The plane ride that never happened was the journey that couldn’t happen. It was the plane ticket that wasn’t purchased online when the realization hit. That was the salt in the open wound – the insult to the injury.
I slid the cursor to the right side of the computer screen. No clicks. I wouldn’t purchase the ticket. I wouldn’t request bereavement leave. I wouldn’t take the five-hour bus ride to the airport then the four-hour plane ride from South Korea to the Philippines.
Previous trips required vigilance – not out of anticipated distress but from repulsive precedence. Never had I been so thankful for guzzling back a late-evening cup of coffee and staying awake during one of my flights from Incheon Airport to Clark Airport. My window seat was anything but comfortable when, quickly scanning over the passengers in the airplane cabin, I noticed being one of a handful of women including the willowy Korean flight attendants onboard and one of several foreigners. The rest of the passengers appeared to be middle-aged Korean men. The plane had barely lifted off the tarmac when they had already become progressively more boisterous and increasingly more drunk. At one point, I walked to the lavatory at the back of the plane. After returning to my seat, one of the Korean male passengers – with alcoholic beverage in hand – even ambled up the aisle to my row, nodded toward the empty seat beside me, and attempted to reenact propositioning a juicy girl at a nightclub.
I couldn’t put myself through that. Not again. Not this time. I couldn’t put my guard up. Actually, I couldn’t keep my guard up anymore.
Exhaustion.
I wouldn’t go to my ingkung’s funeral.
The stakes were too high this time. The well-worn performative strategies of camouflage and accent mimicry were taxing. Hiding my soul. Viewing that familiar look into pairs of eyes that seemed to have no soul behind them. Hiding my soul so that they couldn’t take mine. Hiding my soul to the point where even I couldn’t find it. Hidden so well that even the roadmap and retracing of steps became too difficult to follow.
That was the journey now: Rebuilding the connection to self, remembering history and ancestors, speaking truth to power. Redefining also meant resisting. It was the best response I could think of to the nagging feeling of powerlessness that even traveling in public was dangerous regardless of the passport, visa, and reason for being here.
Because they shouldn’t matter.
In the Philippines, a funeral is called a libing. Growing up, I always confused the word with living and thought it was an error of my Filipino immigrant parents’ pronunciation. It wasn’t.
Even though I was in Korea, remembering the journey that felt like from hell and back, the objective was still to celebrate life. And this time, I decided to make peace and forgive myself for the absence at the funeral I never attended.
Reflections Told 