Turbulence.

The plane taxied on the tarmac of Manila Domestic Airport, and as I peered outside the window to an overcast sky that seems to give off a feeling of dread, I have a feeling in my gut that I should have not come back. As the passengers came filing inside the terminal and headed to the only working conveyor belt to wait and pick up their luggages, I felt like a lost cattle in the huge, unfamiliar crowd. The flight was delayed for an hour and the humidity was suffocating.

I heaved off my huge backpack into my cousin's van and proceeded to perfunctorily greet everyone in a semi-daze. Manila is the city of our frustrations, and this day is not any day different amongst all the others-its festering slums and shantytowns our postmodern monument to our national angst and hopelessness.

I always loved to travel and I try to get away from it all every chance I can get. Filipino folk beliefs say that a mole on the sole of one's feet meant that that person will go places. I wonder what a mole on the tip of one's genitalia do.

Call me escapist, I call myself human. I refused to be a serf enslaved to a mindless monotonous tyranny of everyday living. I guess we are all travellers, because change is the most natural thing in the world. It is always nice to get away from it all, to meet new people, see new places, make new acquaintances and create temporary attachments, because for all we know this will be gone in the wink of an eye. A look at my childhood photos is always an emotional moment for me. These are the moments that I can never bring back. Some faces die, some fades away. Some places gone, some places crumble. To the extreme (in my point of view), one friend is fascinated with airports and travelling. I once received an SMS from him while he is aboard a train snaking its way to the Kenyan port of Mombasa from Nairobi and while I didn't know that he was abroad, I called to invite him to a major sports event. And to his weirdest phone call ever, he was riding at the back of a truck barreling its way in the middle of a desert in Yemen. Today he was at the southernmost province of the Philippines- the Tawi-tawi archipelago.

I guess we are wayfarers all. We are all travellers, sometimes we get to our destinations, sometimes we dont. Others travel in a more blistering pace while others dawdled. And in the journeys we take makes the unbearable weight of our memories even heavier. And with that nagging, blunt pain, we simply trudge on, even when we are lost, we move blindly forward. Because these cursed emotions of hope give us the strength and the faith that everything, somehow, will turn out just fine.