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Text of the page (random words):
nce for me it was that brief pause after a song and before another the tick of the stoplight as i waited to cross a road the moment i looked up and saw sunlight trickling through the trees comparisons are odious 03 saturday oct 2020 posted by rei in uncategorized leave a comment i am the same age as jacinda ardern but she is running a country amidst a global pandemic with a baby in her arms and i am sitting here eating chips and cradling a beer dancing in deep water 14 thursday feb 2019 posted by rei in by my walking tears leave a comment i stopped writing stories after i heard too many that were too heavy to bear that pushed me down so far that words became tears and breath became salt i stopped reading them for the same reason the words peel open my heart and i am afraid of being vulnerable now to the fools who dream 27 monday mar 2017 posted by rei in a house not right in the head by my walking tears leave a comment when you re going to dream for yourself please include the country in it because who s going to dream for the country but us aisa mijeno salt lamp co inventor document the way your heart breaks start with the moment of impact the disbelief the force that takes your breath away begin here where you absorb the damage without feeling the pain stay in that moment voiceless and tearless stay in that moment for as long as you can insulated from what comes after don t forget to breathe maybe you collapse maybe you keep walking maybe you crack you don t quite remember in the aftermath you remember the tiniest details the feeling that something is not quite right the sensation of bones coming apart skin tearing feeling trickles back in pinprick by pinprick it hits yesterday today tomorrow and all at once and suddenly there is no breath in your body no blood no sight only pain only a hurt that is so overwhelming that there is nothing that alleviates it except more hurt for moments hours years you are lost to everything but sensation you do not need words to scream time heals so you wait eventually your words return together with thought and reason you can identify some of the things that hurt some of them you skim over leaving them for someone else to name someone professional someone with the expertise to fix and heal you fix what you can you struggle to get as far up as you can lift your head sit up get to your knees and the moment you can stand on your own feet again is such a victory that you cry as if you had lost everything time heals time heals time one day so far into the future you have stopped counting days you wake up before the sun rises curious to know what the day holds another day you feel something even lighter in your chest when you wake it takes you several days weeks months to realize that the sensation is anticipation you have stopped counting you wake up and wait for the sun to catch up with you the horizon looks like a finish line that you will be able to reach from this vantage point you can take a deep breath and look back over the acres of damage the expanse of struggle and say thank you that is the moment you sit down and begin to write document your heartbreak and the path you took back you never know who will need the instructions when the leaving is easy 19 sunday feb 2017 posted by rei in a stranger has come leave a comment a month of preparations events meetings i would complain but there really isn t anyone to blame but myself why do i do this i moaned to a friend over a bottle of wine on the sideline of one of the events i d organized because he replied laconically after you re done you can sit back and chill for at least a month guilt free except i won t because in three months i m leaving again and that s barely enough time to sort out everything that i need to leave heart in a suitcase once again one day i ll learn to make the leaving easy castle on a hill 19 thursday jan 2017 posted by rei in uncategorized leave a comment i was younger then take me back to when i found my heart and broke it here castle on a hill ed sheeran technically they re just days the same as any other but on a calendar the time in between the sunrises and sunsets that happen in december and january make them seem so much more significant you bracket a day with the slow rise and fade of the sun and we bracket our lives with the open and close of years i tried writing about how we mark the passage of grief but that needed more time and thought than i had so for now i settle for the easy win how i closed the year with gratitude and looked forward with hope it s not something i ve done before in december i typically start out festive and bubbly hopping from dinner to party to celebration then after some time the energy runs out and i m just tired and want to sleep and that carries over into the first week of january christmas has not typically been a time of introspection and the one time i did use it to reflect on my life it resulted in the end of a relationship so since then i haven t been too eager to use that particular time of the year to think very hard about my life in my head i kept it simple a year is ending a year is beginning goodbye and hello this year for some reason something else kept on coming to mind this is it maybe it was the people i happened to have christmas dinners with maybe it was the moments i spent looking out at the city lights from my apartment s balcony scratch that it was definitely the balcony standing at the railings thinking of nothing in particular i had a sudden flashback to myself at fifteen sitting on the window ledge of our school building with my best friend on a night that our editorial team stayed late to finish the proofs for our school magazine it was quiet the rest of our team had either settled down to nap or go over their respective portions of the magazine one last time and the two of us were waiting for everyone else to be done so we could do our final checks and ok the proofs for printing we were talking then of our dreams what we hoped to be in the future there was nothing atypical about our dreams we wanted to see the world make something of ourselves fall in love fifteen year old dreams innocent and brave what shook me last december was how clearly my fifteen year old self had pictured what she wanted in her future even if she didn t have details an apartment of her own a life lived without needing to ask permission achievements that she had earned not received as a gift or inheritance in my head i traveled back almost twenty years looked at my present with my fifteen year old eyes and was staggered by how closely it resembled what i had hoped so hard for as a girl i don t know how to explain it the feeling you get when you realize that everything you ve ever done has led you to this moment when your present looks exactly like what you used to wish for so that night and every moment since then that i remember i said thank you to my past self that shy silly girl on the ledge who knew so little about the world but knew so clearly what she wanted thank you i said for knowing me so well for dreaming of such an amazing future thank you for working so hard sweetheart and thank you for being strong i would not be here if you had accepted something less or if you had let yourself be crushed any of the times you failed were rejected or told you weren t enough here we are now here i am congratulations and thank you so much here i am indeed the sum of a lost 13 year old girl long ago and a hopeful 15 year old who wanted to see the world beyond what her parents allowed and all the days in between her then and me now who would have thought and who would have known all these years they were technically just days shape of you 15 sunday jan 2017 posted by rei in uncategorized leave a comment that moment ed sheeran finds every single place your heart has ever broken and with two songs makes them ache again in a way that leaves you crying and smiling at the same time in the back of an uber at 5am on a monday morning in the first month of the new year really ed really one step closer 04 friday jul 2014 posted by rei in by my walking tears leave a comment in singapore there were days when i felt perpetually on the verge of tears like a dam so strained by the weight of water that it was a breath away from bursting 50 true stories from singapore and san francisco porgud 09 wednesday apr 2014 posted by rei in a girl mad as birds a stranger has come leave a comment tags 50truestories who can say if i ve been changed for the better but because i knew you i have been changed for good for good wicked stephen schwartz in singapore filipino contract workers had a slang term that referred to the act of going back to the philippines at the end of a contract as opposed to on a brief vacation or to process a change of visa in between contracts porgud they would say a pidgin amalgamation of the english words for good even my housekeeper ate v picked it up after a year rei she said once tina s going porgud next month we re going to throw a goodbye party for her i found that interesting because in filipino the word for going back to the philippines regardless of purpose or intent and going home is one and the same uuwi ako i am going home contract workers who were done with their contracts who had been laid off from work who had had enough of the golden dream of going overseas to work must have needed a way to convey to their friends that this was a more permanent departure this time they were going home not for a vacation not to attend someone s wedding or graduation or funeral not to renew a contract but to stay of course filipinos being filipinos porgud doesn t necessarily mean the same thing as for good just because a worker was done with singapore didn t mean she was permanently done with the entire overseas work thing and sometimes a few months after someone had gone porgud you d get news that she was now in dubai or sydney or some other place all porgud meant that you were done with this place for now and you were going home to regroup and recharge i think of that now that i m starting to think very seriously about going back to manila it s been the thing among my work friends to do countdowns a friend started her countdown a year before she left her post another one is counting down her last 100 days i imitated both because it s a fun idea to document your last everything and things took a serious turn last night when i started counting days and realized that as of today i ve got 75 days left it came as a huge jolt especially since i ve been looking manila ward with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension the things i must do the people i need to spend time with the quirks and routines i ll need to re establish the small details i must catch up on after being away so long for the past year i ve been swimming idly between the two poles and last night i thought this is it this is real i only have 75 days before what if becomes what is for the past 200 some days i ve been documenting my path home with photos on instagram tagging them so that when i get home i ll have memories i can put up on my wall the closer my departure gets though the more intense my preparations get and photos are beginning to feel inadequate last year i sat with a group of filipino american writers watching them try to think up a theme for a book festival they were organizing we want a theme that bridges the work of our community here to the culture we come from the committee chairperson urged we don t necessarily always write about the philippines but it does inform the nature and bent of our work and our theme should reflect that a moment of silence a beat before one woman barbara offered what about writing a way home it s what we all do and it s an open ended theme because it could go so many ways the diaspora writing about the motherland the diaspora writing about their new homes here the people in the motherland writing about the diaspora they used it of course they would have been crazy not to because that is a beautiful phrase i still think about it to this day loving the many ways you can interpret the words but in this context it is precisely what i intend to do write my way home i started this journey telling stories so it feels apropos to go back to that medium to document this transition and all the things i feel and think about going porgud there are tons of stories too things i ve seen and done and experienced over the past six years and i need to get them down get them out before i go home someone once told me that intense experiences need to be followed by debriefings this then will be mine i ve been ambitious and titled my project before i began 50 true stories to keep me focused on what i need to say there are more than 50 stories but i haven t blogged in forever and i only have 75 days so i ll start with that and see where it leads me i to the world 31 thursday oct 2013 posted by rei in a girl mad as birds a stranger has come leave a comment so i to find my brother yes i to find another in my search for him unhappy lose myself i to the world oh brother i turned 33 this year and for the first time since i turned 30 i had a travel plan the years in between were neither kind nor conducive to traveling so i folded my wings and waited it out soon enough i figured traveling would be possible again and then away i d go like most people i travel whenever there s an opportunity but i also travel to mark milestones before i turned 30 i promised myself that i would spend my birthday in a city i d never been in before true enough that year i blew out my birthday candles in prague triumphant because i d also managed to visit several other cities in europe north america and asia during the same year this year i was particularly determined to go places for many reasons i was getting cabin fever i had friends and family to visit and catch up with the obligations that kept me home bound no longer existed and most importantly i m scheduled to end my tour of duty next year and report back to hq in manila in a way that s a whole new adventure but still and all it s hitting me that i ve gotten through my first foreign posting and i ll never look at the foreign service the same way again in that context this year i traveled not necessarily to see new places although i did more accurately i traveled to give myself time and space to reflect and breathe when you re in transit life feels like it s held in temporary suspension in the air no one can call or text or email you on the road they can but your ability to reply or act on their requests is extremely limited i used to love transit periods for the space they gave me to anticipate my destination now i love them because in a way they cut me loose let me live temporarily free of all the electronic leashes i ve got on me for the first time in a long while i had time to dream and imagine and pretend and it felt like falling back into a cold pool on a hot day i ...