i grew up in an island that would require an hour of rough ferry ride from the northern tip of another island province in central philippines. for someone impatient like me, it was a good place to grow up. the grinding boredom of growing up there made me resolve to leave it as soon as i could. was it auden or was it e.e. cummings who said that all children should be subjected to as much trauma as they could bear? my island hometown was my childhood trauma.
a temp nurse at work today told me she had a friend who grew up in the same island as i did, albeit in another barrio. “have you been there?” she asked me of her friend’s little hamlet. what was the point of knowing that outback when i knew, even then, that i would be out of there as soon as i could pay for my ferry fare?
back at my desk, i--what's the word?--felt a yearning for that world i left behind, of finding bamboo shoots sprouting in the little piece of land behind our house in the early evenings and waking the next day to find them already a meter high. but just a tad, though. and i wish it weighed a bit heavier on my memory.