Vaguely afraid of the heat. An all-enveloping one that sticks to you like how you’d feel cling film would. And you keep asking, when did it get this bad? Would you really get used to it? Is it just something in the mind, and that the mind can override it? On the fourth day, I gave up and retreated to one of the rooms to read and turned the air-conditioning on. I didn’t get to use half the usual facial stuff I normally put on my mug daily, and gave up wearing underwear altogether.

Authority/the Powers-that-be. I’d like to believe that our family name still has some value and that it’s a currency you can use when needed. But I hope that we won’t need to, not anymore anyway since we’re now citizens of another country. Or let my mother use it for herself instead to navigate an even more complex, even more sinister system running on favours, contacts and kickbacks.

Violence. I studied college in Manila and spent some time working there, but I can’t say exactly that I know it, not when the places I inhabited and moved around were places of privilege. Stepping out into a place like Cubao or Pasay is still jarring. You wish you were chameleon-like, to blend into the scenery, to look a little rough at the edges, your skin duller, your body language slightly less assured and more defeated. But have never succeeded in fooling the dodgy taxi drivers at the airport that I was an OFW, or those roving opportunists when my father was running for re-election that I was no one but the household help. Maybe it’s all in my imagination. Maybe it’s all mostly random. But I never linger, the share-ride mere minutes away to whisk me off to a ‘safer’ place, all my cash (in the mid-5 digits) stuffed in my tight pants pockets where I feel it’s safer. But in Pangasinan, I relax a little bit. I take the jeep around Dagupan which is forever fixing itself but never really succeeding. I take a tricycle home and take some perverse pleasure at all the gawking, of people trying to recognise me - look at that guy, he looks different.