It’s hard to put our seasons into words: milestones, celebrations, strange in-between states, highs and lows, moments when we are not broken but self-barred, limited by what we cannot yet imagine beyond our present condition. I am writing my seasons not to mirror a space or fix a time, nor to declare any clear moment of becoming, but to trace back the wanting and desiring, when in trying to become whole, accumulation becomes the action; this is how I came to buy my house in Cavite after a decade of imagining stability and security within fixed walls and a permanent address. I was aching for a room of my own in that liminal season of borrowed beds, dorm spaces, and rental arrangements, where life was always partly elsewhere and never fully held in place; I craved permanence, and it felt urgent that I anchor myself in a place of my own.

I Bought a House in Cavite

But once there, the walls were too white, the room artificially cut, the windows felt unsafe; though it felt rustic, with a ricefield behind it and an aratiles tree shading the back door, I was inspired only once, and the poem I wrote was about the threat of that ricefield being flattened as they began to bulldoze the area to widen the subdivision, and it was too noisy; inside my newly acquired home, I wanted a bed, and then a sofa, and then a writing desk, and then a bookshelf, and then I thought my space was finally defined.

In two years, the space accumulated paper files, art books, novels, desk-things, shoes and bags, organizers, framed photos, bracelets and earrings, lamps, mugs, dolls, throw pillows, table runners; I bought a molave desk, a metal dining table and batibot, a refrigerator, and a La Germania gas stove, and I dreamt of a painting I would hang on the still very white walls, then realized I was becoming elitist, pun intended, and I stopped there.

Attempting Wholeness in Accumulation

Every apartment before this house required only a portable, roller-coaster suitcase; then this ownership asked for marking territory: the curtain is blue, the bed will have a comforter though it is always humid, the night will get a yellow light, and I will drink lemon water. There is that liminal quality to my early homeownership that felt like triumph but, in reality, was an ellipsis. I was wondering about the disorientation, was it just the financial commitment, the demands of homecare, the real estate tax, or was it because I could not cook at all, and the convenience stores were now two tricycle rides away?

During this time, I cleaned compulsively, was trying to define loneliness, why it was suddenly expanding, and my day dream for a room escalated to a room with a view. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that houses shelter daydreaming itself. Both defining loneliness and daydreaming were unrealized desires; the more I lived in my house, the less I met the secure homebody.

My static domestic routine could not even shift into excitement; the plants did not grow into bushes, the single bougainvillea in my one-square-meter front yard shaded the sweltering afternoons, birds built nests on my electric box, the ceiling was so thin that the sun seemed to scorch the bread on my table, and I ate noodles again and again, then bought a water purifier, then a massage chair, then another electric fan, as if accumulation could correct the air; what could be missing there? When I was sitting on that chair, I desired a room with a view, something that opened outward to mountains or sea, anything expansive, cool, and green; I dreamt of pine, I wanted to live in Tagaytay

Imagining A Room with a View

Later, I got impatient with my house. I had nobody else to impress but me, but interior decoration and anything artsy and aesthetic is out of the question in this row house. I wouldn’t install an air-condition and only sound proofing will dull the karaoke singing from neighbor’s houses. I could not come up with a plot for any story at all. My desire for a room is now for a space, as if I don’t own yet a space. My desire turned into a more spiritual longing. Was I in some kind of bubble space, anytime it will burst, I will fall off and then house or no house, I spaced out.

The Unliveable Interior

Between my inner life and external environment my habits became obscure. My fears occupied all the fifty square meter space. My aspirations sat in plain view every morning when I had to wake up at dawn to chase the earliest ride to Manila. Spatially, I was floating when I had my own house in Cavite.

One night when the neighborhood was busy running after a thief who stole a neighbor’s garden tools, I realized I was overstaying. Why should my bookshelf occupy too much space while I wasn’t fully there? The moments in that house could not accumulate because I could not stop desiring. Then crying just overwhelmed the craving, and I couldn’t sleep at all.

What I understand now is that a home can’t be just myself within it. I need to interact with something to form a routine, but the routine must affirm I am also encountering myself. Why was that space kept unlived? Why didn’t I know how to live in that house?

A Provisional Life or How the City Trained Me

Commuting, renting, improvising, enduring cramped transient spaces shaped by other people’s noise and schedules. What the city trained me to do was live provisionally. I learned not to settle too deeply into any room.

But the house was demanding. Returning home late at night, I felt suspended between aspiration and incompletion. No one tells you that buying a house can expose the blueprint of your uncertainty.

The row house taught me that ownership alone cannot create belonging. Deeds and documents could name me as its keeper, but they could not teach me how to dwell. A structure becomes livable only when a self is able to exist within the self.

The house remained, patient, almost indifferent. I would later learn to inhabit both the structure and the self with the same quiet, enduring acceptance.