It is July 2015.

I am in Berlin for my 28th birthday, crashing on a friend’s couch for the next 12 days. I’m on my own across the world from my parents, something I’ve never been allowed to do before now, but I’ve never really been allowed to do a good number of things by Millennial standards anyway, so it’s a gift I appreciate all the more. (I suppose getting your heart broken and your pride wrecked by someone who gave you the idea that he wanted to be more than a summer fling does have its perks.)

The feeling is like being underage and getting drunk for the first time: like I’m doing something I’m not supposed to, and it’s the best thing ever. Except this time, I’m doing it with a lot less guilt and no fear, because there will be no repercussions — no one is watching; I don’t know anyone here. I can do whatever I want, and there is no place for doing that quite like this city.

No one watches in Berlin. No, that is wrong. They glance, and then look away politely; they do not document, and they do not judge. There’s a respect for privacy and individuality here that I never thought possible, which is unsurprising because Manila is the polar opposite, and Manila is the only place I’ve ever truly known. In Manila, there are no strangers. There are whispers, and whispers spread like wildfire, so you tread carefully.

In Manila, you either disappear or do your best to fit in, which is essentially the same thing. There’s this homogeneity to it. Ironically, despite the need to blend into the wallpaper, there is also a need to be seen, but not necessarily for who you are, unless who you are fits into the preferred social mold. If it doesn’t, you trim bits of yourself off until you do. So many give up personalities to become Personalities. Go where everyone goes. Wear what everyone wears. Do what everyone does. So pretty, so clean, so #GOALS. But it is all surface, surface, surface.

I came from a time less policed, when people felt more comfortable baring their souls to strangers who would eventually become real friends, which is probably why I still sometimes do, although things have changed considerably since then. But I have no right to judge if those who came after that era choose not to make themselves vulnerable; that is their prerogative, as this is mine. And perhaps theirs is the better choice in the end; there is less of them available for scrutiny, for judgment, for the condemnation of strangers who will most certainly not be your friends. But almost everything is so thoroughly sanitized. We present only the best of ourselves, the idealized and aspirational, and it turns into a never-ending cycle of everyone else trying to do the same thing: bury our grit in the dirt and pretend at perfection. It’s safer that way.

Berlin is gritty, and it is dirty, and it is all the more breathtaking for it, and within 12 hours of landing exhausted at Berlin Tegel, taking a quick nap, grabbing a bite, and being dragged out by friends to two clubs thinking that not wearing a bra under my backless tank top might be the most scandalous thing I have ever publicly done — my God, it’s nothing here — I already know I will leave this place irrevocably changed, because for the first time in my life, I am going to be allowed to learn — or decide, or discover — who I am, what I really want, and what kind of person I am capable of becoming outside of Manila’s gilded limits, in a place where everyone is free. The cage is open; I am about to fly.

No, that is the wrong metaphor. The abyss is before me; I am about to jump.

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I am typing away fruitlessly on my phone at breakfast, trying to send out important messages that aren’t going through because the cellular signal is terrible in our new village, when my mom looks at the newspaper, looks up at me, and gives me a quizzical look. We attended a piano concerto the other week, and our photo is sandwiched somewhere between two of John Lloyd Cruz. “Your body language here is so…guarded,” she comments. “So defensive.” I brought a friend — a male friend, a business partner — with me to see my favorite Rachmaninoff performed because he asked to come, to reconnect with his ‘Europeanness’ and bask in a little culture instead of the clubbing we were always doing. (Also, he’d never been to the CCP.)

“What?” I ask. I look at the photo. “Do I, really? I don’t think I do, I think I look good in that picture. I’m thin, I’m dressed like a lady, I look pleasant, and everything is on point.”

“Yes, you do, but look at this, look at your body language,” Mom says. “I can read it, and I can read you. You’re leaning away from him. You’re so on guard.” She likes this boy a lot, which does not happen very often with boys I introduce to her. (I can write this here because that smug halfie already knows precisely how charming he was and can be; and I have told her — and my godmother, and my grandmother, who were also with us and also now adore him, and even my editor, who messaged me at three in the morning to ask me about ‘the guy I was with’ — time and again since then that we really do work together.) “Why do you look so hesitant?” she asks me.

I don’t even pause to think about my answer. “Mom, I think I’m like that with all boys. Even ones I’m interested in. Especially those. Because every year since I became single, I’ve put myself out there, and I got hurt, and I got disappointed, and I’m scared to get hurt again. I’m not ready to go through that another time. I’m not done putting myself back together. There are things about myself I need to fix, and right now, I don’t know how to trust. I’m too terrified.”

She looks at me with understanding. We have the most open mother-daughter relationship I know of — almost more best friends than anything else — and I tell her nearly everything. I can count on one hand the number of people who know me better than I know myself, and she is one of them. She knows. She knows about last summer.

Around April of last year, at the height of an ill-advised and ill-fated summer romance, I wrote an essay entitled Thermodynamics. About 80 people got to read a version of it on my now defunct TinyLetter, and it was initially written upon the request of Sarge Lacuesta for Esquire’s Notes & Essays section for an issue about women — anything about the female experience, don’t even think about it, just wing it, and by the way, your deadline’s in less than a week — but it never came out in the magazine. I wasn’t writing anything at the time; disillusioned with the practice of it or just completely blocked, but he was and is a writer and editor I deeply respect, and to have been asked by him to write something was an honor, so I just had to do it. (He told me later that it reminded him of a Jeff Buckley song.)

Some months later, Dyan Zarzuela of Candy Magazine, also under Summit Media, messaged me to ask if I might be willing to contribute to a book they were putting together about feels. Any kind of feels, she said. Even your feels for techno. And while I was still blocked — the block even worse because of the antidepressants I was placed on — I said yes. I figured I would be able to pull a thousand words out of myself somehow; I could find something to be passionate about.

But I wasn’t, not then. I was comfortably numb. And in the end, I asked Sarge if I could give Thermodynamics to Candy, and he said I could. It will be appearing in the Candy #Feels book that’s launching this Sunday, February 14th, at Eastwood, and because I have no Valentine this year, I will be there. In the meantime, I’m putting an excerpt below.

The boy it was written about has probably never read it, and probably doesn’t even know it exists. But he will know it is him from the very first line. I’m generally never fond of old work, but this piece, for some reason, I still love. Despite the memories attached. Maybe because this one, like most of my writing these days, came from the heart.

(Spoiler alert: I forgave. You’ll get it when you read it. I hope you pick up a copy of the book and read it.)

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