Crying in hotel rooms, and other occupational hazards

The night before I left for Jeju Island, I had dinner at the mall with my sister who was back in Manila for a few days. My niece was with us, as well as our cousin and a friend. I stopped by the supermarket first for things I would need on my trip: apple shampoo, toothpaste, cherry blossom-scented soap I’d always wanted to try, a plug adapter because the letter from the travel agency had suggested it.

We met up at Scout’s Honor after. I picked at my meatballs as we discussed our jobs and burnout and what we did on our days off, which we didn’t get to talk about very often. Our lives after college pulled us in irreversibly different directions, one of us even living and working in a city thousands of kilometers away. It made catching up a bit more difficult than before.

We had never had a grownup dinner where it was just us, without our parents. It felt for the first time like we were regular young adults having another night out, like I’d read about in novels and seen in the movies. I thought it was something I could get used to.

Dylan was two and just beginning to speak in full sentences. Idly I watched her play with the puzzles and blocks the restaurant put out for customers and my mind was already a little bit far away, imagining all the places I was about to see.

I tried not to think about the time. The mall was about to close. I still had to pack. My flight was early.

I told myself: I’ll just lose sleep.

The rest of it went without saying: So I can have this.

✈

The first song I heard on the street when I arrived in the city, tinny but unmistakable on the loudspeakers of the underground shopping complex beneath Chilsung-ro, was “Spring Day.” At this point, I had probably listened to it hundreds of times in ardent anticipation of the trip, letting it occupy my headspace as I pictured canola blooms and clear crisp weather. A common, meaningless occurrence, hearing a very popular song by a very popular South Korean group in South Korea, but I was always a romantic, and it was obviously fate.

It was my first time traveling alone and I was fretting about it for weeks. My editor had texted asking if I would be free to go to Jeju Island for a story, and my calendar was blissfully blank. I had just gotten my passport renewed — it was exciting to finally get to go somewhere new with it.

I didn’t receive any information and I wasn’t actually sure it was happening until the day before the flight, when the travel agency sent me an email with my plane ticket and the itinerary for the tour. I’d never been on a press trip. I was used to taking my time in a new city until it became like a second home during month-long stays with my diplomat aunt. But now I only had four days and three nights. A change of pace, to say the least.  

I spent that first night trying to get used to my hotel room. I went on my private Twitter account for close friends and wrote about it: i have this whole room to myself (perfect for crying!) and i know i’m gonna miss it like hell already. Patch replied: do they have a tub? cause u really deserve a tub. They didn’t, but it was easily the nicest thing anyone has said to me anyway.  

I went to bed, awkwardly messing up the pristine sheets on one side as I got under the covers. I read a story on my phone, brightness turned low. Something about a writer who travels to a different country for work and falls in love, and it makes him happy, but he’s also sad, because he’s sad all the time. Something I kept coming back to because I found comfort in its muted melancholy.

It was 2 a.m. before I knew it. I had to be up in four hours. I left the story unfinished, watched my lock screen fade to black, and closed my eyes.

✈

I couldn’t fathom trying to muster the energy and commitment to hike three hundred steps up the Seongsan Ilchulbong Peak, so I ducked out of the tour group when nobody was looking and went across the fields to look at the sea instead.

I walked along the streets first, took in the people selling tangerines on the roadside and tried to pluck up the courage to enter a coffee shop or McDonald’s. But I was afraid of seeming like such a tourist, much too aware of being by myself and of the language barrier, so I ended up at the nearby 7-Eleven. I went to the counter with a bottle of pear-flavored Sprite and felt myself uncoil somewhat from being so tightly wound when I managed to avoid messing up “감사합니다.”

I sat at the hexagonal wooden table outside and stared at the brick wall opposite me with a sign that said 해녀민박 — Haenyeo Bed and Breakfast — above it. There was an image of a Jeju woman diver (the haenyeo in question) on the bottom left, standing regal and proud in her diving gear.

It was beginning to rain.

I walked out to the edge of the field that overlooked the water, the wind whipping around me, and tried to memorize everything I could see. There was the peak to my left, looking like the opposite of ephemeral where it stood starkly framed by the morning sun. There was the surrounding town, so familiar already that my heart ached a little at the thought of leaving, at the thought that my time with it had begun to run out before I even stepped off the bus because we were never meant to stay in one place for too long. And then there was the off-kilter shape of the sea. From where I stood, it didn’t look all that different from the bleak, empty skies.

There was a protective barrier on the edge which was barely up to my thigh. The thought entered my head, unbidden as it always was: It would be so easy to jump. My fingers twitched with an impulse to walk up to it and peer at the pale grey depths waiting below. I shook it off and braced myself against the chill, huddling tighter in my leather jacket as I headed for cover from the rain though I didn’t really mind it.

At the airport waiting to fly back home I would listen to “Waiting for My Sun to Shine” by The Maine, and the lyrics would remind me of this moment, somehow already in the past.

And it wouldn’t occur to me until three months later how not normal that was. To be in another country, someplace I’d never been, looking out into something beautiful and only thinking what a nice place it would be to die.  

Earlier that month, Anna Borges had published an essay on The Outline titled “I am not always very attached to being alive,” comparing constant, reflexive suicidal ideation to living in the ocean. In it, she discussed the “nebulous gray space between fleeting thought and attempt,” where there’s a passivity and indifference to the feeling of wanting to die, more background noise than anything.

One of the songs I kept listening to on repeat those days was “Dark Water” by JR JR, its chorus a devastating suggestion that maybe you were always drowning, and you just now realize that you were. So you could say I understood it a little too well, that resignation and recognition that it was just another side effect of mental illness, just another part of who I’d become. Not always an emergency — sometimes the act of it was mundane and ordinary, like washing your hands or crossing the street.

Borges further wrote about learning to tread these unpredictable waters, of trying to keep your head above the surface and stay afloat. Some floatation devices, she said, were like driftwood, “shallow motivators, hardly anchors to life, but sometimes you just need something that will get you through the month. Or the week. Or the night.” Others were life preservers, more sturdy and long-term, helping you swim towards some semblance of a future.

This is something I’ve been doing for longer than I care to admit. My relationship with my own future has become precarious and complicated. An anonymous message I got on Tumblr when I was 17 asked what it was that I did when I felt like dying or when everything got to be too much, and I answered that I sought something to look forward to, that I would regret missing, no matter how shallow (pesto pasta, a new movie) or far-fetched (visiting New York, meeting a celebrity crush).  

An excerpt from one of the last entries I posted on Dayre before I left it for good:

I honestly can’t imagine how there could possibly be anything more, anything left for me, even if I somehow reach a stable plane of existence and become a functional human being.

There are flashes, sometimes: A published novel. A pet cat. Watching my niece grow up. A studio apartment with big windows and enough space for all my books for once.

“The ocean is nice sometimes,” Borges concluded somewhere near the end of her essay. I must have been thinking the same thing as we left the Seongsan Peninsula. Not just bodies of water, but also the state of being suspended. Whether you’re desperately holding on, or letting yourself be washed away. Despite that brief lapse into the unmentionable, I felt more like myself than I had in a while. No longer so concerned with being a tourist, struck instead by a sudden sense of belonging. I always did think to myself that if I had to settle somewhere, it would be a quaint seaside town.

Out there on the field, I spotted a group of haenyeo bobbing up and out of the water, fresh catches in tow. I had read about them once in a magazine: how they were known for their independence and power, some of them well into their 80s, making an honest living diving for fish. And now here they were, right in front of me. Our tour guide had mentioned that we might see them if we were really lucky.

The friends I had made in the tour group were wistful, lamenting what a shame it was that they had missed the haenyeo. I listened to them as I leaned against the window, and made no move to tell them what I had seen. Some magical moments you just had to keep to yourself.

✈

I was moving on autopilot, spending the day trips sightseeing and being friendly with my companions who had no idea how depressed I was. I smiled for pictures and kept up with pleasant conversation. I passed the banchan as we had a meal and laughed along. At night I would go back to my hotel room, drained and boneless, and just fend off the cold and the sudden loneliness while I began sobbing in the dark for no reason.

I was running out of layers.

I wouldn’t be able to stop picturing it for months: the room, every light turned off, no air conditioning because it was spring and the cold slipped in through the closed windows and chilled the hardwood beneath my bare feet. Shadows and lights from passing cars crawled across the bed and onto the ceiling, and I’d lie awake at unguarded hours shrinking under the blankets and quietly wailing.

✈

So far, the days in Jeju had been glacial and unforgiving, the last impressions of winter overstaying their welcome. It was like the weather was my mood ring, the skies coloring the city a palette of blues and greys, the rain seeping through to my skin as though I needed a reminder of how gloomy it was inside.

But everything was different on the fourth day, when I hauled my once-again-full suitcase out onto the street and turned my face up to the kind of morning I’d been hoping for. Our bus pulled away from the hotel for the last time and I watched the scenery change out the window, saying goodbye to all of it the only way I knew how.

When I try to recall it now, I don’t think about the activities we did together or the places we went. Instead I think of the scent of pine and saltwater, the miyeokguk and tangerine juice at breakfast, the greenhouses that reminded me of Burning. Silly, seemingly fleeting details, like using a public bathroom encased in two-way mirrors at Jeju Glass Castle or buying a cactus pen as a souvenir because I found it cheap and cute and discovering months later that BTS’ Namjoon had one exactly like it.

I think about that weird, unmoored feeling of being part of a tour group as a solo traveler and meeting all kinds of people, and how nice it could be to just go along with it and let things happen.

I’d brought my favorite plastic film camera with me to remember it all by. And while I don’t particularly enjoy having my picture taken, the friends I had made insisted on documenting every little stop of our tour. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t turn down their offers to take my photo among the canola fields or next to some mascot at a theme park, leaving me with an album that allows me to say, over and over again, “I was here.”

But the definitive snapshot that I’ve kept in my mind is this: the sun out and bright as the skies bled blue between evergreen trees, radiating warmth and welcomeness all around. A perfect day made even better with a summer latte — smooth, sweet iced coffee topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. A last-chance glimpse at what Jeju really looked like in the spring.

✈

Four months later I was in Singapore, exhausted after having gotten up at 5 a.m., almost missing a 10 a.m. flight, and heading straight to the indoor flea market event I’d volunteered to cover in Marina Bay Sands, which lasted until 7 p.m.

I met up with my sister for dinner at NY Night Market, worried that we would have nothing to talk about — we’re both quiet people, and we’ve never been all that close or actually spent any time alone together. We both ordered pasta and shared a plate of ranch cheese fries. I asked her about work and she asked about my day. We moved on to other things, and it didn’t feel like small talk.

(“I cried watching Hello, Love, Goodbye because I could relate to it,” she said. “Did it remind you of your previous relationships?” I joked. But she clarified, “No, their lives as OFWs, being apart from their families,” and then I definitely wasn’t joking around anymore.)

The rest was comfortable silence. I hadn’t considered it, maybe forgotten it because she’d been away for three years, but we’d always been able to do our own thing and still count as company. It takes a lot of trust and familiarity to be with someone and not feel the need to fill the quiet.

Unlike Jeju, I knew Singapore like the back of my hand. I lived there for a month when I was 18 and returned a couple of times, and it was an easy city to get to know regardless. It’s taught me independence from the first time I went out alone and found my own way around a foreign country as a teenager. (To meet the bassist of my then-favorite band, but that’s a story for another long-winded essay.)

I had a free day before I had to fly back home, and I was going to spend it revisiting a few of my favorite places and taking pictures. I got an MRT pass that gave me unlimited rides for a day and read Normal People by Sally Rooney, bought at Kinokuniya first thing that morning, on the train or whenever I stopped and sat somewhere.

I started at Somerset Station and slowly made my way through the loose route I had in mind, though I didn’t really venture that far: Dhoby Ghaut, Bencoolen, Clarke Quay, Tiong Bahru. I considered visiting my old apartment block in Queenstown but thought better of it because it wasn’t worth the long walk in the dry heat — if I had, I would’ve seen that the teal and lavender facade I’d adored was gone, replaced with a drab all-over white and the barest orange creamsicle accents.

The main item on my agenda was the art installation BooksActually was hosting at the theater development space Centre 42, which I learned about in their newsletter. Called “The World’s Loneliest Bookstore,” it had a vividly imagined post-apocalyptic concept where a freak solar flare leaves only 4,169 people alive in the whole world, and the one remaining person in Singapore has scavenged paintings and books and set up the last bookstore on earth as she attempts to reach anybody else who could possibly be out there.

The installation itself was just as detailed: a shelf stood lined with eggs, cereal, matches, and odd knick-knacks, an old radio hummed with throwback pop and static, and the woman from the story sat behind a counter, content with her solitude. Visitors could buy secondhand books and pick up printed paraphernalia with poetry. My favorite was the table with dozens of house keys bearing handwritten addresses. You could choose one to take with you, and I decided on one emblazoned with the word LUCKY.

At 1 a.m. I left my hotel room and walked along an eerily vacant Orchard Road to clear my head. (Nevermind that I had another early flight in a few hours.) I went to the basement 24-hour Japanese grocery, walking listlessly through the aisles past other twenty-somethings who obviously didn’t value their sleep. I didn’t have a lot of room in my suitcase, so all I bought were a couple of instant noodles I wanted to try: the Pokemon seafood ramen with tiny Pikachus in the form of fish cakes, and this insanely good salt and lemon yakisoba.

This late-night walk crosses my mind whenever I hear “Better Now” by Disco Hue, one of my favorite bands from Singapore. But at the time I must have been listening to “Song Request” — pretending I were one of those people in its music video, lonely but sufficed in a darkened city.

✈

I sometimes think about what it would’ve been like if I hadn’t gotten into BTS right before I went to Jeju. If any of it would have meant half as much.

Everything was so new. It’s embarrassing to think about now, but it was wonderful timing to be right there as I experienced those first few weeks of obsessing over a recently acquired interest I already felt very deeply for. It was the same rush you got from a school crush: that hyper-awareness of proximity, of standing in place and knowing they’d been there once, too — no longer as hyperbolic, but every bit as fervent. They followed me around; I saw them everywhere without really looking.

I can’t listen to “Spring Day” without being reminded of everything, the song and the memories inseparable, forever linked.

And because I only grew to love them even more as the months passed, they made a significant impact on my other trips too.

I never would’ve made fast friends with another underpaid and overworked Manila writer at the Singapore event who had a Koya keychain and said she liked the Hoseok sticker on my camera. I ran into her outside a train station the next day while having my little adventure but hid behind my book because I didn’t know how to say hi. We shared a ride to the airport for our flight home, and I would’ve liked to, but we didn’t keep in touch.

 

 

I never would’ve made a “delulu” joke that “What if we’re going to the same country?” one month later when I flew out to Singapore again for another story and BTS also happened to be flying somewhere that same morning, only to find out on Bon Voyage that we actually were at Changi Airport at the exact same time, not very far from each other at all. The hyper-awareness of proximity was belated this time, and it’s not like I ran into them, but it’s still a fun and endlessly frustrating story to tell. No one on Archive of Our Own could’ve written it better.

I never would’ve recognized “Mikrokosmos” as it played in the candy-scented lobby of Hello Kitty Island. (Map of the Soul: Persona had just come out and I wasn’t over the novelty of it just yet.) Never would’ve listened to the very same song on the plane back to Manila as I looked out the window at the night sky, crying all I wanted because it was a charter flight and I had the entire row to myself.

The fog and lights in Jeju made it hard to see the stars, but here they were bigger and brighter and there were more of them than I had ever seen in my life.

✈

I’ve been very fortunate to have had jobs that took me places. Writing the article itself was always strange because I had to stick to the relevant details, the half-hearted observations that went towards my word count: The Teddy Bear Museum draws crowds of keen Princess Hours fans. The indoor flea market has a section dedicated to Instagrammable food like milk in cookie cups and White Rabbit soft serve. The elevators at Legoland Hotel play “Everything Is AWESOME!!!” by Tegan and Sara feat. The Lonely Island all day under disco lights.

I had to omit such a big part of the experience — namely, my depression and how it affected the way I perceived and internalized what was going on around me. All that time to myself that was a relief, but could also be alienating. The unease of trying to enjoy myself when I’d grown unaccustomed to it. The detachment that seemed to manifest physically as the slow sensation of being hollowed out. The constant notion that I never thought I’d (still) be here.

Everything was precious and important, and everything was pointless and temporary.

In that story I keep reading, the protagonist imagines writing about the things that actually mattered to him on his sojourn — the raw, haunting, personal traces that exposed too much. In the end, his final piece held nothing about wounds and scars, or an inconsequential grocery store, or the person he’d fallen in love with. But the idea of what he called “becoming a part of a place instead of simply walking through it” remained.

I didn’t keep a journal that year. I came to remember my travels in pieces: stray notes on my phone and scraps of paper, an untitled Spotify playlist labeled only with emojis (a daisy, a cactus, and an orange), bad film photography, tweets I wrote in the moment, tweets I wrote when I began to miss it. I wrote this to unravel the rest of it, the ugly parts I couldn’t put in print.

Depression has this way of making every surreal, beautiful, monumental thing that happens to you feel like it’s something you’ve held on long enough to see. I count it all up. I hold it for safekeeping. Each one becomes so much more poignant, and lands with much more weight, especially after almost a year of not being able to leave home. As though something up there must have known that I couldn’t afford to waste any more time or throw any more of my life away.

I cut my hair short right before I went to Jeju. I haven’t had a haircut since. It’s strange to note that fragments of that version of me are still here. I always came home feeling like I’d lived through something, like I wasn’t the same. Some of it hurts like anything, but when I look back on it now, there’s only nothing but fondness.

I’ve lived through so many things already. It’s not so bad, I know now, to live through this.