An argument against the favorite person

in which I muse uncontrollably and give myself anxiety

In the hotel elevator I chanced upon a young lady and her mother. She must have been around eight or nine years old, carrying an adult bag, and dressed for an adult vacation—linens and florals. She looks up at her mother, and says in an accent that was a little bit British-Singaporean, and in a voice loud enough to cut through any room: “I hope the food is good—because the service was no’ tha’ good.” It was unbearably cute. The way cats take themselves so seriously, but are just so little and harmless. I told my wife about it and we speculated if our kid would be just as hilarious.

This morning, at breakfast, I was assigned a seat beside the same mother and daughter pair. This time, she was in a better mood. She tells her mother: “The croissants are lovely. Would you like one? You can have a pan au chocolat too.” Then she sits down and munches on a Stik-O.

I was melting into my bowl of Weetabix and low fat milk, inconsolable at the cuteness and my own curiosity—how did her parents raise her? Or, what kind of TV shows does she watch? And of course, what kind of reflection of ourselves would our children be? What oddities of ours would we discover only when we see it in them?

I counted the things people told me I inherited. My dad told me I stood like my mother, with my two feet angled open like a duck. An ex-girlfriend told me I said “hay nako” with my moms’s exact tone. I don’t eat watermelon because my mother hates watermelon—and it will always feel like an inferior fruit, no matter how delicious or how square it might be. Sometimes, I do feel like the husky who was raised with cats. I guess that’s all of us—we are all the husky who was raised with cats. People say my face is a carbon copy of my father’s face, but my mother’s everything is imprinted in my being.

When I was around seven years old and spent Saturdays in my father’s office, I met everyone. I was the Boss’s kid, and I suppose there were intangible benefits to being liked by the Boss’s kid, so they were all polite and interesting. The inappropriate 90’s practice then was to have me rank the women in the office based on who I found prettiest. In reception was my 5th girlfriend, and in sales was my 3rd girlfriend, and someone from logistics was my 2nd girlfriend. I’m not sure I ever really liked any of them—I just wanted the adults to let me go play. The only thing I knew for certain was mom was my 1st girlfriend, and there was no disputing that. She was the prettiest girl in the world. Her breath was always minty. Her way of moving through the world was always the most beautiful.

Once, walking through a mall, a day-drinking tito saw my mother walking by. I must have been around 10. He gestured to her, asking her to come join them. And she smiled, said no, and turned the other way. The guy—three-fourths of his eyes must have been eyelids, sort of like a frog—then looked at me, and asked me to call my mother. I tugged her shirt, and said: “Ma, the guy’s asking me to call you.” And she just told me: “Just ignore him. Best to ignore those kinds of people.” I wanted to shut his damn eyelids so he’d stop looking at my mom like a piece of meat. That was my 1st girlfriend she was looking at. And he was an ugly, creepy nobody day-drinking at Maxim’s Tea House. This also became my first lesson on how not to be a Man—and one of the first angers I truly held on to.

There are emotions I feel for my mom that are also emotions one feels for the 1st girlfriend. And I suppose the inverse is true as well. That was a complexity of marriage that I didn’t foresee. The mother of the groom is the 1st girlfriend, but also the source material—the prequel—of all his virtues and faults. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to see that boy who was—before he had any clue what romance was—so in love with you that he would copy how you lived life. And then you see that accumulation of your love and caring, your trauma and regret, walking down the aisle—and you think, am I now just the 2nd girlfriend? Where she once laughed at the idea of me being someone’s—or everyone’s—romantic interest, she might suddenly become nervous. I think about the young girl in the elevator, and how her teenage version being that self-serious might be challenging to guide, instead of hilarious to raise.

There was a line in Ted Lasso that seared itself into my brain. It was from a gay character who—as an athlete—had to keep his professional life separate from his private life. He said: “My whole life is two lives really. You got my work life… then you got my dating life… then the club brought in Dr. Sharon and she helped me realize that I have an ache. An ache for both my lives to be my only life.” And I’m lucky that I’m never going to feel an ache like that in my life, but I do sense one of the same genre—wanting my mother to know that she is still my 1st girlfriend, even after I’ve married the woman I love. I’d like them both to be my favorite.

There’s a Miranda July short that went around in the mid-aughts. It’s of this guy standing in the middle of a street, asking passers-by whether they were anyone’s favorite person. One answers, yeah, I think I am. Another answers no, I’m pretty sure. And a third one refuses to take part in the survey. It brought up anxieties in me and most of my Tumblr friends. It’s only now I realize that perhaps Miranda July’s point was that it was a false premise—that we’ve been conditioned to compete with one another ever since we beat all the other sperm cells to the egg. In school, there are topnotchers. At work, there are fast-tracked employees. In writing, there are the Palancas and the workshops. In friendship, there is the best friend, the best man, and then all the other friends. In sports, people keep saying Filipinos should give up on basketball because we have no height—and we’re never going to win. But few have bothered to ask—if so many of us enjoy it anyway, what’s wrong if we don’t win so often?

Growing up, we were asked about our favorite color, favorite TV show, favorite food. None of that stuck, by the way. Very few people have actual favorite things that they pick out every single time. I don’t have a favorite color—I want a room where the colors complement each other. I don’t have a favorite TV show—I want a show that comforts when I’m troubled, and a different one that troubles when I’m comfortable. There are wounds only my mother can heal. Fears only my wife can hear. Worries only my brother will understand. I do not have a favorite person. I am furnishing a room where the colors all make sense. I am curating a pile of leaves I can jump into when I need to feel home.

My aunt passed away recently, but my cousin Ann makes dumplings the exact same way she does. And even though aunts and cousins are sometimes portrayed like Venus to the Mercury of the immediate family, they are no less essential in the orbit of our love. I mean, their siomai is amazing. That flavor she made with her hands has made me weep with the twin forces of objectively good taste and nostalgia—and I cannot imagine disrespecting it by naming another favorite food. Favorites are cruel because everything is essential. Every dumpling, every dish by every loved one, every office in which we laughed. Every friend—not just the best one. Yes, my mom and my wife—because every disappeared piece makes the room feel like it’s missing something. One day, when I am old, I hope to be haunted by many of these missing things. Crying at the scent of a bakery. At a cloud formation. I hope everything can come to remind me of everyone.

When she ran out of comments about the breakfast buffet, the self-serious child from the elevator began singing to herself. I do that too, on long walks, though I don’t know who I got it from. It’s probably someone I love—and I’ve copied them without noticing that it’s a habit of theirs. My song selection, too. I am halfway to work and singing Fall Out Boy, without realizing where I heard it. Perhaps at the lobby of my building, from the security guard’s radio. Perhaps from the posh bakery that was just opening its doors. At some point you can’t tell anymore exactly when a form of beauty descended into your little life—but I do relish enumerating them. My father once told me I put my hand on my waist like my mom. I often mutter a childish “uh oh” the way my wife does—though we can’t remember who started it. Sometimes, I hear in my brother’s voice my own voice from the past. It’s quite comforting. It’s like dreams, I guess. The peer-reviewed studies say every person we see in our dreams is someone we’ve run into in real life. And maybe in the same way—everything we do is a way of remembering someone—even when we don’t remember who.