Against Love

Krysta Lee Frost

Unlike my mother, I have never been one to collect. Call it inheritance: they always said I took after my father. Or call it rebellion: because my mother’s urges to save and store were relentless, I molded myself into her opposite. “Just in case someone needs it someday,” she’d justify, cramming empty jars and bottles into a full cupboard or hauling garbage bags of old clothes into the closet. Boxes and boxes of things she couldn’t remember but loved nonetheless.

Her explanation: as her family’s bunso, she grew up on hand-me-downs and leftovers, stuffing cotton into shoes too big and sewing the holes in her older sisters’ blouses. Abundance soothed something in her. In my parents’ shared walk-in closet in our third home, my father’s clothes had been neatly hung on wooden hangers and pushed into a corner. My mother’s things took up the rest of the space. How had she amassed so much in so little time?

In America, she discovered Goodwill and the Salvation Army—an immigrant mother’s haven and her daughter’s curse. Racks and racks of discounted clothes nicer than anything my mother could ever own as a child sold for less than a dollar, if the tag matched the day’s designated color. If it was on sale, even if it didn’t fit quite right, it would make its way into her cart. Someone, someday might want it. And it was so cheap—it didn’t hurt to have it around.

It’s like those studies that claim that people who grow up poor develop appetites that far surpass their actual hunger: once they have access to money and food as adults, they eat and eat, regardless of  need. Something in you raises its defenses and stays there, even when the threat is gone.

I didn’t want to admit it. I was more like my mother than I ever wanted to be.

***

What came easy and cheap. What didn’t quite fit but could come in handy in times of need. What was easy to lose.

What was my own version of a Goodwill sale?

I think of the people I misled into my life when times were bad. How I could construe each of their gestures, empty and anonymous, into whatever I wanted. A knock-off, a cheap substitute. But beggars can’t be choosers. You take what you can.

Like the night the boy—which one, you don’t even remember—is nodding to the music playing in your room, commending your taste in lyrics, and you’re not even listening to him, and none of it matters, not the music, not the lyrics, not the talk, not the boy—none of it except your hand held in another’s.

***

My father is happiest remembering the past. In the years before he met my mother, my father lived a simple life teaching at a university in California. I would watch him as he carefully unfolded his memories for me, his face suddenly animated, his voice booming, his story punctuated perfectly by a laugh or a pause, commanding the attention of whomever he was talking to. He lived in a tiny apartment near campus, furnished only with a futon, a mini fridge, and kitchen utensils for one. My father relished this lightness: the ability to pack up and move whenever he wanted. He lived a full life, yet lingered nowhere. There was always another city to see. More people to meet. All he needed in life was pen and paper. If not a spiral-ring, then one of its torn sheets, folded into fours and tucked into his shirt pocket. Unlike me, my father is a natural-born storyteller—no detail ever escaped him. No memory was too forgettable to keep. I could listen to him for hours, taking in everything I wanted to know but could never seem to ask.

Whenever we traveled, my father would tell me about his own journeys alone across Europe, Asia, and of course, the United States—he’s seen the sun filter gold through his windshield from coast to coast. In his eyes, the experiences we had on the trips we took together could only bolster his young daughter’s writing. But I sought out another skill I saw in him: the ability to avoid the pain of being ripped away from what you love. I wanted to be like my father, living with nothing to lose from New York to San Francisco. The world was large and nothing could hurt me.

It’s funny how life repeats itself: decades ago, my father left his first wife and their two sons. When he did the same to my mother, he explained, “I left everything to my first wife then. I want to do the same with your mother. I don’t need things.”

It was an easy divorce. A smooth transaction. 25 years of marriage, and my mother left with everything they had owned.

***

What was it all for—the dates with strangers, the slow walk to the apartment, the manic, unplaced impulse, the hand lain thoughtfully here, lingering apprehensively there, and how well your desperation has translated into desire before something jerks you back into yourself, the projection suddenly gone, the room spinning, the shock of light from the room’s single bulb, and there you are, on top of someone, heaving and crying again, the suddenness of it all like a punch to the gut, and this isn’t you, is it, something else has taken control, something else is moving your mouth, but the delusion crescendos again, and your body moves on its own, the arching and softening a practiced performance, a one-woman show, an every-woman-for herself anguish, then the pathetic finish, then the restless sleep, the face hidden in the pillow, the tossing and turning in shame, the stirring awake, the night washed off, the clothes slipped on as you watch from the bed—Stay?—the trade proposed, then denied—Please?—and you’re as worthless as old currency, how about next time, let’s take a rain check, I’ll text you later, whatever, never mind, it doesn’t matter: a closing door is a closing door. Abandonment, in whatever shape it takes, feels the same every time.

Isn’t it easier to say it was love? Isn’t love a lesser vice than loneliness, a lesser evil than what you are?

***

Sometimes my mother still thinks of me as my father’s daughter. In front of her, I am her opposite, cerebral and rational, untouched by sentiment.

After learning that my father wanted a divorce, my mother was heartbroken for months. What had changed? My parents had lived separately for years; my sister and I were used to traveling between them. Both of them had been unhappy with the other. But she complained about the pain in her chest and swore she would die from it. How could your father do this? She had done everything for him, she claimed. Moved across oceans for him, left her family for him. For years she tried to rationalize his aloofness, brushed it off as a quirk or personality trait, that maybe love looked different for him than it did for her. Maybe Americans weren’t as tender; Filipinos were romantics, had bigger hearts. Sure, he loved his time alone, spent hours reading or watching movies, but he took care of his family. And he loved his daughters more than anything. Wherever he was in the world, he took care of them.

“I thought that we’d finally be happy,” she sighed, “with you two all grown up. After he retired, we had plans to travel together. We could finally relax. Have no worries. But then your dad goes and does this. He threw away everything.”

“You can’t make someone stay, ma. It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you, or that he doesn’t now. You know him.”

I was cool about it. While my sister cried upon hearing the news, I was cool. Nothing hurts you when it leaves if you never depended on it staying.

***

Lightness and weight. My mother and my father. In my head, diametrically opposed.

As a teenager, I pored over Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Something about Tomas and Tereza resonated with me. Like Tereza, my mother craved the mass of love, the inertia of the familiar, the accumulation of meaning. My father, like Tomas, was her opposite: weight was a burden that suffocated. Love was a shackle. But, as Kundera poses, “Is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?”

I was either one or the other—my mother or my father’s daughter. Never both at once.

Here I am, oscillating between extremes, trying to get the answer right.

***

Personality is flexible, but only up to a point. Think of sweet, heavy syrup that hardens to a brittle sheet. Try to alter it once it solidifies and watch it shatter into fragments.

Sure, you can try to cover it up—garnish it with delicacies or smother it with saccharine. But the foundation remains the same—that original, pure layer of you. The fault lines emerge no matter how many times you try to hide them, repeating the same mistakes as you try to piece the parts into the whole it can never be.

Genetics, environment, personal disposition. There’s lots of explanations for why you are the way you are. But how you buckle down, again and again, and claim there’s no map you’re following, no path you’re drawn to—there’s no explanation for that, and you know it.

***

Before the summer my father and I spent in Budapest, I fell in love.

In a matter of months, we had become inseparable. The days and nights we spent together melted into one long dawn we wanted to cheat for another hour. We biked all over the city, the winding streets engulfed in darkness, illuminated only by the small, blinking lamps that swung on our handlebars. I rediscovered my body. Said yes to it all. I could live for days on feeling, and did.

We snuck into the university’s art building one night, spread a blanket over the cold linoleum floor, and lay side by side. A song played on repeat, the voice from the tinny speakers heavy against the silence. The moment entirely ours. Hours later, we emerged to an indigo night, the temperature verging on freezing. I stared at the moon. It looked cold and quiet. The world was so still it felt like a dome had been placed over us. Vacuum shut. Just that dome with a single point where the white light of the moon shone sharply through. Just us, that light, that cold. I was ashamed to love but let it move my body.

The night remains the same in my memory, but it could have been anyone I had loved that night. The faces, the names interchangeable. Just to be held that night, just to believe I was someone worth holding on to.

Call it hunger pangs. Call it low hanging fruit.

I didn’t have the choice to stay then. I cried when I had to leave for the summer. My father had offered me the trip of a lifetime and there I was, tethered to someone I thought I loved, thought I could die for. Was it worth it? That moment of forgetting who I was and that grotesque thing I carried in me. Was it worth forgoing the world for a brief feeling of love?

In the airport, on the plane, in Budapest, the world cracked open for me again. All the wires that pulled me down finally snapping. I was alone. I was no one. But Budapest was a new city. And I could be anyone I wanted.

I wanted to take back everything I had said. I was a fool. Back home, the person I thought I loved said they missed me; they read and re-read the letter I had written them before I left; they wondered what would happen to us upon my return.

I wanted to forget. Weight was a curse that pulled you down to the point of atrophy. In a new country, I felt like a new person; I shed myself off that quickly. I knew what lightness meant.

Call it my own little magic trick. My own way of surviving the life I had lived. The ability to detach at will, as if love was disposable. To leave behind everything and anyone whenever the need arose. Everything I needed right here with me. A protective spell against hurt.

Of course, it was silly to believe it was a gift. That I could wield that power instead of the other way around. But can you blame me? I still believed my life would one day be full. That if I looked enough, experienced enough, wrote enough—I wouldn’t need anyone or anything. If I just tried harder, I would be enough, all on my own.

***

I admit to my dependence on love like an addict. It is not romantic. It is a point of shame; it demeans me. I’m supposed to be better than this. I had been given everything; I was taught to be better than this. What more did I need?

Upon telling my parents about my borderline personality disorder:

My mother: “Bakit ka ba may ganyan? Hindi naman kita inabuso ah.”

My father: Raises eyebrows. Sighs. Changes the subject.

I didn’t bring it up again. Now and then, my mother tries to broach the subject as obliquely as she can, still rejecting the possibility that something could have gone wrong with her meticulously planned, breastfed, read to, watched over, American-born daughter: “Kumusta naman ‘yong nerbyos mo na ‘yon?”

Perhaps it was a mocking scene that mirrored the day of my birth, to come face to face with your own flesh and blood and not recognize it. That despite my mother’s best intentions, her daughter had grown into someone she could no longer understand.

The first time I wanted to get help, she wanted to know everything: what, when, how, why. It was a double betrayal: that I had been keeping something from her, and that I was becoming more like my father.

I couldn’t answer her questions. I just shook my head and cried. My silence was offensive. She strode to the door. Before slamming it, she fired: “Doon ka na nga sa tatay mo—parehas kayong baliw!”

***

Personality is pervasive. It’s how you think, how you act, how you think about how you act. It’s like looking at the world through a window. Sure, you can be aware of the window, know that you’re looking through it, but you can’t see the world in any other way if that’s the only window you’ve got.

Even hating the window you look through is part of personality. Even trying to break the window with your fist is part of personality.

Now that was stupid, wasn’t it? You’ve messed things up again. Look what you’ve done: now these broken pieces are all that you have left. Now the world is a handful of glass shards.

Now you’re stuck with yourself and what you’ve broken. You can thank your personality for that, too.

***

Two months in Rome, a month in Budapest. We visited ruins, museums, and graveyards. The Coloseo, old churches, sunlit piazzas. Bathhouses bathed in light in Budapest. The Protestant Cemetery in Rome, which held the graves of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, which my father said should delight me as an English major. He took pictures of the elaborate headstones and mausoleums with his old camera, the only one he knew how to operate, while I snapped photos of the greenery with my phone, the moss-strewn marble, the light filtering down from somewhere behind the trees. This visit to the graveyard would make its way into a memoir of sorts that my father was writing, an elaborate journey throughout Europe that spanned not only our summer trip, but also my father’s younger years, when he had saved up working nights all throughout college to spend a gap year in Europe. His own graduation present as the first in his family to graduate college.

Just like that—my father had a story. He could conjure them up at the snap of his fingers. I grew up on those stories; instead of reading to me, my father would sit at my bedside as I asked for a story, and he’d tell me another, a tale that spanned fiction and non-fiction, his own way of telling me about his life. It became a practice in remembering, what my father still does best. Despite his age, he can recount his past as if no time has passed. I knew he could live with nothing because he remembered everything, from getting stabbed in New York City to spending a night in jail in the Canary Islands.

I couldn’t imagine my father as a young man. So much had happened before I was born. He had divorced his first wife and decided to pursue his PhD at Berkeley on a full scholarship. But he had two sons then; life wasn’t as light. His ex-wife hated him; his sons would grow more and more resentful that their father had left. Where had he gone wrong? Because despite teaching—his greatest passion—something started to grow inside, a kind of emptiness that his newfound freedom couldn’t satisfy. That maybe what he had left behind had left a wound he no longer knew how to heal.

What made him try again? Give up his life of lightness to be a father for the second time? Instead of two sons, two daughters. Love had caught him in its grip again, smothering the man he wanted to be but couldn’t, the man he lived out in his memories. He had always been a great father to me, but I knew he had already lost something by the time I was born, something I could only glimpse in the stories he told. The man I would look up to but could never meet. I’d get to know my father like that, trying to piece together what I had missed.

***

Years and years of forgotten memories. Twelve schools before college. More than ten houses; less that I remember living in. Another introduction. Another departure. Conflicting images. Too hard to remember. Too different to synthesize. Easier to restart. Blade clean and build from scratch. Easier to lose.

Years of starting over. Years of unmemory. Years of psychotropic drugs. I can’t remember what happened. Who I was. What I lost. Nothing to write because nothing is true. The past wrings itself dry. To keep away what hurts. What’s too lonely to remember. Grind each memory down to a pulp. Sweeten with sugar. Easier to swallow.

***

Although it was my father’s first time visiting Budapest, he was not the same man that he had been. He was older now. He was tired. I imagined him holding his breath until the day was over, until he could retreat back into the privacy of his bedroom. He couldn’t be on his feet for long anymore, he’d say, and lead us back towards our street, each uphill block seeming longer and longer.

Back in the apartment, he’d sit in front of the large windows that overlooked the Danube River and the footbridge that linked the two sides of the city. I thought he could stare out the window for hours, a beer in hand, watching the boats crisscross the water. Sometimes, he’d tell me about the times he and his brother spent on their father’s small boat on the weekends. Had I closed my eyes then, I would have seen the sunlight through his words, see the immaculate white of the hull as it trembled in the river. One of the stories he liked to tell me was how water began seeping in through a small hole at the bottom of the boat, and how, in his panic, he had taken out the wad of bubble gum he had been chewing and stuffed it into the hole. It worked. He saved the boat.

It’s a story I’ve heard over and over again, but I can never remember the details. If only I had closed my eyes. But I couldn’t betray how much I needed this, how much I wanted this to be mine, to store each detail away for safekeeping, to feel that my father had lended me a piece of his life that he would one day come back to retrieve, and we’d lay out our memories in front of us like cards, marveling at the ways our lives mirrored the other’s.

As the Hungarian Parliament Building threw a blanket of golden light over the Danube, my father’s life stretched out invisibly before him. The cards he kept only to himself.

***

My mother’s memory was not as strong as my father’s. She needed reminders; wherever we went, she’d force the family in front of an unsightly sign or plaque, often prioritizing them over the very sights and ruins she came to see. At least when she looked back, she said, she’d remember the names of where she’d been. My sister and I would plaster on smiles until the third or fourth shot, growing more and more agitated as my mother pleaded with us, “One more! One more!” We were lucky if my father even joined the photo, barely holding a smile for the camera, dark sunglasses shielding his eyes. I guess that means a lot of my mother’s memories won’t include him; in time, she’ll forget he was even there.

My mother took photos of everything, even street signs and subway stations, as proof of where she had been. Tacky souvenir shops in Rome and double-decker buses of tourists she somehow considered a sight of their own. While my mother spent her time looking through a viewfinder, my father would walk around the grounds, hands clasped behind his back, bending his 6’4” frame to read the label below some painting or artifact, getting as close to the thing as he could, peering over the his glasses to examine the details.

They were both sentimental in their own ways; my mother had her pictures, my father had his memories. They found meaning in the lives they led, remembered the past fondly. I was supposed to have my writing: before each trip, my father would give me a brand new notebook to encourage me to record my experiences. I still have a few of them, the first few pages meticulously filled in, the rest of the pages empty. The leather faded and peeling, the black ink softened into a hazy blue.

If it was important, I thought, I’d remember it. But none of my experiences ever met my expectations. Maybe I was too hopeful, too much of a romantic. I wanted every experience to be perfect. If it wasn’t, then it wasn’t worth saving. So I never could fill up those notebooks. I was not the person I wanted to be, so it was a waste to write about it, to ascribe permanence to a self I was constantly rewriting in my head. What was unwritten still seemed changeable. And maybe, in the future, when I finally became someone I was proud of being, I’d have a past worth remembering. I’d remember the important things, and they’d finally be worthy of words.

Dad, I’m sorry I failed you. I want to remember. I should have documented our days together. But the world is too wide and I am terrified of failure. I’m deathly afraid of getting things wrong. I’d rather forget, dad, but now there’s nothing left, and I don’t know how to hold on anymore. Tell me another story, just this once, tell me about the boat and how you escaped death that one time, and the next, and the next. I’m listening this time, I won’t forget. Once upon a time—just like before.

***

I had just quit my job and had moved back in with my mother and sister. The novelty of a new job with new people had worn off and I had grown restless. Something in me writhed and ached like a phantom limb. I thought about leaving, moving, starting over; I’d done it so many times. My escape route. Foolproof. No one would care if I left, just like all those times before. Every night, I walked home from work, dreaming of another city. When I reached my apartment, I slipped out of my clothes, barely ate, nursed bottles of wine alone at night, cried at spills and broken glasses, watching dark red river across white sheets, disconnected from the reality of it all.

I’m going to leave, and that will show them. I’m going to leave and then they’ll be sorry.

I was frantic. I called my father. I told him I was ready to leave Manila. I wanted to move to San Francisco, and my father told me how much he liked living there when he did. I didn’t care what I would do. I would get any job I could. I just wanted to leave.

My father seemed excited for me. Maybe, after I had settled down, I could think about grad school. Maybe I could go to Berkeley like he did.

So we made plans to go to San Francisco. My father told me to start looking for places to live. Did I know anyone there who needed a roommate? San Francisco was terribly expensive; it wasn’t how it used to be in his days. I’d have to get over my fear of living with strangers, a phobia that had led me to the brink of malnourishment (and, in my paranoia, sudden death) when I had studied abroad in London. I wouldn’t eat just to avoid seeing my flatmates in the kitchen. Soon my hair fell out in clumps and I could barely leave my room. My thinning hair scared me; tangles of fallen strands scattered all over the carpet. Shamefully, I made arrangements to cut my program short and return to my family in Manila.

But I didn’t care. I’d make it work this time.

My father emailed me asking how much longer I’d be staying in Manila. I hesitated to reply.

A week before, I had met someone I would change all my plans for. He was biracial, like me, and maybe something about it felt natural, like a home I never had. We spent the night in my apartment, drinking the wine I had kept stocked in my kitchen. We sat on opposite ends of the couch; hours later our bodies had slumped into one. Mellowed out by the wine we shared from the bottle, I was thoughtless and carefree.

I felt my hands move without me, no longer my hands. My body was a blur of possibility. To be seen and held. To be had and consumed. To be remade into something worthy of taking. Ripe. Wanted. Take me now and I’ll give and give. Let me feed and nurture. Let me rot my way into you.

The artifice of the intimacy I would hold onto for the next months all hinged upon that night. The promise of it coaxed me back into life. Our shadows drew closer and closer, the umbra deepening into black.

***

I couldn’t tell my father this. The part of me that was my father’s daughter knew that this was irrational, laughable, pathetic. Why would I sacrifice my life for love, for someone I had just met?

I constructed my reply: I had changed my mind. I wasn’t ready for that big of a move after all. My family and friends were here. And I didn’t want a repeat of London, did I? I couldn’t afford to overestimate my mental health again; my experiences in London were some of the most terrifying in my life. So I’d stay where I knew I had people to support me. And I had a plan—I’d apply for a master’s program at the University of the Philippines. It made sense, see, to study in the Philippines after spending my undergraduate years in America.

My father said he understood. It made sense. And yes, having experiences in both America and the Philippines would further legitimize the transnational and bicultural identity that was so important to me. I had grown up in both countries, and would have learned from mentors in both.

Completely rational. Nothing reckless about it. I couldn’t let my father know who I became in the face of loneliness. How unrecognizable, how so unlike his daughter.

***

Staying up until four in the morning, shaking from hunger you were too shy to disclose, not wanting the night to end, not wanting to be put to bed, the body next to you resigned, breathing deeply, asleep already, and you’re always the last one awake, facing the wall, curling into yourself, your stomach thinned out from acid, your body overworked, running on empty now, but wide-eyed still, and why are you doing this again, you’ll curse yourself for this, and you want more alcohol, more sex, more what? more affection from some boy you share no interests with, or more reasons to hate yourself for needing whatever it is he gives you, a way out of yourself, for a brief moment, a grand delusion of normalcy, of desire for the sake of desire, stripped of pretense, for him to think you’re just a wild girl, before you’re too much again, before you’re nothing more than a story shared over drinks about some crazy girl he got to fuck.

In your severed logic, did you think that was good for you?

***

I remembered the reasons I had wanted to stay in Manila: love, the prospect of safety, stability. I had a paper trail: the emails between my father and I, messages to friends about finally meeting someone who just got me. But I can’t say I remember the feeling, the love so big it made it all seem worth it. The person all but gone. A foreboding figure in my dreams. A gap of memories in the shape of someone I didn’t want to remember.

I would later learn about the idealization stage: the first half of the yoyoing idealization/devaluation cycle that defines the intensity and passion that those with borderline traits experience as love. It’s enough to completely recast someone into the perfect person, chipping away all their flaws in the process. Your savior in the flesh. Your giver of life. You needed them—their love, their validation, their attention. You’re nothing without them.

I didn’t quite know the science behind it. My doctor once asked me, point blank, if I ever believed I’d find true love. I scoffed. True love? Was she joking?

I couldn’t answer her. I was usually ready for all of the questions she threw at me; I had done my own research about personality disorders, had looked at my past every which way trying to construct a narrative that made sense, wherein this event led to this feeling led to this behavior. She rarely said anything that caught me off guard. But love? That wasn’t part of the story. I was embarrassed. I looked away and laughed—my default response to discomfort.

But she was serious; she seemed annoyed now. The question wasn’t rhetorical. She asked again. I laughed, looked away. I felt like a kid again, my teacher singling me out for an answer I didn’t know, exposing me for my stupidity, my carelessness. Here was something I didn’t prepare for, didn’t want to face. “I don’t know,” I mumbled. She asked me to think about it now, seriously: did I believe that someone could truly love me?

“No, I guess,” I said finally.

Of course, I knew the answer. And that was why. I knew I’d never be worth the real thing, so it was easy, it was enough, to elevate fiction into fact. I didn’t deserve love, so any hint of it was as good as I was going to get. As good as I earned. As good as my performance allowed. So I played the game like I had nothing to lose. It didn’t matter who or how.

Well, if she says so.

I soon figured out the pattern: the agony of a rupturing love followed by the unbridled hatred and disgust, then the fear of being abandoned thrusting you back into the swell of passion, then the crest of betrayal, then the finality of the crash, then—

The devaluation process. The cushion against pain. Once you prepare yourself for being hurt, for being left, every action looks like abandonment. Every loving gesture was a ruse. To use you. And dispose of you. Like this.

Love and hate are part of the same delusion. An optical illusion. A way of seeing and re-seeing. You’re a master of this art. You plaster over the past, and then you scrape it off again. You shape everything into love and tear it down again when the edges start to crumble. Your hands are raw. The room is ravaged. You’re alone again. What have you done?

***

Get real. You’re just some American brat wasting money on medication for some mental illness you made up in your head, relying on some arbitrary diagnosis for sympathy and attention. No one would think twice about you otherwise. Excuse after excuse. Your cousins, they grew up with nothing, and they’re happy. I should have never let you grow up in America so you never learned how to whine and complain. Get over it. Tulog ka lang kasi ng tulog. Hindi ka na kasi kumakain kaya ka naging ganyan. Ako nga, iniwan nga ng tatay mo; ako ‘yong may karapatan magmukmuk dito.

Kailangan mo ba talaga uminom niyan? Hindi naman kita inabuso ah.

***

It’s not like you didn’t know that those you loved could hurt you—in fact, you knew it all too well, so much that it became the very thing you feared. How much easier it was to reduce the world into absolutes: good/bad, love/hate, yes/no. It was better to believe that love was always pure, always real, untouched by cruelty and deception. When you finally saw it, you’d know it was true. You wouldn’t be wrong. Real love wouldn’t leave; if it did, it wasn’t real. It was never love to begin with.

You thought this equation would keep you safe. But look where it’s gotten you. Look how love has left you for dead.

***

When I was younger, my mother would leave me in America with my father for months at a time. My sister was still a baby then, so my mother would always bring her on their journeys back home. The years took on a certain pattern: my mother packing a single large suitcase for their things, my father and I taking them to the airport every spring, when the pollen was at its worst.

I imagined an invisible line dividing my family: my mother and my sister on one side, my father and I on the other. It seemed that my mother had given up on trying to live happily in America, and my father had given up on trying to compromise with her.

I couldn’t tell her how badly I wished she would take me with her. That maybe I wasn’t old enough, strong enough, independent enough to be left. Why did I always have to bear the brunt of it?

It’s not like my father didn’t pay attention to me—he did in ways my mother never did. On the days I didn’t have school, he’d take me out to lunch, and we’d go by his office on campus so he could finish some work or pick up some papers. His colleagues would comment on how big I’d gotten; they had known me since I was a toddler, when my father first started teaching at the university. I felt special. My father was always seemed proud of me. He’d joke that I was stuck with him once again because the rest of the family had gone off to the Philippines for the next few months.

It’s not even that I didn’t want to be with my father. My mother and I didn’t talk much when she was home, and when we did, it often ended in argument. I was a barely a teenager, still in denial about our common ground. She’d be busy with my little sister in the day, and at night she’d lock herself in her room, talking to relatives and friends back home for hours on end, her voice seeping through the walls and into my bedroom.

I knew she hated being here. I knew she spent the rest of the year counting down the months until she could go back home with my sister, who was born in the Philippines, who had the certificate to prove she belonged. It was her birth country, after all, while I had to submit an application for my right to live there: a flimsy document that stated I was a dual citizen. Barely proof of anything. And no one believed me, anyway. Was I really Filipino? But I was just like my father!

I knew my mother saw me as her anchor to America: the only reason she had tried to stay. I knew that to be an anchor is to become a curse—for being like my father, for dragging her back again and again. It was my fault, so I deserved to stay. Wasn’t this my country anyway, the one my mother grew to hate, winter after insufferable winter, with my father coming home from work barely saying a word?

No, I loved spending time with my father. Springtime without my mother and sister was quiet, but the sun would begin to shine through the trees again, and the new leaves that sprouted pale and green against the grey bark of winter made the city look brand new. My father was a swimmer, and on the weekends he’d drive us to the university rec center where I’d play in the water while he swam laps in the deep end. Sometimes I’d swim over to him and ask him to rate my dives off the diving board. We had fun then. My father still swims everyday; I haven’t in years.

It’s not even that I wanted to go: Manila was still overwhelming to me then. There were so many places to go and so many people I didn’t know, who were never shy to share exactly what they thought about which feature I inherited from which parent. It was tiring. But why did I have to be left behind? Month after month for all those years. It was easier to say I didn’t need her than to admit I did.

I was either my mother or my father’s daughter. How could I be both at once?

***

And how could I blame either of them? For loving in opposite ways that I wouldn’t understand until much later, until I had to face love on my own, forge love in my own way. I knew how my mother felt when my father left. I knew her pain; I feared it everyday. Her anger was my anger, though I never dared show it. For her sake or mine. I tried to be a good daughter. Gave her the advice I couldn't take. Sometimes people just leave, ma, and that’s that. Sometimes leaving is just leaving.

And I knew why my father left, because when he said he hasn’t been happy in 25 years, I knew it was the same kind of pain that bore itself in me, deep, invasive, life-threatening. I recognized the exhaustion in his movements, his dissatisfaction with routine, his abrupt decisions to leave everything behind in hopes of even a mimicry of happiness—of the better days he told me about, the ones I’m afraid he can never again experience, the ones he keeps stored in the corners of his mind for when things go bad.

The effort, in the end, is futile. The exploration fruitless. But the answer is in the flesh. It’s in my blood to love them. To love like them. To be versed in opposites, to gauge in extremes, to move between worlds. To want to leave as much as I want to stay. To experience the world but always come back home.

Every day is a balancing act. I’m teetering in the middle, but so much of me is still pulled in one direction. I fall into my old habits—my magic tricks. Watch me turn love into hate. Watch my life disappear into a plume of smoke. But cut things off enough times and you won’t have anything left. Suddenly you can’t remember who you were, because forgetting is easier than remembering, and you’re left with nothing, and live with nothing, and your hunger grows far too big for your appetite, and you want to take and take, and keep and store and hoard for when worse comes to worst. Even if it’s cheap. Even if it doesn’t quite fit. You’ll be ready; you’re always ready now.

Translations

“Bakit ka ba may ganyan? Hindi naman kita inabuso ah.” — “Why do you have that? It’s not like I abused you.”

“Kumusta naman ‘yong nerbyos mo na ‘yon?”  — “So how is that ‘nervousness’ that you have?”

“Tulog ka lang kasi ng tulog. Hindi ka na kasi kumakain kaya ka naging ganyan. Ako nga, iniwan nga ng tatay mo; ako ‘yong may karapatan magmukmuk dito.” — It’s because all you do is sleep. You don’t eat anything and that’s why you’re like that. Look at me, your dad left me; I’m the one who should be sulking.”

“Kailangan mo ba talaga uminom niyan? Hindi naman kita inabuso ah.” — “Do you really need to take that? It’s not like I abused you.”

Krysta Lee Frost is a mixed race Filipino American poet who halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, Hobart, The Margins, Entropy, wildness, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Find her on social media @kryleef.

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