september musings

My September 2024 tastes like Diet Pepsi by Addison Rae, running at 6 am, watching Formula One, sweater weather, moreno Sonny Angels, and Chet Baker. Saying goodbye to summer always leaves a hollow pit in my stomach. To quote my guilty pleasure, The Summer I Turned Pretty, “Summer was what mattered. My life was measured in summers; like, I don’t begin living until June.” My biggest, most serious moments of growth and creativity — albeit layered with spontaneous days at the mall with my friends, staying up at 2 am for the most cliche romance novels, traveling abroad, or devouring Selecta cookies and cream after swimming — happen between June and August.

I am hopelessly, irrevocably in love with the idea of summer. This summer was the best, but then again, I say that every year. After a hectic finals week as a sophomore, I only had a week left in Manila before going on the biggest adventure of my life: my first solo travel abroad. I had the immense privilege to call myself an international student in Singapore for my midyear term. By August, I vacationed with my family in Tokyo and then had a quick flight to Seoul. 

As much as I wanted to be wrapped in my sweet summer dream for as long as I could, my flight from Incheon to Manila felt like being doused in cold water. Our plane didn’t offer WiFi, and SAIS enlistment happened to be on the same date and time as my flight. If you’re from UP, you know how difficult enlistment is. Last year, I cried because I was one minute late in opening my SAIS account, so I ended up with a 1-4 pm class on a Saturday.

While I was confident that I would get my required number of units, a horrible schedule is what I feared — a 4 pm or 7 am class would entail a major difficulty for my mom, whom I carpool with to get to school. We would have to brave through nights with less than eight hours of sleep and rush hour traffic. Out of desperation, I let my college friends open my account and do the enlisting for me. Thank god for the best, most selfless friends, because I ended up with a decent schedule in 90% of my desired classes.

Less than 24 hours after returning to Manila, I already found myself in the streets of Padre Faura to finalize my classes on paper and get my Form 5. It’s strange, being back all of a sudden after being away for so long. Every international student will likely tell you the same thing, but I really do have to emphasize the feeling of being back — how you’ve seen the grandest views and gained beautiful new experiences and went through volumes of growth, but the world back home remains unchanged. Taft Avenue is the same: illegal vendors outside of PGH, private vehicles that never let you cross the pedestrian lane, people screaming on the roads, and the scorching Philippine heat even worse than it was before. And like every other international trip, you admittedly go back with a little disdain for our norms, but even more so, the vision of everything we could be.

As much as I miss NTU (my beloved university in Singapore), being back in UP makes me realize how much I missed home. It’s refreshing to finally walk around a campus where you understand the language people are speaking, to bump into your cool Millennial professor, and say hi. Don’t forget the rally plaque cards drying up around Rizal Hall for another protest along Taft Avenue. I’ve missed laughing around Rob Man with my friends and our routine of indecisiveness when choosing where to grab lunch. Seeing my friends again was especially rewarding; being with them always makes me feel like Billie Eilish wrote Birds of a Feather especially for us. We bonded over the newly opened Chicken BBQ nearby, I gifted them with Sanrio lollies from Japan, and nearly cried when my friend whipped out friendship bracelets as a farewell present for her shifting to a new course.

Coming home is weird. You expect things to be different, considerably so because of how much you’ve grown, but everything here stays exactly the same. I can’t tell if that’s comforting or unsettling. Maybe a bit of both. Either way, I’m thankful for the familiarity, something solid to hold onto when life gets messy.

Going back to school this semester is a mark of how old I feel. Junior year, finally. I can’t believe I’ve been calling myself a college kid for the past two years now — half the time, I still feel like a clueless freshman. As I write this, I’m curled up in my room, after an unexpected late-night class suspension announcement. I know I should be dreading the semester ahead, especially with the notorious workload that third-year years are known to have. Yet somehow, I feel a strange sense of optimism about what’s to come.

Originally written on: Septemeber 2, 2024