We began the two-hour drive home to Talacsan, me wide-eyed with jet lag and nostalgia while my relatives in the back of the van, various family members from three generations, died down and slept after a while, until it was only me and the silent driver who were awake. I kept going through the feeble exercise of matching reality with memory, patterns of light as we passed through the city on our way to the province, which in my jet lag and poor vision I didn’t fully recognize as real until we got to the familiar open highway that led to Bulacan, which itself was just a long stretch of vague blankness, no lights to illuminate the endless succession of paddy fields and give them specificity.

Ten years were enough to erase whatever intuition I had of my place in this world, until our vehicle turned right and into our municipality of San Rafael. With only the van’s headlights to guide me, I recognized the old pattern of native wooden houses interspersed with cement constructions painted pastel, the municipal center where the road split in two, as I asked the driver to take the path next to the Angat River, which I could only glean as a dark absence while lights from houses dotted its banks. How strange it was, to think of this as the boundary of my knowledge as a child, when I had nearly circumnavigated the world since, crossing the Pacific to get here, and the Atlantic to get to England, a place I’d visited many times instead of returning home. Eventually, the roads met again and we came to the uphill rise that brought back a feeling of hope, because it led to our house next to the town chapel, and the memory of those years—really, until I moved in with Ralph—when this was the only place where I felt truly loved.

The car drove past the assemblage of bamboo and thatch my family lived in until I was twelve, and I suddenly felt the gulf between the child I was and the adult I had become. I excavated the precious memory of me lying on our bamboo-slat floor on idle afternoons, peeking through the spaces between to spy the sacks of rice beneath us, tracing lines with my finger and finding the spots where the slats were nailed to their underlying wooden supports. These were motions I’d performed out of habit for years, ones that started before I ever had any inkling of future wonders: a child star career, a life in America, Harvard, coming out, a relationship with a lovely man from a distinguished family.