THE THOUSANDS OF ISLANDS

AldrinBadiola Grade9 BaltimorePolytechnicInstitute

Sweat drips from my furrowed brows onto the lenses of my glasses. I’d woken up– not in my bedroom, but in front of a house I was quick to recognize, yet not know whose it was. But I knew exactly where I was.

I never thought it would be possible. I was back to a home that I have never known. To a world I have never explored; to lands uncharted by the map that my parietal lobe has in its grasp. I had made it to the Philippines.

Who knew that even in dreams I could be chased by my own lack of experience in existence? In existing in a world where I am not welcome; a place where I feel so distant from people I should love; should want to love, because of the divisions of language and culture? I am a Filipino person; I simply just live in the United States. But I am as American as Asian immigrants get.

The house I was in front of flew the flag of the Philippines on a pole beside its entrance door. That wonderful flag terrorizes me everywhere I go; I show it off with pride, yet its loud whispers interrupt any sense of connection to who I could have been to who I actually am. All I can hear when I wear that flag is the taunts of Filipinos that are older than me about how I can’t speak Tagalog.

I had awoken in my bed, a reinvigorated passion to eat more Filipino food, learn Tagalog, or even travel to the Philippines for the first time since I left on an airplane as a one-year-old. But I was not aspiring to achieve those things because I wanted to reconnect to the roots I could’ve had or to prove myself to anyone. The thousands of islands I might never know in this life will never welcome me as I wish it would.