I’m seeing my college block mates today. It has been 10 years since we all first met during our university’s orientation seminar. I still remember sitting next to Mikee and waving hi to Kristina who sat a row behind me, all complete strangers at that point—all still budding balls of energy and potential and idealism. It’s difficult to picture all that has transpired over the last 10 years.
A few of us had agreed to meet in Rockwell before carpooling to Kodawari in Salcedo village, where we would have dinner. I arrive early. To pass the time, I sit at the smaller Starbucks near the Powerplant cinemas (there’s a much bigger branch a few floors below, but I prefer the quiet of this one) and read a book about killing time. Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming.
There’s a chapter entitled Dinner Parties as Hanging Out. Perfect, I think to myself, a prelude to my college reunion. The past two weeks—my last week in Beijing before the winter break and the few days since I arrived in Manila—had been filled with see-you-in-two-months get-togethers and reunions. I feel the need for some priming to keep my social batteries charged for the night ahead.
In this chapter, Liming tells the story of her friend Émile, who in the 1980s had met a local girl and they started hanging around together (excerpt from the book below):
“She invited him to dine one evening with her parents. The day of the dinner party came and he and the girl spent it at the beach and then they had to stop off to buy wine on the way to her parents’ house. Émile didn’t have a car, only a bike, and the girl didn’t even have that much, so they took off from the beach with her on his handlebars.
When he got to this part in the story, Émile would always make a motion with his hand to describe their movements as they rolled up and over the hills toward the town. It was like he was caressing the shapes of the remembered terrain. The town, as he explained, would appear, bobbing there on the horizon, and then disappear again as the bike descended the next hill. Up and over. Now you see it, now you don’t. He had to bike hard and the whole way, the girl’s long, blonde hair kept flying back into his face and it would get in his mouth, which tickled and made him laugh.
At the market, the girl picked out the wine: it was sunset-colored, more orange than red or pink. Émile had never heard of the type and, afterward, he could never manage to conjure up its name again. At her parents’ house, they opened the wine and had it alongside a first course of braised leeks in mustard sauce and it was the most glorious thing Émile had ever tasted, he said. The wine was sharp and dry and acidic, but also laced with honey. It was like the whole day at the beach had been boiled down and put into a bottle and then served cold, still smelling of all its good, warm summer smells.
Years later, back in Pittsburgh, Émile chanced upon the same wine for sale in a shop. He’d been looking for it for years but hadn’t known what to ask for. He recognized it immediately, though, from the label and also the orange color, and he bought a bottle to take home and then picked up some leeks and whole grain mustard to go with it. But, as he would always tell it to me, when he tasted it all those years later, he realized it wasn’t the wine, it had never been the wine. Rather, it had been ‘the flavor of the whole day,’ as he used to put it—that was what he had been tasting back then. It was brewed, that flavor, from a complex assortment of impressions, the beach and the bike ride and the girl and her hair in his mouth and her family’s second-floor apartment with its windows open to the street and the leeks in mustard sauce and then also, finally, the wine. But it had never been just the wine.”
I shed one (1) tear—neither of joy nor sorrow, but more of familiarity—as I read through this chapter, thinking of all the other times the beer or the meal tasted better than it should have when paired with the right moment. I think of the crosspoint I’m in—a few days “pitstopping” in Manila before going back home to Iloilo. I think of all the moments that just came before the plane ride en route to this city and all the moments after the plane ride leaving it.
Jaymes—whom I call Shrim because his surname is Shrimski and because I have too many James’s in my life—and Ymara arrive shortly after I finish reading the chapter. “You look exactly the same,” Shrim tells me. He’s right. He, on the other hand, always looks slightly different every time I see him, always fashion forward. Ymara is proudly wearing her 5—maybe 6—inch sandals. I’ve never seen her this tall. She embraces the power of her artificial height as we walk and talk and ensure we’re 100% caught up with each other’s lives.
We talk until we decide to take a seat in the bigger Starbucks downstairs. Both Ymara and Shrim had just moved to new companies and I’m curious about their experiences because a part of me actually misses the corporate life of moving jobs and finding your place within a larger ecosystem of roles. Ymara shares how her colleagues at her old company said goodbye to her, how it wasn’t her competence at work that stuck with them but her willingness to be of help to others, her energy, and ultimately how she made them feel.
We all agree that life isn’t work and work isn’t life. And that work can simply be that which provides a steady cash flow for our needs, hobbies, and interests. If it so happens to also be something we also enjoyed, then great! Anything more is a bonus. This is a healthy way to look at it, I think.
We also contemplate the significance of personal relationships, most especially the loved ones with whom our time together is limited. As we grow older, so do the people who have raised us. As we move on to the various phases of our lives, it’s inevitable that we leave some people behind—albeit temporarily until the next reunion.
I felt this in a very real sense recently while still in Beijing. Two days before my flight to leave, I was walking just outside our campus, when I bumped into Shatha, my friend from Saudi Arabia. She invited me to her farewell party to be held at the end of the week. I told her, I was leaving in two days. “When are you back in Beijing?” I ask. “I’m not coming back!” she replies.
I’m reminded of another conversation I had with Sunny, my friend from Korea, and Ifigenia, the only Greek student on campus. We were walking back from class one day. We talked about how at the end of our program, while some will stay in China for work, many of us will be headed back to our home countries for good. We should just end our friendships now, we joked, to avoid an inevitable bitter goodbye. We knew, the deeper our relationships become, the more difficult the separation would be.
At 6:40 PM, CJ arrives to collect us. I’ve always seen CJ—or Siege, as some would call him—as the older brother of the block. At the end of a long night, he would insist on giving you a ride home, no matter how far or out of the way you lived. There’s a meme showing Matthew McConaughey driving alone through a highway with the caption “POV: the friend who drops all the homies home, going back to his house.” This always reminds me of CJ. That’s just the guy he is.
After a rather tight parking episode, we arrive at Kodawari where we meet Alex and Kristina, who arrived straight from the separate law offices they work at, and Pat Ambal—the “Ambal” is necessary due to the numerous Pat’s we know from college—who was off-duty today, thank goodness. We scream “Pat Ambal MD!!!” as soon as we see her because she has just passed the recent physicians’ licensure examinations.
I feel a sense of ease and an unexplainable longing. The night has not really begun yet but I already don’t want for it to end. A bit of greed creeps in me as I think of all the other friend groups I wish to meet with. I want more time, more energy, more perfect timings. “Just more of this,” I think, “this here feels good and I’m glad I’m in it. More please.”
But then I remind myself, the unavoidable risk of separation is the price we pay for connection. Years of moving from one city to another, switching careers, companies, schools, have taught me this.
After dinner, we take a quick walk to the nearby bar below Picasso Hotel for some wine and dessert, where another wave of feels crashes onto me. This time, I share it with the group. I tell them how happy I am that everyone is here and how sad I am going to be when we all go home tonight, and also that I may have preempted the sadness by putting it out into the open. Shrim reminds me of the Seneca quote: “A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.” “Yup,” I tell him, “that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
As we sip our wines, we collectively decide to set an even bigger reunion with the rest of the block. We pick a date in February and suddenly we have something else to look forward to. I’m learning that this is an effective remedy for the separation anxiety. Before the end of the current hangout, set the next one.
Just yesterday, I was with some college dormer friends we employed the same technique. Right before we said our goodbyes, we planned a date for a hiking trip to Mt. Pulag the month after. So it was never really goodbye, rather it was a “See you. Pulag, Pulag.” A much softer blow.
Tonight is no different. “It was so good seeing you,” we would say, “see you next month.” No goodbyes, only see you later—but for real, with an actual date, venue, the works!
CJ proposes a shot. One for the road. “A shot of what?” I ask him. He looks at me, disappointed, “Did you really need to ask?” I’ve found that my love for tequila is a mere side effect of CJ’s obsession with it. He orders the most expensive shots of tequila on the menu. We chase it with an orange slice and brown sugar—it really didn’t need a chaser, but the complementary flavors completed the shot. Shrim and CJ rave over its smoothness and taste. I, recalling Èmile’s words, think to myself, “the flavor of the whole night.”
“I have tasted good things and bad, in other words, though the individual flavors of those things, much like Émile’s wine, were never the point. What has mattered, each time, is the work of collective arrival—taking the time to get to a place where time itself feels different, and to arrive there all together, in the company of people I care about. Kim Stanley Robinson, also an avid backpacker, describes that feeling of collective arrival as ‘re-entering a miracle.’ It is a phrase that evokes the feeling of entering into something known and familiar, marked by generations of ritualistic occurrence, that yet persists in feeling incessantly new. And it is the caring that makes the flavor of the whole day happen. It is the seizing of a moment that you hope will come again, but which is really only here right now, that proves to be the true source of satiation.”
Shiela Liming, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time
