I've been so caught up with finding a suitable place to write at home, I've actually forgotten to write. I'm seriously considering taking the Narnia route and turning the last untouched frontier of this house - the coat room, as a possible creative space for my wandering thoughts.
Why I spend so much time trying to figure out where I can possibly have my own nook, cave, or corner doesn't come much of a surprise. I'm a crab and is very much in need of her own shell. We can thank the zodiac for that; thank you cosmos.
In the nearly three months that I fell short of updating my blog, it's as if this space skipped beat that spanned a lifetime. Deluge of memories in the 12 hour flight back to Manila for some long overdue family time, and when it was happy, it was intensely blissful. Watching Mandarin run and play with her cousins and grandparents, my best friends - her godparents. It was unbearable to leave, and yet just the same I knew I couldn't stay. Between an emotionally tumultuous goodbye that I had already started to fear a month into our trip, the plane allegedly getting struck by lighting and our flight getting cancelled and having to re-do goodbye's all over again the next day, it was an emotionally turbulent flight back home.
Home. The operative word here. Is it possible to call two places home? One where a past life thrives with nostalgic memorabilia and another where the current one resides. It is a blessing as much as it is a cursed longing for finding one's own place in the order of things. Having left in the peak of summer and arriving back just in time for fall; the change of seasons bearing the appropriate scenery of a life that has significantly changed over the last few years.
One thing to note, as I have discovered. I have a copy of Gaston Bachelard's " The Poetics of Space" on both sides of the Pacific that I call home. Possibly, the most copies I have of a the same book. One left under a bed in a hotel in Hong Kong, another in the room I grew up in, and one that I keep by my bedside like a bible. All because the deep psychology rooted in the spaces we create, cook, sleep, and play affect us in more way that we initially care to understand and I carry this book with me because it has given light (and poetry) to the spaces I occupy.
As my family and I now transition into becoming homeowners, a day I thought would never come, I find that I have extended my feelers past the room we sleep in, the kitchen, and a sliver of the living room. Like a switch going off, the official word is in - we are buying the home we have stayed in for the last five years. I have taken a stand against ALL fake plants, spray painted gold mirrors for a contemporary feel, removed dust-catching empty memorabilia that poses no great emotional attachment to anyone anyway (except to fill up a house that no one used to live in back then).
The husband and I have virtually remodeled this home into an HGTV worthy space in our head, our creative neurons firing way ahead of a true working budget, but then again that thought on its own is the beauty of it all. We can dream of a space knowing it is ours it will be ours and someday; sometime very soon we can peel off twenty year old wall paper off the wall and paint that mother a bright bold shade like a declaration of ownership. We have arrived.
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