had been broken into several times in our youth. One night, while on my laptop, I had been ushered with my sister by our shaking helper to get into the car so we could drive out and call for help because someone was currently in the house. (Emergency lines and police phones often do not work. There was no functioning 911 call system then.) Another night, we watched in silence as someone brandished with a weapon walked over our sleeping bodies to take bags of stuff and leave; reporting the incident only when we knew they were gone. (The family sleeps in the same room to conserve electricity, most of us on the floor.) Aside from break-ins, I had known that nothing physical I own would be forever. With the amount of people moving in and out, I would notice little things like clothing, toys, trinkets, disappearing.

As a child, these conditions invariably fucked with my head often. Think the weird, gut sinking feeling you have at night when you remember a shirt you haven’t seen in a while but magnified for every little thing you own. If I was allowed to access the toys I had (usually barred in layers of clear packaging tape, to be taken away months after) at all, they would soon be gone. When I saved up enough money to buy crappy one-dollar shirts at the mall’s tiny bazaars, they would be taken, too. I’d open my drawers, piling things on the floor until my fingernails clogged with dust and woodchips, teary-eyed, looking for any item that would be in my possession for longer than a few weeks. My first iPhone’s camera roll mostly consisted of iFunny screenshots and photos of anything I owned, taken in several angles. About three times did that help me find something I lost misplaced in the laundry or elsewhere, or suddenly “found” in my stack of things. I knew how to take everything in my room apart and put it back again. I never could do this with individual possessions, too unfamiliar and distant to learn how to detach.
While packing for America, I realized that my possessions mostly consisted of ill-fitting shoes and shirts from over a decade ago, aching for the presence of any constant object. I owned two functioning pairs of footwear that were truly my own, and brought those with me to my dorm room.

…

When campuses shut down in early 2020, I began clinging to the little material things that I gathered over my two years at school. Pens and mugs from random visiting companies recruiting on diversity events, leftover flyers from overpriced campus printing, vinyls amassed and catalogued carefully on Discogs from trips to record stores in every city I would visit, YesStyle haul boxes and their $12 shirts that would consist of most of my wardrobe––a mild upgrade from my high school one. And then, I condensed everything again from a life I had lived anew and left boxes of belongings somewhere behind. As the virus worsened, my roommates sent messages and proxies to pick up their things, one-by-one emptying our suite. The solitary spring break I had stretched out, stilling, paralyzing.

In April, I would take masks from the laundry room and go out to buy groceries––milk, crackers, cup noodles––and walk back to my dorm. New Haven was now largely free of undergraduates, dispersed across America and the larger world, yet it had never been so alive.

As the summer arrived, I took job interviews in a disheveled room, take two daily showers on walks across bleach-scented bathroom floors, take the stairs up to the top dorm room floor in the decades-old dorm for the first time. I think one other person was in the entire building. I saw no other Yale students for the next few months.

…

Most of the time, people presume my biggest contention is where to live. The story of the Filipino international always comes with an expectation to lift your family with you to American soil and a shiny new workplace that pays tenfold your parents’ work, and live anew. You become the new generation of salvation, a person to emulate for the ages.

My tiny dreams today mostly have me wondering about when I will find a room of my own. It is the most prominent and distant dream I hold with me.

…

It’s disgusting how we’ve left living–what a beautiful thing–to the few. Life as we know it is about making life better than others at the expense of your own. That’s love. The act of time, sacrifice, attention. Not in the transactional sense, but love is about giving.

Life is never meant to all be happy but I do presume that there should be more good than bad. But what have we done as a society? From our markets to relationships, we treat everything as if it is finite and the few and up hoarding so much. There are millions out there suffering, as there are people who suffer so much that the very few moments of hope (and the way people play with this bar for hope) are all we cling onto. Is this what we want?

Life is about making it better for others in an unjust world. So they don’t fall below a net happy. So there is still goodness and worth.

Inevitably, for a few it’s simply not worth it. You could argue it’s selfish; but they do need help.

When was I last happy?

I feel like I’ve aged a lot in the past week. I’ve been swept by scary news around my family, almost-homelessness in a country 8,000 miles away, my loved ones back in Manila in lockdown in a state that has essentially imposed martial law, the loss of life-changing opportunities that I had thought beckoned the fight and narrative of why I chose to come to America, and so much more.

Turning 20 in the midst of a global pandemic, I write to you from a dormitory in my campus, now more still than ever. For every student who talks about how New Haven is boring (or worse, scary) is always so mistaken. There are no cars on the street in the dead of night, no lights in the Saybrook courtyard anymore, I am the sound of what is left.

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Time right now is not difficult because social distancing it’s hard. It’s difficult because my brain is scrambling for the sense of normalcy prior, even if it were a disjoint existence. We’ll see more of this in the coming weeks, but the impacts of a societal and economic collapse will live on with us forever.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, basically. At one moment I’m chuckling about a quarantine joke about never having been loved in 21 years. In the next, I’m furious about someone’s shitty mockup of a “Zoom University” hoodie that they plan to sell for 17 dollars each to be printed on the cheapest online supplier over a Yale Blue Gildan. I am distant from my family (part in choice, part of necessity), and thinking about why I must live in this day and age and time.

I cried even harder when opportunity was taken away from me. I write gentle thank you’s and then become rough on myself for still seemingly knowing nothing. I am my worst enemy. I sleep for 18 hours one day and then 30 minutes the next. I am pining for perfection and self-destruction, simultaneously. I share another document containing links to help the impacted that only 1% of people will actually click. I recede and play Plague Inc. and name my disease “Furry” and wonder if my Car Seat Headrest tickets will be refunded. I wave at the shut-off shower lights as I stand in the hottest water at midnight, I sing in the suite and cry on the floor–surrounded by open, filled luggages ready to let me go at any moment.

I can’t create right now. I cannot think about product and conversions and how to ease churn rates. I cannot think about anything but empathy. People I look up to are having their jobs taken away; I tell acquaintances who don’t give a fuck whether I come out of this with something or not that an offer was cancelled; I tell myself that everything given to me has been deserved.

What I’m saying is that there is so much more at stake in the world that so misshapen. I understand, but I remain angry at myself. I’m angry not because something was taken away, but because right now–this mid-March–my heart is with the student at threat of violence the next week, pouring their life into a 30-day-trial UHaul truck. My heart is with Luzon facing a militant, uncaring government that like the United States, ignored warning signs and acted too late––after just facing a volcanic explosion. I have thrusted my fist into the heart, pounding for some sense of normalcy so I can care again and become part of the system: but it’s not something for today.

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