Laguna has always been a place attached to my being. It's where my memories started as a child. I remember the heat of the ground on my feet, the fresh scent of trees, and the sounds of crisp fallen leaves when I ran into the fields.
I remember digging up soil in our backyard to find worms and put them in one hole thinking it's lonely to be alone. It's where my love for cats and dogs started... though it's where my trauma of dogs also happened. (I'm halfway healed about it now.)
It's where my humbling beginning took place. A small boyish child playing in the bukirin. Watching snails and frogs. Eating homemade iced candy that has milk and mango cubes in it. Drinking sagong bagets which is literally just water with sugar and colorful tapioca pearls. It's where I first fell in love with the taste of chokochoko. Where I pretend to cook using wild grass, heat them inside a repurposed can of my brother's powdered milk. It's where I met my first bestfriend, separated on her birthday because we had to leave our house there.
Laguna has always been my home. So when I met him, my heart jumps with excitement whenever we talk about our childhood there. Wondering why we never met there. Every time my mom allows me to go with him and his family to Laguna, I am just filled with pure excitement. It feels like meeting my inner child's soul in there and becoming one once again. I feel like I belonged there. Like I am welcome to embrace the freedom of a child to be nothing but herself. It is where I get to meet... me, the child I had abandoned the day we left, before I entered another reality.
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//Leaving my Heart where my Feet had Gone - a series of written thoughts about places where my feet have gone and left pieces of my heart along the way
©tea.coffee
T