This was how I found myself back inside a house that was once my grandparents’ pride, which Nanay Coro was only able to inhabit again as a lifeless body during the three-day wake before her funeral. That once-grand home was in a sorry state, much of its expensive furniture gone, roof and ironwork rusty, ceilings and walls stained brown from water that had seeped in during monsoons. The only opulent feature that remained untouched was the marble floors, which I only realized then were nearly identical to the Widener Library stacks at Harvard, the same square tiles and shade of gray.

I spent the first night of my grandmother’s vigil sleeping on an old upholstered chair near her casket, while Papa showed up to gamble in the wee hours and I pretended not to see him, then woke up and bathed in rusty water the next morning. The entire day, neighbors from our village and nearby towns visited Nanay Coro, almost none of whom had met me as a woman, nearly all of whom I didn’t remember because I left too young and too long ago. There was an old woman who asked about my brother, meaning me, and another who asked if I’d given birth to children, thinking that my surgery involved making a womb. But just like it was during my childhood, many of those villagers marveled over how beautiful I was, and with my light blond hair down to my shoulders, wearing mascara and lipstick, how I was even more beautiful as a woman than the man they’d never met, their extrapolation of the boy they remembered.

A friend from school named Dek Igaya visited on the second day, the one member of my old gang who also lived in my village. He and I sat on a long bench with an ornate, carved back, one of the few pieces of presentable furniture left in the house. Dek was a predictable outcome of the dark, baby-faced kid I once knew, especially when he still sported his bowl cut and straight bangs.

“I’m sorry it took this long to visit Ninang,” he said.