That place of deepest solitude

Last week, on the first day of the Advanced Poetry Workshop I'm teaching this semester, we did the obligatory round of introductions of all class members. One student piped up, out of the blue: Let's also say what our favorite movie is! And so we did. Mine is always and ever Cinema Paradiso, perhaps because for me it captures so perfectly the nature and quality of nostalgia— for a place which formed you, but which in leaving, you find you can never fully return to even if you might physically come back to visit.

For me, this place that I can never stop writing about is Baguio, where I was raised and where I grew up. I sometimes wonder, do those who never leave ever experience a sense of loss or longing for the selves they might have become if they had gone somewhere else, instead of staying put? 

Some things feel like they never change, at the same time that of course you know they have. Deep inside, I've always felt close to my own particular sense of "me," though time and multiple experiences have also augmented that. I can't explain it well, but it seems it has to do with more than what words like "individuality" represent.

This sense of my interiority is something I want to protect, because somehow I understand it can shrink, even become lost—and without it, nothing of the other identities I possess (daughter, mother, wife, teacher, writer, friend, and more) could make up for it. And I would be bereft.

Sometimes it feels like a place of deepest solitude, and other times a place lined with windows out of which I can turn my face with bright curiosity and interest. But it is also changing with the years; I am older. The camera is panning outward, moving toward a distance i can't see clearly yet. Sometimes this makes me feel unbearably sad; other times, I try my best to learn to sit in stillness, before being claimed again by the world of unending care and obligation. .
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