I've been Leaving Pieces of Myself All Over the City (4:15 PM)

My skin started peeling two days after our trip to Boracay. From my shoulders, burnt skin came off like aluminum foil around a baked potato. It made a sound as I ripped them off. It made a sound as they dried up and rubbed against the inside of my shirt.

I tried to be neat, collecting the pieces in my hand, balling them up like boogers, and tossing them into the nearest waste bin.

I even bought an 100 mL bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion (Deep Nourishing) to stave off the itchiness and the mess.

But they fell, by their own will, like giant dandruff, all brown and disgusting. When I woke up in the morning, my bed was covered with pieces of skin. I brushed them off to the floor, only to realize that the floor beside me was covered with them. I had to sweep up before I left for the office.

At the office, even during meetings, I could not help but scratch and pick at the peeling skin. When I stood up, I was horrified. They were on the chair and the floor. I've never had peeling skin like this before. I hurriedly hid the evidence.

"You're like Gorbachev," my boss teased me, pointing to my scalp, where my thinning hair gave way to splotches of burnt and peeling skin. None of the other managers seemed to know who Mikhail Gorbachev was.

I didn't expect this, back when I was offering my body up to the Sun God of Boracay, as I floated on a inflatable bed about fifty feet from the beach, just before lunch last Saturday.

Before the trip, I even bought a very expensive Coppertone Sport Sunblock Lotion, SPF 30, and "ultra-sweatproof". I used it liberally that Saturday, on my torso, scalp, face, and ears. I didn't want to burn myself, but I did want a good tan. I haven't been under the sun for quite a long while.

From since I was a kid, all the way up to college, I enjoyed being under the sun. With my indio blood and kayumanggi skin, I would easily turn brown, and I enjoyed it. It was a natural protection against our tropical, Third World sun.

But when I started working, especially when I worked in the Internet industry, the sun was banished from my schedule. I would wake up, blinds or curtains drawn, while the air conditioning maintained the temperature of my nest. I would quickly jump into my car and follow a virtual shaded (and, again, air-conditioned) tunnel all the way to my artificially-lit, air-conditioned office.

The sun, all these years, had become an inconvenience. My skin became several shades of paleness, yellowish, pinkish, kayumanggi-ish. I avoided the sun, and--for the most part--never even saw it.

During the past year, as my life turned into another view, I would catch myself looking into the setting sun, right above Manila Bay. My office now boasts of a 360-degree view from the edge of Makati City. The sun, I realized, was beautiful in its redness, soaked with varieties of orange, violet, blue, and yellow.

Sometimes I would go out into the parking lot to thaw and hold out my pale arms into the late afternoon sunlight. I already began wondering then--

How would it feel to embrace the sun?

So, when the opportunity to go to a beach came up, I braved it and exposed my big, flabby, pale body to the low-season Boracay crowd. I played in the sand and bobbed in the water, under the hot, searing morning sun. By lunchtime, I was a boiled, red lobster. I didn't realize that I had sunburn. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I overdid it.

Cold showers became a relief and sleeping was a problem, as well as wearing shirts and bearing the straps of my bag. My skin was literally burning. I imagined that my blood was boiling just beneath the surface.

In the end, I simply attributed it all to fate and destiny--take your pick. Boracay marks a turning point in my life, after a journey under the shadows of buildings, office cubicles, and parking lots.

The Boracay trip was actually a family reunion, in honor of my sister who lived in the States and was last in the Philippines back in 1998, right smack when I was moving jobs. I was already fattening up back then and I hardly felt her presence. (This time around, my sister and I reconnected.)

Coincidentally, that same period encompassed the bulk of my career thus far, including my marriage. I am now looking forward to moving on, changing jobs, and changing countries.

I am shaking off my old, tired self.

The first time my new shoulders bared themselves, I was amazed with the quality of the skin. It was new, a healthy light brown, with tiny, tiny specks of light reflecting on it, like pools of water across a great expanse of fertile land.

"Can I peel it?" was what everyone said, my wife, my American sister, my nieces.

And peel they did, to their amazement.

"The skin is so thick!" they said. My sister was sad that her own skin was peeling in tiny, thin bits--hardly peeling at all.

I wish I could just take it all off, like removing a shirt, like how snakes and other animals molt. In one entire piece, one gesture.

Instead, my oldness is falling off in bits, in thick strips. They fall in my office, in my bedroom and bathroom, in my apartment balcony, drifting off onto the streets of Makati. I pick them and toss it outside my car window, letting the wind pick them up, as I drive along EDSA. I would leave pieces everywhere else, in my sister's house, in Ateneo, in the mall, in the ATM booth.

Pieces of me would drop into the pages of the books I read, just before I sleep. And I slept well.