Home?

Where is "home"?

As soon as I clicked "Save Entry" on my previous post, I couldn't shake the thought out of my head: I'm not "going home" to Dagupan, I'm just visiting.

Due to some "complications" a couple of years ago, I don't have a house in Dagupan City anymore.

Whenever people ask me where I'm gonna go for the holidays or during long weekends, my mind defaults to "nowhere" as an answer.

I consider myself NPA–No Permanent Address–because I really do not have a permanent address, like I said before. I've lived in four different places in the last two years: the Cityland condo in Makati, Ate Epie's house in Palmdale, Kuya and Ate Awit's house in Katipunan, and now my place here in Ortigas.

Now that I think about it, our family doesn't have a place we could collectively call "our own". Most people I know have their families' house to go home to during Christmas, while I go "Oh, shit" whenever Christmas comes because it means staying with my brother's family and his in-laws again where I feel so much like an outsider. It's not that they're not nice people. On the contrary, they are very nice and have been extremely generous to our family. Hey, they let me stay at their house for a few months for free after all! But you know what I mean, right?

So if there's a chance that we could all be together–like my brothers flying in from the US and London and somehow everybody's here in the Philippines–where would we stay? At a hotel? Hahaha! We are so screwed.