Though I knew how easy it was to imagine a different future because you’re unaware of the challenges that came with it. I had to remind myself of my aversion to feeling inferior and how bakla, while tolerated, were still seen as second class. I’d learned over time that the imagination simplifies the complexities of real life, so that the life other than the one you’re living tends to seem better no matter what. Chances were that there would also be unforeseen obstacles in my other imagined future.

“I hope we keep in touch,” I told Camilla as our evening wound down, and I meant it, even though our ideological differences felt more stark as I anticipated the outside world, the bridging of our emotional lives so much easier to hold within the confines of a Harvard dining hall, the span of a dinner.

“I hope so too.”

—

I spent the rest of freshman year in that same state of vacillation, between long spaces of loneliness and slivers of belonging. The adjustment from my life in Chino, California, to Harvard often felt like a bigger transition than the move from the Philippines to the U.S., especially when I was doing it alone, without family to guide me, without friends who in some way approximated my experience, not just of being poor or new to America, but of being gay and looking white even though I wasn’t. I submitted myself so completely to Harvard’s norms, ones that were defined by centuries of white elitism, that over time, the distinction between who I was—a Filipino person who looked, sounded, and acted white—and a person who was actually white became more and more uncertain, even to myself. Yet my difference continued to burn inside me, as I wondered constantly whether people could tell I wasn’t white and whether they’d judge me inferior if they found out I was Filipino.