remembrance and home

this year has been a year of confusion and trying to sort out mixed feelings of emotion and trying to... i guess understand myself better.
so my post, a copy of a note in my journal (it's rather long, but bear with me):

I feel like my heart is shattered into a million pieces and sprinkled all over the world... and the more I mourn my loss, the more blatantly I realize that in ways I never realized, the Philippines represents home for me. It's true that there are parts of being there, like being a "foreigner" that make it not home, but everything about the culture lights me up!

I want puto and pancit, and even dried fish. I want sweet spaghetti and hotdogs with colorful twisted marshmallows on sticks. I want sticky rice and lumpia, and an abundance of adobo... and lychee. And those just the tastes! I want to hear street merchants in the neighborhoods yelling "baLUT!" or whatever else they decide to sell... "saPAtos"... "moNAY!"... "kanKON!"... oh, and to hear the little magnolia ice cream carts... with their little jingles that could get so annoying, but were so familiar. ...or the sounds of a bustling city, or frogs in a flooded field croaking in such a chorus that they sounded like a bunch of cows! ... Mixed with the sounds of bugs chirping in trees at dusk... and budakees... and carabaos (dumwags)... what a blissful evening. And what of the jeepneys... especially those "cool" ones with their "special" horn sounds? They sound like the voice boxes of talking barbies and GI joes... and toy animals. I never realized I missed it all so much, but I guess that 15 years (arguably 18 with 3 year long sabbaticals dispersed throughout), really does allow a place to steal a large chunk of one's heart.

The last few days have helped me realize just that. I'm doing a project in 3D design about "home being on the airplane" and I'll stick with that even though the Philippines, I'm realizing, is so much a part of me, because I'm also American in some ways, adn thus can never truly fit in either place. Home to me has to be a place where I'm not a misfit, and neither the U.S. nor the Philippines as "home" accomplishes that.
*sigh*

I really want right now to go to my "suki" sari-sari store, on Bishop street in Brookside and buy a 500mL (or 250....) coke "in a plastic", just for old time's sake. The ladies there would ask me about my Ate Nini... who I would say went away to seminary and could be a pastora but now is teaching elementary or high school someplace... and maybe I would mention Ate Lourdes... who was our katulong most recently... and maybe they would have a good green mango harvest again and would share some like they did once, the sap from the stems leaking onto the mangoes and making my hands sticky... sticky and hot, from the humid tropical air. I would then walk home avoiding stray dogs and strange men and sip my coke in a plastic, feeling the straw collapse between my lips. home. or at least a part of home. I would then unlock the gate to my house and walk into the front cemented yard, my ecstatic dog Telly -- (half Filipino mutt, half black lab) -- greeting me an exciting wagging of both tail and body, with tongue outstretched and panting... looking at me with excitement. Then she'd hear a cat and her ears would twitch, and she'd be driven mad with excitement, running around the small confines of the yard until the cat was out of sight.