in which we open .pages:
This computer program, slick and minimalist, offers me a range of document templates to fill with my own words. It’s the first time in a few months that I’ve opened a blank page, having rewritten my resume into various incarnations of my very best self at a glance. For too long I’ve worded myself into one-pagers for non-profits, temp agencies, advertising agencies, PR firms, writing fellowships. The resume templates offer comfort by way of constraint; the yawning white page, though empty, fills me with fear.
How does one begin from nothing, I wonder. I’ve been in New York for a little over two weeks, with nearly nothing: a body twenty-five years old, two suitcases of thick clothing, and twenty-five books culled from a hundred-strong library that I left back in Metro Manila, a city much smaller than this one, but no less alive in my mind.
I spend my first week amassing the necessary documents to exist in the government’s eye: a state ID, a bank account, medical insurance. I receive a letter in the mail which tells me, soberly, that I’ve chosen to receive all information through e-mail. I keep the envelope as proof of address -- one bed in a first-floor two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, rented for seven years now by two aunts, in which my share of the rent is the mere effort to do laundry and take out the trash. On Saturday nights, they invite the other Filipinas in the building down for home-cooked dinner and karaoke; I perch on the couch and watch police lights throb against the walls as the ladies, tipsy on red wine, croon love songs from the seventies.
I go to parties. I have friends here, met through other friends and Facebook, and they express slight displeasure that I have been here “so long” but have not made the effort to see them. The commute back to the Bronx from Bushwick is two hours long; I spend it nodding off against one of the metal poles. A small brown girl beside me gets her schoolbag tangled up in my headphones. Her mother tries to remove it without waking me; I pretend to be asleep because it is embarrassing to be awake. Have I been here so long? Why do I still have nothing?
How does one begin from nothing, I wonder. I’ve been in New York for a little over two weeks, with nearly nothing: a body twenty-five years old, two suitcases of thick clothing, and twenty-five books culled from a hundred-strong library that I left back in Metro Manila, a city much smaller than this one, but no less alive in my mind.
I spend my first week amassing the necessary documents to exist in the government’s eye: a state ID, a bank account, medical insurance. I receive a letter in the mail which tells me, soberly, that I’ve chosen to receive all information through e-mail. I keep the envelope as proof of address -- one bed in a first-floor two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, rented for seven years now by two aunts, in which my share of the rent is the mere effort to do laundry and take out the trash. On Saturday nights, they invite the other Filipinas in the building down for home-cooked dinner and karaoke; I perch on the couch and watch police lights throb against the walls as the ladies, tipsy on red wine, croon love songs from the seventies.
I go to parties. I have friends here, met through other friends and Facebook, and they express slight displeasure that I have been here “so long” but have not made the effort to see them. The commute back to the Bronx from Bushwick is two hours long; I spend it nodding off against one of the metal poles. A small brown girl beside me gets her schoolbag tangled up in my headphones. Her mother tries to remove it without waking me; I pretend to be asleep because it is embarrassing to be awake. Have I been here so long? Why do I still have nothing?