A few days ago, I had a random memory of how trapped I felt back in the days when I was living down south, in Muntinlupa. (Yes, sa labas, so shaddup, you punners. :P) Whatever brought that memory on escapes me now, but having recalled that feeling, I now feel the need to articulate why.

Let's start with a historical context: my family moved to Muntinlupa in 1980, when my tita, an analyst for the Bangko Sentral, availed of the housing projects designed for BSP employees. This fact is made apparent by the street names in my subdivision: they're currency names. My tita's house there is on Yen Street, so going on bike rides with my mom in those days also provided an early education in money names. The subdivision had a circular plaza with a Catholic church. Cars were rare then, and commuting within the village consisted mainly of tricycles which took you to either of the two gates, or from those gates to your house. These gates opened out onto the National Highway, where you could take jeepneys to nearby San Pedro, Laguna, or to other towns in Muntinlupa. When I started going to school, my lola or my cousins would go with me on the jeepneys, and later on, a jeepney service became available to kids in the village who went to the same school. Telecommunications consisted of two or three public payphones (the red kind, for those who remember), which were also situated at the two village gates.

My life down south was then interrupted by my mom and me moving to Manila, where we stayed until 1992.

When we moved back, few things had changed. Tricycles took us into the village and out, but this time a Tricycle Drivers and Owners Association was already formed. Payphones were still the main mode of telecommunications, although a little down south in San Pedro and other parts of Laguna, CB radios were used pretty much the same way Manileños used party lines or how most Pinoys made the technological leap to texting. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Commuting only had one route: the National Highway, which at that time was so clogged during rush hour that it would take me over an hour to get home to Muntinlupa from Biñan, when it should only take less than 30 minutes in light traffic.

As an aside, I kept in touch with my friends from Manila Science High School (whom I had left after two and a half years together) via letters. I had several neighbors who were also classmates, and were nice enough to convey letters to and from me and my friends.

Anyway, during the last two years of high school, the spaces I frequented were my tita's house, the National Highway, school, and my friends' houses. Sometimes we'd go to the mall, which was still called Twin Cinema back then, and not the sprawling Alabang Town Center most people know these days.

College offered greater variety, but I still had constants in the form of commuting and the spaces and expenses involved. There was always the National Highway and the trikes that took you into the villages where you either lived or were visiting. There were the malls, which eventually closed, and required money for one to fully enjoy their offerings. And, after 18 years of waiting, we finally got a landline at my tita's house.

Of course, by this time, the feeling of being trapped down south was diffuse, diluted by my rather debauched college life, which my friends from those days know and my newer friends can easily deduce. There were moments that expressed this feeling, however, which I can now see. The two short stories I had written during that time involved living in the south: the first was about an overstaying college student having a torrid affair with a girl he'd met on the bus going home; the second was about a writer who gets mugged in his own home down in the south--partially inspired by a series of robberies in my village at the time. And there were the times when Aldus and I couldn't find a place to hang out, since the bleeding National Highway only has two directions. We ended up staying for an hour or so near the Muntinlupa City Hall, on the terrace of an office building that had closed for the night, while the jeeps roared past us.

Now I'm convinced the trapped feeling I got resulted from how the spaces were divided and assigned. To get anywhere (City Hall, the hospital, up north to Manila, further south to Laguna) everyone has to take the National Highway. It cuts through practically everything down in Muntinlupa: health, politics, education, entertainment, living space. Hell, even the penal system is accessed through this highway. Any lateral movement takes one away from these crowded public spaces into the isolation of the villages and the individual residences. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground, any transition from the two types of spaces.

I'll grant that perhaps an alternative means of transportation (private transportation, like cars) may have opened up the space a little more. On the other hand, this isn't about what I had or didn't have to navigate the spaces, but how the spaces were apportioned in the first place. Take that, urban planning people.

In 1999, I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road; I didn't realize then that, while the Beats saw the highway as full of potential and adventure, I viewed the highway as a fenced-in area in between pens, funnelling me and thousands of other people to and from school, work, home, and what have you. I felt overdetermined by that space.

Then again, my life down south consisted of more than this feeling of being trapped, of this craving for more potential. This is merely a single aspect of my life there. At any rate, I don't know what I would have wanted in exchange, just the that those spaces were suffocating. Without conscious design, I found myself living in Cubao, and have now lived here for seven years. And yes, I also have something to say about the spaces up north. But let's save that for another time.