My life, like all lives, has been a circuitous road to wherever it may be going. Sometimes there was a somewhat thought out plan about my next move, but mostly I learned how go with the flow. Although flow is a misidentifier. More like I learned how to absorb the bumps and change course.

My childhood, like many childhoods, wasn’t easy. My parents divorced after years of great unhappiness together. My first cohesive memory is them fighting and moving with their anger through the house. After they broke up, the fighting at home stopped, but so did the regular meals. Food, like love, became scarce for a time.

But I had my sisters. We had each other. At times, we were all we had, but we definitely had that. That’s more than what many can say. They were everything to me. Parent, playmate, confidant, protector, friend. We were a unit. The girls. Only in our sleep were we separate entities.

I, like many others, am bi-racial. I was born and raised in my home country, but taught the ways of my mother’s people. When my schoolmates would speak of the their lives with their families, my stories were somewhat different. What we ate, how we related to one another, the things we did, the people we relied on and how. Even in the most common of everyday events, there was something unique in ours.

Then my world, like many others, changed when I grew up and moved away. It took a really long time, not as long as others but longer than most, to find my own way. I learned how to stand alone, unconnected but by unseen heartstrings. My experiences defined the path I chose because of the things that still mattered. I was still me, but showing the world a unforeseen slice.

The I met someone who saw me for me. And put nothing in that except the truth. She wanted nothing more than for me to be who I was, in every way that I knew. To stop being just the sister, the daughter, the Filipina. To be all of those things, and more because I could put them all together in one space. I could be the single unit, the complete entity.

Through her vision, I was able to recognize when others would see me through the limited view of their own desire. I could see, with my own eyes, what was true and was subterfuge. My level of trust in people never ran too deep. I wasn’t very good at determining someone else’s agenda. But is ceased to matter when someone saw the truth in me.

She is gone now and I am left unseen. Again.