I journeyed back to Bulacan the next day, but the combination of gridlocked traffic and a late start meant that I was still on the road by the time the new millennium came, as the commotion of fireworks escorted me to Talacsan. I had missed my family’s celebration and Ralph’s call by the time I got back. He was logical when we talked later that night—I didn’t tell him about Boy, though we’d already agreed from the start we could sleep with other people, a modern relationship—and said there was no need to be sentimental about missing midnight, since there were twenty-four of them. It was true that his midnight hadn’t even arrived, but I did feel the loss of not having been there with my family at the turn of the millennium, not being on the phone with Ralph as it happened. I wanted that feeling of belonging to the exact time and place, though I’d spent an entire life never feeling that way and had learned to adapt. Even just once, it would have been terrific.

14.

I came back to the U.S., to Boston, the South End. I woke up in the airy brownstone apartment I shared with Ralph, grabbed a lemon scone at a café called the Garden of Eden, took the T across the bridge to Kendall Square. I’d fallen into a technical assistant job at a cognitive science lab at MIT, where I designed figures for scientific papers. I returned to dinner with Ralph at night, at home or at a restaurant, and either read afterward or occasionally went to a movie or the theater.

This routine shifted steadily over the following months, after I started a color darkroom class two evenings a week. My plan after graduation was to become a fiction writer, and I submitted stories about immigrant life to literary journals while also working on an autobiographical novel. I even applied to writing programs, which, like the literary journals, all rejected me. I had started college in a state of wonder, but with no frame of reference except for the countless speeches about Harvard students being the best of the best, I found myself overconfident when I got out, and thought I could be a professional author with one fiction class as training, where I fought with the professor the whole time. When that didn’t pan out, I looked around for something else to do and settled on photography. I’d taken a beginning class at Harvard and enjoyed using my camera to bring the world closer to me, to be able to see details up close in a photograph that I couldn’t see in real life.