The Tide is Going Out

On Siquijor Island, I am desperate to be healed.

The only thing I remember is that I did the boat ride raw. No music, no movies, no distractions. Surely I had a window seat, because I always try to, but aside from that, nothing about the hours-long journey stuck out. I am here by convenience - it’s the island next to the airport I’m flying out of - and yet, I’ve unknowingly slipped into another dimension. My mind starts fresh from the dock, mesmerized by the sun kissing the horizon in long, languid, orange strokes.

Siquijor Island in the Philippines is known as the Healing Island, and for a brief moment, I believe it. I’m healed! I’m cured! All aliments bygone! But Siquijor also sounds like quidjod, a Bisayan word meaning “the tide is going out.” My name must mean “the wave comes back in” because my memory hits at full speed. Not the last hour, or the last week, but stretches before that. Between time zones and jobs and decades. I take it all in with a sigh.

You can’t run away from yourself, no matter how hard you try. What’s the opposite of solipsism? That’s what I have. Everyone else exists, and I never know if I do. I used to think if I run fast enough, I’ll catch up to myself. I’m trying the reverse, and it’s constrained me to what feels like the edge of the universe.

Another sigh escapes me as I trudge away from the dock towards the darkening shore. There’s a driver waiting for me, holding a sign with my name misspelled across the front. Close enough, again.

Someone is already in the tuktuk. Tash, a girl with curly hair. I’ve always been so jealous of curly hair.

It takes me a moment to reactivate after a silent journey. This “solo” traveling thing is a bunch of hogwash - I’m never alone. In fact, I’m always surrounded. I’ve met more people in the last few months than I can even count. We’re tossed into shared rooms and tours, bumping into each other on sidewalks and rooftops. As someone fresh off of breakups (both romantic and platonic), these interactions are temporary band-aids, and I still wince when they are ripped off.

The conversations always start off as the same script. What country are you from? Where are you traveling, and for how long? One of my many fatal flaws is that I’m horrible at first impressions, constantly trusting with no evidence to support, so I’ve been acting against my tendencies. Open but distant. Read the vibe first. Eyes on the road that hugs the coastline, ears straining over the sound of the motor. I take small peaks at Tash, and it seems like she’s doing the same thing. We are both in our heads, but the conversation is flowing like a river; I grip its cadence like a life raft.

“Whoa!” Tash stops her sentence to look over my shoulder. I’m startled by the interruption, unsure what she’ll say. “That sunset is incredible.”

I curl my head back as we zoom under the sun’s streaks through the silhouettes of palm trees. It has changed colors since the dock, and I’m grateful she pointed it out. “We’ve got to see at least one sunset while we’re here.” She adds, solidifying a future plan with a near stranger. I love to hear it, but ignoring my instinct, I don’t admit it.

Ironically, outside of myself, I hate writing about real people. I can’t capture their complexities without flattening them into a caricature that exists for this one story. But to write about Siquijor is mostly, if not only, thinking about the people I met there. I arrived on the dock feeling lonelier than ever, an ocean away from my community, as if I successfully disappeared from it. Isn’t that what I wanted? To be so engulfed in the now, wherever it takes me? Then why does it hurt so bad?

I do not say these things to Tash, stranger from an hour ago, as we eat dinner across from each other at Tagbalayon Hostel’s restaurant. We’re staying in the same sixteen person dorm for $13 a night, my first (and last time) in a co-ed option. She’s meeting a friend from Laos here in a few days, and I’m meeting my friend from Cambodia. We’ve both been traveling for months, and are both pop music girlies, in a very specific way. I just turned 30, her 30th birthday is in two weeks. POC thought girls that love the club. The similarities stack up through dinner - listing them here would be ludicrous. “Okay, twin” she says, only half joking.

I had just lost a friend that I called “twin” right before this trip. Overnight, as if we were never friends. It was complicated, as all friendships are, and I was on the losing end for its entire tenure. I should be happier about it, but while I’m laying in the humid bunk bed, I ruminate instead. The vulnerability of being known. There’s a guy sleeping across from me, and his snores vibrate through the room. It brings me back to when I lived with my ex-boyfriend and couldn’t sleep through the night, but I wasn’t alone through nightmares and earthquakes. The intimacy of proximity. God, everything reminds me of something else.

I wrap my pillow around my head, as if it could drown it all out.

Tash is eating breakfast before I’m up, journal next to her plate. It’s a small place, and I feel embarrassed to disturb her peace, but I also feel weird not saying hello.

“Hi! Can I sit here?”

“Of course!”

The thing about talking with Tash is that the conversations go anywhere and everywhere. It’s not about the content (at least, not to you, the reader), but the velocity of the volley. She is excellent at asking questions, and so am I, but I only falter when she asks me to join her at the marine sanctuary across the street.

This moment is where I get stuck. Every. Time.

I’ve been trying to write about Siquijor for months. I was trying to write about Siquijor before I even left Siquijor. I have drafted this story in a variety of lenses and frames, and I still get caught up in the same part. It takes me an entire year to get here.

There are not a lot of decisions in life where you can feel the options spread out in front of you as the moment is happening - an instant Sliding Doors moment. On this island, there is so much that happens that is born from millisecond decisions. Which side of Paliton Beach are you on? Who is craving a mango float? Can you teach me to ride a motorbike? (Local, us, no) But right now, I can feel time stop in the density of the humidity.

At this point, I am a newbie at backpacking and have not hit my stride. I had mild regrets and lessons across the board (say yes to going out even if you’re tired, do not stay in the party hostel, you should have done the zip line), and I was beginning to overly rely on the marketing of this Healing Island. I had assumed something quiet and frankly, a little bit lonely, in the name of reflection - my previous solo trips had been like that. I was constantly surprised by friendly invitations, even though I had been on the receiving end of them in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.

But there is something about this specific offer that feels like a trigger. What if I made it all up? The easy friendship sewn out of parallel lines is a finger trap I’ve gotten stuck in before. I’m scared of getting my feelings hurt and being the more attached friend. If there was a wave of confidence about our interactions, it was buried under a cresting a wave of doubt.

Tash doubles down on the invitation before she leaves me to finish my food, and I debate on it, avoidant and anxious in all the ways experience has molded me to be.

I pack my bag for the day in silence, almost in a haze. I know my decision in the way you know threading your eyebrows will sting and that the splinter needs to be pulled and yearning feels like an ache in your chest but you read the romance novels anyway. Because of the choice I make today, I become delusional in a way that hurts me in Tokyo, Chicago, and Santa Clarita. Los Angeles continues to stab me a thousand times. I’ll misread my friendships for the rest of the year because I get this one right.

After a short stomp through a dirt path and a jungle of trees, I arrive at the marine sanctuary to find Tash laying in the shade with her Kindle that matches mine. Okay, twin. She puts it down to greet me with a smile, but we seem equally surprised that I showed up, as if she could read my mind.

I move through Siquijor with quiet disbelief. In the moment, I’m in the moment - acutely aware of my body in every body of water I touch. I crunch silty sand under my Tevas as my new friends hike up a series of waterfalls named after the Zodiac. If it were anywhere else, I’d probably be freaking out over the cloudy cold water and the bugs (little do I know that I’ll be sleeping in a tent on a mountain for two months…). But I’m overtaken by the sweetness of this specific group, formed by me, Tash, our two friends we met on the road, and their friends that they picked up along the way. And eventually it grows to all the others we meet at the hostel’s karaoke, the neighboring waterfalls, on the top of the mountain at BuCafe - colliding at the end of the week with hundreds for the JJ’s weekly beach party.

From Pitigo Cliffs, I wonder why I’ll ever have the desire to go to some Mediterranean coastline when I’m watching everyone jump into crystal blue water, belly full with the best chicken inasal and mango float that I’ve ever had. Paola tries to call me into the water, but I shake my head no, staying high over the cliff face. I give the usual answers: that I’m not a strong swimmer, and hate to jump, and the rocks are too sharp on my bare feet, and once I start drying, I’m reluctant to get wet again. But mostly I am called to sit and observe. The vastness of the ocean steals my breath, and my friends are treading that water, legs moving gracefully under the current.

Something about how the light hits the waves makes the photos look far from perfect - motion blur mixed with my low quality iPhone. In a silly move at the time, I’m too shy to ask for more photos of myself. I feel too embarrassed and self conscious, unsure why I would want to remember how I looked. But I’m so plainly addicted to the scenes that I’m living, made obvious by the lack of photos that I have. I find myself wishing I documented Tash bent over her journal, and the smiles of the staff at the hostel, especially Jake. When I finally post the carousel on Instagram, I feel more nostalgic than usual, and it must be reciprocated because it’s one of my few posts where almost everyone pictured comments, missing each other.

For as good as the days are, I sleep terribly during the nights. Tossing and turning and never comfortable. Usually a combination of water and sun dries me into a skeleton of exhaustion. Not here. From my curtained off top bunk, I blast music through my earbuds, flip like a pancake, and count sheep for so long that I’ve overpopulated Animal Farm.

My mood is only soured on one particularly hot day, in which Tash and I get lost trying to find a healer (a very funny story for a different time). I make some comment about how all I want to do is go back to the hostel to nap, or to write.

Tash, with her journal, knows that I like to write. It came up so early on - something as unusual as my lack of sleep. I shared my Substack, a place that is visibly public yet incredibly private, and she read it that night, noting our similar thought patterns. It was flattering, and embarrassing how much it mattered to me. My old twin once made a joke that “she’d never read my writing.” I used to send my ex links to my Google docs, and watched how they went unopened. Some of my best friends don’t read this Substack, and I know because the website shows me and I close my eyes when I click through the dashboard, because I can’t bear to know. Or really, I already know and can’t be reminded.

So when I let the writing part slip, I cover it with how tired I am, eyes closing in the back of the tuktuk. But Tash is understanding - not only in a verbal reassurance, but by her own actions. Instead of going waterfall hopping (what a phrase), she chooses to stay in for a solo day. When I come back, she’s journaling alone, and in a flash, I see myself in all timelines. We will talk about it later, months later. “Is there a word for that feeling when you’re in a moment and you already know you’re going to be nostalgic for it when it’s over?” Tash asks me. I don’t know the word, but I know the feeling. It’s in the same family of that restlessness when you can’t sleep.

“It’s been hours and we didn’t even know.”

Siquijor hears us say that line a thousand times. We think we’ve been chatting over a quick lunch and four hours have passed. The karaoke night ends just as it begins, but our strained voices disagree. Tash is sure that we’ve only been at the beach club for one drink and we have… but we nursed that bottled Moscow mule while chatting with the girls and it’s already 1AM and I need to wake up at 4AM for my boat ride to the airport.

All the lost time is gained back during the sunset we had hoped for on that first tuktuk ride. I debated it then, but I can confirm now: it was the most beautiful sunset of the World Tour.

For one, the sky is purple. Pink and blue and yellow and orange as well, but mostly purple. The ocean is a mirror, and the hemisphere stretches above in a way that makes me believe that the world has never looked so vast. Like I was dropped into its curve, gravity pulling me down to this exact space in time. The colors mutate over the sea, the stars multiply like freckles, and the moon curves into a smile identical to mine. The universe jokes, “Hello, you are healed,” and I solemnly agree. It’s complete pareidolia yet I’m fully convinced - I went to the edge of it all, and found the center of everything.

The tidbits of Siquijor stories sound entirely fabricated. Pictures do nothing to help.

“We watched the sunset from a net on the top of a mountain, and a volcano exploded in the distance!”

“The tuktuk driver let us plug into his speaker and we blasted Chappell Roan and Charli XCX on the ride home; the girls in the motorbike behind us kept dancing.”

“I got on with my two backpacks and the Italian man scootered me through a marathon to get me to the port.”

Only the people that were there will remotely understand how it felt. Tash and I exorcise the wound for hours, days, months, now a year. On the mainland, I’ll be surrounded by people and still feel alone and this island was the cost of that admission. It will be impossible to explain, no matter how well I comprehend it.

When her World Tour is over (and she planned a real robust one, not the sporadic fever dream I constructed), Tash will go back home to Sydney. Back to a steady job and the goal of moving to her version of Echo Park. At this point of my story, in March 2025, I did not know where I was headed in any capacity. When I hopefully tell Tash “see you later,” the exchange is equivalent to giving up everything all over again.

Congratulations, I did not run away from myself, and instead, showed it to someone else fully. Did it matter in the end, if I’m going to have to walk away anyway? I think of that constantly. I am used to people living inside my phone, wondering if I’ll be headed to Arkansas or DC or Portland in the next calendar year. Even in Southern California, my friends are spread out along freeway interchanges that we rarely cross. Backpacking has made it worse; people chip away at my heart and bring the pieces back to Italy, Australia, Poland. And that doesn’t even include the ones I’ve lost - the relationships I nurtured to no avail. As I lay in the dorm bed for one last time, I think about how much I hate goodbyes.

Except for this time.

When I sail away from Siquijor on the choppiest boat ride known to man, I once again cross dimensions. I know I’ll never return here. The melancholic surrealism melts away, and my soul is assuaged into the fast pace of my forgotten reality. A girl at the airport asks for my help because it’s her first time flying and I look friendly. I pack my bags for another journey tomorrow, one with drastically different weather and experiences. I constantly think of a quote I love from the painter Joan Brown: “What I mainly want is to be surprised, the joyousness of that surprise, going past what I know.” I could never be surprised if I never said goodbye.

I see Tash for another breakfast, only a few months later, overlapping one day in London, a city neither of us meant to go to. We laugh at the odds. We’ll never fully know the other’s daily routines or the minutiae that sews together our beings - yet we continue to be best friends, identical in our life cycles, only parting to meet again. And because her idiosyncrasies so deeply resemble mine, it probably means that I am actually real.