Welcome to Envy Park

A Possible Future

Beside the small stall that served experimental desserts was an old-school Italian food place, and the next day, my former officemates were there to have dinner with me. A semi-impromptu thing.

I kept in touch with them, sure, but I was doing the bare minimum in terms of keeping friendships. On some of my holiday visits to Manila I skipped meeting them entirely, and I didn't feel bad about it. They were nice people and all, but because they all still worked at the same place, conversations gravitated toward the same things all over again. It was great when it was dish I wanted to hear; not so when it was nitpicking over some little thing that happened at work.

To Roxie, I had described my friendship with them as being locked in a time capsule. If I wanted to relive my life and thoughts from five years ago, all I needed to do was hang out with them. There was nostalgia in it, but also a reminder that I had changed.

I said yes to this sudden dinner because they had been hounding me about it for weeks, and they offered to actually come to NV Park, and I had run out of excuses.

"Okay, and Arabella's coming along with us okay, bye!"

Arabella. As in my former boss, Arabella. Somewhat of a mentor figure to me, except I couldn't give her that much credit because my career was currently nonexistent, and I did leave the job before I could get a promotion or a substantial increase. She and I were okay. I didn't have any enemies. But hanging out with her was increasingly becoming icky.

"So how many guys did you sleep with while over there, Moira?" was her second question, after "how are you."

No joke, I pretended to choke on a spaghetti noodle. Just to give myself time to think. Arabella wasn't like this before. But as time went on -- as she neared forty, maybe -- she was getting more and more like this. Whatever this was.

The ex-boyfriend's name was George, Australian with Filipino parents. He was Aussie in many ways and Pinoy in others,  and the balance was what probably made him most attractive to me. Like me, he was someone and somewhere without quite being it. Except he had more than two decades of a head start. So it might be wrong of me to be calling him my boyfriend. Truth was, he was a guy I had dinner with, and did stuff with, for about a  year, but I never felt that he loved me, and I was pretty sure he was seeing other people too.

So one day I just said, no I wasn't going to do stuff with him anymore, and he started going out with new assistant manager Tamsin. I was the new girl too, when we started. He was the type who did that.

"What have you been hearing?" I said, laughing it off. "Don't trust any of these gossips."

"So did you go out with foreigners? Like, Americans, British guys? Or were they mostly Filipinos?"

After I freed myself from that delusion, I dated. Participated in "cultural exchanges" as Roxie and I liked to say. But it wasn't easy to be suddenly promiscuous when your flatmate was your mom's friend's daughter. Not that she was a snitch, but it was weird. I was acutely aware for example that every time her boyfriend visited they would probably want to do stuff and didn't want them to feel like I was in the way. (That weekend I bought huge headphones and bought a bunch of movies to watch.) Surely she thought the same about me.

The four other people at the table didn't even notice how strange this was, which made me wonder if I was the one going crazy. In fact, they continued having their own conversation, about what VP so-and-so did at the annual meeting blah blah blah, while I was left to fend for myself.

"No, I didn't go out with anybody," I lied, just to close the book on it.

"You're lying."

"Nobody liked me over there."

"You're lying. How could they not? You’ve got that...look going for you."

“What look?” I was curious about this.

Arabella was really going there. “Educated Filipina.”

She meant it as a compliment, so I didn’t dare think about what she considered an insult. Best to move on. "Thank you, but no."

"Nobody, the entire time? Five years? Didn't you have a boyfriend or something?"

I was too deep into this by now. "Where did you hear that? There was nobody. I was living with a very religious girl and she made me promise not to bring anyone home."

"But that's what their apartments are for!"

"Guys have flatmates too."

The flats weren't huge. You'd run into each other eventually, like on the way to get a glass of water, and all the money spent on headphones and movies would have been for nothing because you'd have to politely nod and acknowledge the casual visitor who was in too-comfortable shorts.

Over the years it became more like normal, but I never got comfortable knowing that much about another couple (when they fought, made up, broke up, hooked up) through sounds overheard.

So when the opportunity to buy a unit at NV Park came up, I got a one-bedroom. Not going to be sharing.

"Hotels? Motels?"

"Too expensive."

"Oh dear." Arabella looked over at the others just to check if they were as shocked as she was, but they were still in their own world. But she looked so sorry for me. "Is that why you came back? Did you give up on finding a man there?"

Arabella, by the way, was eight years older than I was, and also unattached. Her last serious relationship had ended even before I met her at work. She was a workaholic, but I refused to believe that she had absolutely nobody the whole time. Not the way she kept obsessing about my dating life.

Or maybe it was an indicator that she indeed didn't. Have anybody.

"I should introduce you to someone," Arabella was saying, her nails clicking noisily as she browsed her smartphone contacts list. "I mean, you've been back for a month right? Are you free Saturday?"

"No I'm not, Arabella, but thank you."

"What's your next job?"

"Nothing, right now."

"Are you sure? Because a new division opened up this year. I could recommend you for it. You should consider it. You're not getting any younger."

I sipped some water and swallowed what I really wanted to say. "How are you? Who are you seeing now?" I went, sweetly.

"How can I see anybody when leaving at ten every night? This job is going to kill me."

I smiled and tried to recall how this conversation went. She was complaining about the hours she put in, for as long as I'd known her. I had come to see this as a dance. She stepped forward (I hate my job I work so hard), I stepped back (you should take a break you deserve it), she stepped forward again (but I can't not right now), chachacha.

"Weren't you promoted lately? Can't you start delegating or something?"

Chachacha.

Arabella loved her job. She loved how it gave her an environment to be superior to other people. She loved being right, and being a mentor, and showing people the ropes. She liked being the last to leave, and complaining about it early the next day. But she didn't want to admit it, so she made a show out of hanging out with the underlings, trying to be part of their/our lives.

It was precisely this environment that showed me that my future was Arabella, if I stayed at that workplace any longer, and no I didn't want to be getting older and living vicariously through her "kids."

But I was never, ever going to tell her that.

So throughout dinner I kept up the dance. Chachacha.