Yesterday morning, the lady who lives downstairs tried to talk to me, and my inner snob was revealed. How? I only half-listened to her at first because she looked like a maid. I thought that she was the yaya of a relatively well-off freshman and had been sent here to cook for and clean up after her ward, who played bad music early in the morning. I was so close, yet so far from the truth. When I swam out of the part of my brain that was blocking this lady out, this is what I heard:

Do you want to buy this lpg tank? And the stove, too. We barely used them, but we have to leave. We have to go home to the province. My husband had a heart attack, and he wants me and my daughter--she goes to the community college down the road--to come home. My daughter will have to stop school.

"Sayang," I managed to say, after gargling and spitting out toothpaste.

"Oo nga, sayang," she replied. Anyway, would you mind asking the girls upstairs if they want to buy the tank? It's barely used.

Finally, I saw how tired and sad she looked. But her back was already turned to me; she was already shuffling back into their room.

This morning, I realized that I didn't hear music coming from there anymore.

I look at Martin now and realize that when we first started hanging out late last year, I thought of us as two kids. We were two kids hanging out after work and chatting. Now, almost one year later, he seems to have aged. The stuff that's happened since then--was it really enough to turn him even older for his age? Or has he really been this man the whole time, and it just took me a year to figure that out? (No matter how old he gets, I'll love him, but that's not the point right now.)

What about me? I don't feel that much older, and yet I know that I'm different, too. How old am I now? How is it that I can think these little grown-up things all day (write this e-mail, read that research, withdraw X amount of money--crap; I forgot to bring my NBI clearance so I can photocopy it) and still want to plop down on the mat, cut shapes out of paper, and color with crayons? Why does the first seem like a pretend and the second the real thing Kat is supposed to do?

I know the danger of regressing, but I also know the danger of losing child-likeness. The things I want to do, on which side of the line do they fall?

I watch "TekkonKinkreet" and feel for White, wish I were him, wish I had everyone's understanding that I just don't have the right screws to work in this kind of world. But am I really wired differently, or do I just not want to be here?

My first dips into Surrealism--"I've never cried over an art movement before," I told Martin--particularly Surrealist visual art--have been fun, but they scare me, too.

Are all these things--the childish/-like desires, the feeling of not-belonging, the interest in Surrealism and the unconscious--attempts at escape? Or are they an uncovering?

How can I tell between the lazy self not wanting to leave the comfort zone and the right and true self who knows what really fits, and so comforts, me? Who am I supposed to be? Who am I now? How old am I, really?

I am sadder about leaving Ortigas than I was about leaving the dorm. The reason, of course, is that the dorm was the dorm; everything about it said temporariness. I was very conscious of the way I referred to it; for years, I never said, "Uuwi na ako sa dorm (I'm going home to the dorm)," but "Pabalik na ako sa dorm (I'm heading back to the dorm)." Four years there seems like a blip compared to the one year I lived in Ortigas.

When I moved to Ortigas, I was highly conscious of the difference between me and my roommate. She already had a house in Novaliches, so for her, the apartment was a place to crash. My family was miles away, and I was desperate to get out of my relatives' house. So for me, Ortigas was a place to live. There were no second thoughts about calling it my home.

I started out with a few essentials: kitchen appliances, a bed, and a closet. I was collecting household tips (baking soda, lemon juice, and vinegar for cleaning; baits instead of sprays to kill roaches) and took a quiet delight in mundane tasks such as taking out the trash, sweeping the floor, and scrubbing the shower tiles. By the middle of the year, I was financially confident enough to start making a list of more things to buy: a new mattress, another set of shelves, and a good side table for the TV perched on top of the refrigerator.

Then my roommate announced that she would not be renewing the lease with me, and I immediately cut homemaking out of my lifeplan for the rest of the year to write in, "Find a new place to live."

I could not afford the apartment without a roommate, even when I got a new job with a slightly higher salary. The trouble with me was that I had gotten used to the privacy; my roommate and I each had boyfriends and different sets of friends, so at different times, we each found ourselves alone in the apartment. I didn't want to adjust to a new routine with a new roommate -- in fact, I didn't want a roommate at all; I wanted a place all my own.

In the weeks that followed, however, I found that there was nothing like the Ortigas apartment within my budget. (I was determined to find and pay for a new place without my parents' help. My boyfriend, who also needed to move, wanted to live with me, and he was the only new roommate I would have accepted; renewing the lease with him would have solved both our problems. But that was the kind of independent action that would have lost me my family's respect.) I was this close to saying yes to my parents' help. As the time on the lease ran out, I settled for a boarding house somewhere in Cubao.

I don't want to live there. On the surface, it's because of the number of other people in the house and the number of things I will have to move, but at the heart of it, it's because a boarding house stands for temporariness again. While I did say I had just a few essentials, they are heavy essentials and will be difficult to move. I don't regret getting them at the start because today, they represent a kind of stubbornness I wish I could entertain. They are heavy because I want to be weighed down, want to be tied to one place, want my world to have a physical pivotal point. That was Ortigas to me; that's what the rented room will never be.

In my mind, I can see the room I'll be renting, and I'm starting to envision the layout I want as I envisioned one for the Ortigas apartment. I haven't decided yet where my bed will go, but for sure, the rented room will have one side lined with boxes I will not unpack. It will only be a storage room I happen to sleep in, and home life as I created it, as I want it, will be on hold until I can really get a place of my own, on my own.

I want to go home. I think of Kalsangi, the Ortigas apartment, and even of Martin's room in Paranaque, but really, it doesn't matter anymore. I just want to go home.

It's my last working day at CCF. Yesterday, I cleaned out my desk -- kind of. I just took home the stuff that was mine and left all the CCF papers there. Only right, right? Today, I'll be cleaning this computer of my files.

I thought this day would never come. And I don't just mean that in the way you think you'd never find an oasis after wandering through the scorching desert for days. I mean really, in the back of my mind, I thought this day would never come. I guess I just got used to the routine.

This morning, I rushed down a shortcut by the ADB to clock in on time, for the last time. I'll meet Martin at lunch break in Megamall for the last time (the kind of convenience we've enjoyed might no longer be available once I'm working and maybe living in New Manila). After that is my last staff meeting. After that I clock out of CCF, for the last time.

Am I sad? Not really. I'm thankful for my time at CCF, but I'm very much looking forward to September -- birthday, new job, new place to live (I hope). It's gonna be stressful. It's gonna be challenging. It's gonna be fun.

Those of you I've allowed to see me gripe about my job have celebrated the change with me. I hope you won't go away when I start griping again. :p

I do feel sad about having to move out of Ortigas. It's only been a year in this part of the city, but as I walk to and from home, I see bits and pieces of me that I found and will leave here. There's the park where I read and wrote in the hour I had to wait before work started. There's the convenience store where I supplemented my too-early breakfast with a Dole banana (I thought of buying bananas as a way of sending money home). There's the window I looked out at the city from with the thrill of being out on my own.

There's also the ledge where Martin told me how he felt about me. The other ledges we hung out on, the few streets we explored. The place where he first put his arms around me. The place where he first let the word "love" slip -- the place from which he first walked me home and held my hand.

Someone else will soon occupy the place where he first kissed me, so I'll never get to visit it again.

Despite the fact that it was also here that friendship started to fray, I won't deny that Edwin and his friendship was a part of my life in Ortigas, too. I'm thankful.

"We'll make new memories in other places, love," Martin said when I told him how sad I was.

The other day, I bought a new diary. My way isn't to buy the imported ones with leather covers and art by Jordi Labanda or kukuxumusu. I get a cheap school notebook (but with nice paper) from the school supply shelves of National Bookstore and re-cover it with a different design.

That day was the first time I bought a diary while someone was there with me. The fact that this someone was Martin makes the five minutes it took to buy a diary more significant than usual. It was a tiny, tidy, symbolic moment: Martin was there when I picked up the new repository of my life -- a life that's been changed by him and has come to revolve around him. This was the diary that would contain my first days at the new job, moving to a new place, and figuring the rest of life out. That brief moment at the notebook shelves held the promise that for all those moments, Martin would be there, too.

Here's to new memories.