Notes on Space: An Excerpt from Strange Intimacies
By Zea Asis, with illustrations from Beyza Durmus
For four months, Zea Asis worked on Strange Intimacies together with her illustrator, Beyza Durmus (@silkmauve) and layout artist, Roma Calderon (@romacalderon). What they produced essentially is a labor of love among the three of them, so much so that Zea encourages you to take in the illustrations and layout as much as the personal experiences she shares with you here.
As you grow older, you begin to understand summer in a figurative sense. Visions of road trips to Urbiztondo beach in La Union; a long-weekend trip to a small northern town with coconut trees, motorbikes, and tanned half-naked locals walking barefoot by the side of the pavement. There is no clear demarcation line of the seasons. It is only wet and dry. Our senses are tipped off by it first—when finally the prickling heat is furloughed by the cool, faint wind of a monsoon. You live in a place long enough, you become vulnerable to this particular sensory experience. Your body chafes , vexed by the sudden shift.
I think about my sister, who has had to put down roots in New Jersey, Hawaii and now San Francisco. She taught me the beauty and elbow grease of making a home for yourself. How many times has her body had to acclimate? How many times has she had to endure the recursive emotional cleaving that comes with leaving a place to fit into a new one?
She knew about the characteristically Filipino mindset of getting to where you wanted to go and making something of yourself. Growing up, she had to learn the self-diminishing practice of depending on strangers to live. She got through college and medical school with multiple public and private scholarships and cultivated a relationship with her benefactors (our Auntie Tia from Munich and Uncle Sonny from Davao) by sending long emails of weepy confessionals seasoned with Bible verses, all the while subletting a condo with furniture bargained for cheap from the Paco Public Market. To a lower-middle class family in the province like ours, agency was not a decision nor something afforded by parents to their children. It was a requirement, an inevitability. There was no lineage of succession for a multi-billion tire business or a fail-safe contingency plan of sending us abroad. We were handed the fixture of our lives early on, broken furniture and all.
It is now July, a month after the start of the rainy season. We were told to expect scattered thunderstorms and hanging habagat—the violent dishevelment that comes with the weather. Similarly, my living arrangements are precarious at best. I live with my brother, his wife, and their 16-month old baby. Live is an inaccurate word—perhaps, I linger. The way a presence does. The past year, I kept showing up like a soft, transparent ghost at random hours of the day to pick up clean clothes, stay over for the night and for the next several days, be gone again. A good portion of it was spent sleeping over at my boyfriend’s place in Cubao.
How long has it been? 121 days. 121 days since I set up a temporary camp in the bedroom that was designated to be mine but not really; when the city closed itself to strangers and wheezed out those that did not want to stay. Since then, it’s been stripped to its elemental state, revealing the natural wear and tear of the systems that have controlled and defined us. I’ve given up certain routines: no more sleeping over at my boyfriend’s house and no more daily excursions to my office in Makati. Instead, I wake up to my niece’s cries at the early break of dawn and endure the brief punctures in privacy when, having napped in the middle of the day, I’d panic-wake to the twisting of my door knob and the jangle of keys at my brother’s attempts to open my door to get fresh sheets from my drawer. The smell of fresh linen, for a moment, disconcerting.
Where is your home? These incidents hung onto me and solidified into the belief that I was still a ghost even when I was exiled from my usual processions. I clung to the naive assertion that if I had my shampoo and toothbrush, my bottles of moisturizer, and worn Steve Madden boots laid out, the space I inhabited would form a covenant with me and grant me certain rights. For example, I could then expect a level of privacy where sleep is considered sacred and for which I didn’t have anyone knocking on my order or prying open drawers in my room during mid-afternoon siestas. That is to say, the place still didn’t feel like it was mine.
As I crossed the threshold from college to the workforce and began life as an entry-level salary worker, I discovered that my time at university did more than expand my intellect: it expanded my sense of entitlement so much that, by the end, I had no ability to distinguish myself from the crowd of extremely wealthy people I encountered there.
After graduation, I was affronted by the inescapable facts of living. More specifically, the cost of living a free and independent life. When life’s practicalities knock the romance out, and money, time, the sheer labor abase my passions into bills, bathroom cleaning, and cooked rice green with mold in the kitchen counter top: My first fall-back was my familial home. It was familiar, easy, perfunctory. I was not tethered to some age-old sense of filial piety, I simply lacked the financial resources to make it out on my own.
Living with family is no less comfortable than it is an escape from the unattractive bits that come with coming head-to-head with the notion of my own insufficiencies. I was still at a stage in my life where I wanted to buy good clothes, take taxis rather than public transit, and chew on certain luxuries that would have been impossible, or more accurately, unaffordable if I fully embraced independence. In some ways, it seemed like ripping off a page from the book of How To Repudiate Your Own Life. Maybe there was a part of me that did avoid it and yet I still dreamed of a space that I owned, with high-windows and artisanal furniture (If you prefer a more conservative version: A gloomy, windowless studio unit which is either a walk or a jeepney ride away from my office in Makati). But during these times, people are heading home instead of moving away from it. There is also the inescapable fact that the global health authorities have asked us to limit our interactions with people as much as we can; stay indoors, and as my mother always called to say, save your money for things that matter. Going through the rituals of moving to a new space is treacherous and seems remiss given everything.
Unlike me, my sister had no choice but to start early in life. There was nothing extravagant about her lifestyle. She lived within her means and so accustomed herself to the offerings of sale racks in boutiques and frequented Divisoria on early Sunday mornings (for which her haggling skills became a point of pride for my mother). She wanted and dreamed of beautiful things, but her illusions were curbed by an acute sense of reality. At least within a good portion of her early 20’s, her idea of luxury was reified by Class-A Lacoste bags and fruity-flowery Victoria’s Secret lotions.
“I’ve long perceived sisterhood as a secret inlet,” Durga Chew-Bose once wrote. “A relationship whose shape is uniquely undisclosed.” There was never a time when my sister and I couldn’t be told apart. Eleven years lay between us. More than a decade of her believing to be the only daughter in the family, and then in her eleventh year, terrified or exhilarated by the prospect of another girl, one she would call sister. While she was off to college pursuing a degree, I was a prepubescent teenager who seemed far removed from our family’s history—that the early 2000s were the happiest times came to me sporadically from visits to our family pediatrician and surprise calls from relatives who lived in small towns in Leyte and Cagayan de Oro. My sister met them all. They called her Darling. Kamusta na si, Darling? The years which I recall through group photographs of my father wearing biker shorts and mirrored sunglasses on a mountain hill in Davao del Sur; our mother wearing a gray silk double-breasted blazer with a matching pencil skirt. Even then, beautiful with her wavy soft mullet hair and large pearls.
That I was not conscious of living through a golden time, lost to the many uncles and cousins that popped up every now and then, and that growing older, somehow having to appropriate these tales and strangers into the facts of my own life felt more myth than history (an inheritance of having been born a decade late)—all of these rightfully belonged to my sister and not to me. By essence of memories, scenes of a life that she actually lived through. That she, herself, is a character in these retellings, of the past that I was largely unbeknownst to, set precedence to many differences that came later on.
I became the sister who attended private school and was noticeably more sosyal; lacked warmth but was more trusting of strangers, whose own sense of style was often misconstrued as an arrogance over receiving pasalubongs and not as a kind refusal to spend money on her. And she was Darling, the daughter everyone knew; whose charm and gingery laughter bended the air around her; who possessed a lionheart to claim space and by which in total has lived in two countries, four cities, three different states.