At around 4 p.m. today I rode on a (to my car-untrained eye) 2012 Chevy Sonic with custom plates. It is owned by a friend, a colleague of mine one or two years my junior; a petite and very pretty girl any guy would kill for to be her girlfriend. It’s a lovely car, with just the right amount of space for four people (including the driver) to sit in comfortably and yet be intimately close to one another. The doors are pleasantly heavy and making just the right sort of impressive, competent sound as it shuts that states “premium quality” quite plainly. It has custom plates. And it’s driven by a pretty girl younger than I am.

I’ve never really yearned to trade the life I’m living with my folks for a more affluent one, but as I rode that car it occured to me that I will not have my own Chevy (or any car for the matter) any time soon, much less one with custom plates. Custom plates, for crying out loud. I’m pretty confident that I shall become rather well-off one day, but a dismaying thought to mar this confidence is that that one day may be much too far off for me to really enjoy my wealth. And at the moment, I wished I were rich. I wished I was young with a kick-ass car and money to burn. And I truly believed that the best thing to be in this world is to be young and rich, to lead a life that is infinitely more convenient and entertaining than my own, and to not worry too much about the state of my finances, my wardrobe or any of those superficial things.

Then all too soon we arrived at a pizza place. We ate and chatted merrily for two hours along with other friends. The longing passed, as it always does. But one thing remains. I want a car. With custom plates, of course.

Now comes the question of, How do I proceed in the here and now? As I am recessing into my dream of the future, I’ll have to leave this present, but how to do it in such a way that my absence would not be felt in the things I am still part of. How to proceed.

I came across a scrap of my thoughts from years ago just a few weeks back. I was cleaning my room in time for the New Year when I found a print-out of my blog. It was a post I made in Friendster, and as I quit the site years before it folded on its own, I saved all my stuff there and printed it as a sort of physical memory archive. In that piece of paper I wrote about how my life has been changing: how after being used to walking a dozen kilometers to traverse buildings in UP Mindanao I now sit comfortably in a library computer lab, clicking away at a keyboard that sticks, among people I do not know; or else passing the time wandering aimlessly at the mall, drinking coke floats. I was a drifter; I didn’t belong anywhere. And what is interesting now is that I’m coming back to that point in my life. It’s now January 25. In a month’s time, our feasibility study shall be finished in all its hard-bounded glory, one way or the other. In another month, I shall be wearing a toga. And here I am again, drifting, not exactly belonging anywhere, slowly severing my ties to college life in the Ateneo — not the most mature way of leaving behind an era, I know, but what the heck, I like this feeling of finality, of putting this life behind me and starting at square one — and I’m musing all this in the library’s computer lab, in front of a keyboard that no longer sticks, while behind me kids two or three years younger than I am clickety-clack away playing Tetris and games I don’t know how to play; or else while I’m in McDonald’s munching french fries.