4 YEARS AND SOME deciding to leave home

Four years and some. It took this much time, a work in progress by itself, for the hubby and I to finally move in to our new place by the beach.

This decision to leave our careers, family and new friends behind in the Big City came in mid-1999. Deep in our souls, we knew that we were slowly becoming the selves we saw and despised in people struggling to survive the concrete jungle of Metro Manila. We were forcing ourselves to live the metropolitan life: continuously yearning for things material. We were learning the trade of survival, crushing other people’s spirits so that ours may persevere. We were consumed with the element of time, as if there was nothing more important in the world than to live fast and furious.

The terrible feeling was gnawing at us, eating us as we looked at our lives with jaded eyes. We were living such deafening and cacophonic lives, the paradox of what we planned our lives to be. We knew if we didn’t leave the Big City, it would consume us whole and the good that we once were, would be forever lost.

We decided that for us to reinvent ourselves, we had to leave the Big City. The time to leave would be after four years and some, a little after our son had graduated from college and established himself independent of us.