“Here it is. My memory, my old light, fixed in time. And sometimes—how quickly did things change—”.
– Larissa Pham, Camera Roll (Notes on Longing)
It’s August. Which means it’s Ghost Month. Which means my dad and I can’t do our usual rounds of packing more things into the car, and driving to the new-old house. Despite her vocal despise towards China (some very reasonable, others just plain weird), she adheres to their superstitions like it were second gospel.
It’s in this brief pause that we can at least be in denial. We can pretend that time, and even the very idea of forwards had stopped in this bubble of temporary non-time. August didn’t become the name of a month but of a utopia where we’re obligated to live in denial; in bliss of not having to reduce our home into packed junk.
Except, it’s difficult when the apartment is making it clear it is anything but a pause. I see rats scurrying about more frequently now—having a fill at our lives in more crevices they can fester in, and the years of accumulated junk they can feast on. A square of plywood chipped off from the ceiling of our roof during a very bad storm a couple of weeks back. Our house was a patchwork of sentiment, but it was becoming much harder to be in maintain.
August is ending. By now, it went from utopia to a glaring reminder that we’re past the halfway point of the year, and come September, and the months following that we’ll be a lot more committed packing the rest of our home into a box, knowing full well that a lot of these would probably be thrown away at the new place.
There are boxes we won’t even bother opening, knowing what they were and what they aren’t now. The process of packing, and relocating these memorabilia into an indifferent corner; this, too, is denial.
I’ll miss my cocoa butter kisses
I think scent is the hardest to write, mainly because to ascribe scent is to not just detail a fragrance’s notes and elements, but the scene to come with it. Despite being undervalued by philosophers, scientists, and even writers to a degree, the olfactory remains essential to living. To write about scent is to be burdened with remembering; in memory and daydream; in past and future tense.
One could make the argument that a scent is more potent than a photograph is to nostalgia. Because a photograph is complacent, knowing that even in forgetting, something real and tangible is stored away somewhere. A photograph is to capture a fixed moment in time, yet I can refuse to look at it. A photo rarely barges in unannounced, oftentimes the act of remembering through photographs is deliberate, knowing it’s fondness is sweet enough to be sought after.
But smelling something; the near-invisible and abstract stimuli of scent. We are forced to remember. Elusive as it is intruding, our present conscience is suddenly upended by a whiff of something. Your brain takes a moment to register not the where, but the when—when have i last seen you?
Chance the Rapper’s Cocoa Butter Kisses tells us the longing for childhood in three parts. We are taken to the distances drawn between the three rappers and their respective pasts, embodied in family, self, and the material. The song can be an anthem for relapse. A new kind of addiction where scent is at the forefront. Despite the bliss given by drugs, Chance is washed over with the potency of nostalgia, presented in the soothe of cocoa butter and the tenderness of a mother that came with it. The distance is recognized and avoidant, and we are left but to poorly dress ourselves in swathes of memory to reconnect with what is now foreign to us.
The sound first introduces us to something reminiscent of a funeral hymn—its composition of somber, hazy organ notes slowly melds into Chance’s voice, and then to its arrhythmic beats. The chorus and verse, sounding half-dazed and nostalgic, takes us to a story as it crescendos into faster and more frustrated bars in the succeeding verses from Vic Mensa and Twista.
“I think we all addicted.”
The song evokes nostalgia, which can only take us so far, and has its own respective caveats. We’re not the person they last saw us but we like to pretend.
When I was walking along Ortigas a weekend ago, I caught a whiff of the cheap Bench teen’s cologne we used to wear in childhood. I am reminded of 2009, back when my mother and I went out often to watch movies during the summer, and we had far too few things to really disagree about. When the skies were just as sullen but the smell of petrichor made it feel more lulling than dangerous, just like it did then. I am reminded of 2009, when everyone unanimously loved comic books because our school library had them, and we got drawn to the gratuitous gore of a Vampiric Batman impaling Two-Face with two crossbow bolts on both sides of his face(s). Back when everyone danced and everyone encouraged you to dance. I am reminded of 2009.
I wear the cologne my sister gave me last Christmas. David Beckham’s Bold Instinct is a safe scent. Masculine, spicy, and turns a tad sweeter as it settles. I wear it to feel complete, but less so out of want to be seen. Worse, I wear it more out of habit than anything. We’re back to square one.
Writing about a scent, this is its own kind of pain. I am forced to remember.
A patchwork love.
We have a lot of recycled fans. Some of them are almost as old as I am and have undergone several repairs. My father refuses to let something die. Whether it’s out of his show of resourcefulness, frugality, or sentiment; regardless, a lot of them were back in working order after an afternoon of tinkering around. My father has kept enough old screws and discarded parts to make use of them one day. The same way with whatever was just broken from a recent fan would make its way back into another broken fan one day. This is what sentiment gets him, and it’s in that very same mindset that works for almost anything else.
Dad would collect some of the clothes I thought were already thrown away long ago. He’d go to our room, hold this worn out Captain America tee in front of me and ask if I still remember this shirt, as if to say “do you remember when you were this person?”.
There are some shirts that I do keep with me again, and some that were no longer worth keeping. Soon enough they’d find its way to someone else that my father knows, as long as it continues to live on.
Whereas for my mother, she is more of the Marie Kondo philosophy of “if it does not spark joy, throw it away,” and that includes any item (mostly clothes), no matter how recent, as long as it has outlived its growth. This isn’t to say she isn’t a sentimental person, but she is more willing to know when something is no longer fitting of their current character. Hence, the old blazers, the old blouses, and even old T-shirts find their way to a trashbag, to which my father salvages and finds a way to give it off to someone else.
This was one of the many things my parents were often at odds with. My father hoards future resources but refuses to discard, and my mother discards too easily, but has cultivated a more refined identity for herself.
In Zea Asis’s essay collection titled “Strange Intimacies”, her first essay, “Pre-Loved”, talks about the relationship of pre-owned (more commonly referred to as “pre-loved) clothes and its new wearer. Discarding its past life to make way for a succession of strangers’ new histories. It’s also from there that clothes are our way of negotiating and renegotiating with the self—to both be seen and to know what we are.
If the phrase to be loved is to be changed can be applied to the worn down metamorphosis of secondhand clothes, then to be found is to be remembered. In some strange way, the clothes we discard and later picked up by someone else might have adjacent similarities. Maybe they, too, listened to the same type of music I did when I wore that shirt, and lived the same teenage angst I did, not to say that it repeats itself, but it, too, can still hold what it knew from elsewhen.
“It is a peculiar kind of nostalgia—yearning for a life lived by garments once owned” Number 15 in her series of introspects in this essay.
Sometimes my rotation of outfits would include some of my father’s clothes. An oversized beige shirt to pair with my jeans, a textured yellow shirt with a disco collar to match my yellow Chuck Taylors, or a white button down with a navy blue square patterns in the middle of the shirt. Somehow I was more than just a legacy of my father’s clothes but a vessel of hybridities. I rarely if at all, ever seen my father wear some of the clothes I dug out from his pile, so what I’m doing isn’t really wearing my father’s memories but rather the daydream of what he would have looked like when he wore them the day he bought it. I imagine when he were a lot younger.
Lately, I’ve decided to move away a bit from my father’s wardrobe and cultivate my own wardrobe of clothes. I’ve taken to Instagram shops that sold “pre-loved” clothes, cropped and customized to better fit in with today’s fashion trends. Naturally, I became a sucker and irresponsibly blew most of my paycheck on impulse purchases.
Yet, I loved being a mosaic of discarded selves. I loved through mimesis—being a patchwork of accumulated memory and to daydream I am either one of them. I loved being a mirror if it meant I didn't have to see myself.
What I really mean when I say I’m going out for a jog.
Back in 2022, I started running again. After two years of being mostly stuck at home, and days of inactivity, I decided to bring back some old habits. Once my family got more comfortable with the idea of me going out more often, I started with doing morning runs around my neighborhood. Guised under the promise of losing weight, I’ve slowly rebuilt a healthy routine as a way of figuratively (and in some ways literally) running away from my anxieties. My breath heaved and my legs tire easily in the first couple of weeks. Actually, even as it grew into habit, my stamina barely changed. I never got the runners high they were talking about, only the compulsion to at least do a couple of laps each day.
I stopped around January of last year. Or at least, became less frequent as I soon fell into other pitfalls of stagnancy that weren’t just about running.
I’ve been spacing out so frequently. I make a deal to myself to keep moving. Always be moving so I don’t have to space out so often, but the thought of moving paralyzes me. The thought that everyone else is moving paralyzes me even more. I’ve made a deal with myself that any kind of moving is still forwards, so move. It helps me dwell much less.
Hence why I’ve been going out more often. Sometimes not even for social reasons nor errands, but just for the sake that I need to be out of the house. Maybe because someone once told me fresh air made the air feel light again. Or maybe so I can become accustomed to the distance that was gradually becoming more and more prominent in our home.
Maybe for any other reason, grief is the real answer to all of it. The pre-emptive grief to save us the trouble later on.
Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks talks about a pain more potent than absence itself: absence through replacement. She visits the house she and her family used to live in, when her father was still with them. She watches from afar as their old apartment is now lived in by a new tenant. She takes note of the rearranged space, the newly placed items in places where her old items used to sit on. Owusu describes how the replaced gauges us to reconcile with memory, a lasting sting that they were whole in that place once.
When I ran, I ran for my grief. I ran from breaking caused by the distance drawn between me and a past. Now, I run as a way to remember; to reconcile with what else I’ve lost since then. When I take a right turn to my usual route, I do not remember what I grieved for when I first ran in 2022, but instead what I had.
More and more the house surrenders itself to age. We’re slowly learning to unlove this apartment. Its creaks and imperfections became less sentiment and more practical annoyance. I open old letters and everything I’ve written in this substack from last year. There are boxes I still haven’t opened.
“Fondness peters out to estrangement.” Number 6 in “Pre-Loved”
When all of this is over, a part of me fears no one is really going to hold me. I treat it like a prediction.
There are some aches I can’t return to.