As I write this, it is the day before the last day of the year, and I sit once more at the table in the Boston condo. To my left, the Hancock Tower twinkles in the cold night sky. Perched perhaps precariously close to this keyboard is a large mug of hot chamomile tea. Tendrils of steam curl off its surface, and I blow on it each time I take a small, quick sip. The day turned progressively colder as the sun went down. The wind picked up. Whispers of trouble at home, if we can ever really call a place home, have reached me even from a distance. Unlike others, I will not get into blaming or acting a victim. Tonight, I am alone. Contentedly so. Neither lonely nor sad, neither giddy nor drunk, I sit in the single place where I’ve ever felt completely at ease, completely myself.

I wear a somewhat garish silk kimono, procured a couple of days ago at The Shops at Porter Square. I went there for some soba noodles and came home with a kimono. It seemed a perfect trade-off. It eases the pain of so much ugliness in the world.

On this evening, I eat the remains of a Basque fish soup that I made the night before. Rather than run wild on such a cold night, I will stay here. Read a little. Maybe watch the DVD of ‘Grand Hotel’ that I brought with me but have never seen. Or perhaps I’ll just sit still and be very quiet. I’ve made enough noise this past year (though far less than some would have you believe – I don’t break things outside of my own house, thank you very much). But I suppose when you break something you run the risk of being blamed for breaking everything.

Across the street, the third floor of another Boston brownstone is occupied by warm light, and holiday candles in the windows. I’ve watched this person make dinner for almost twenty years – he is (now) an elderly man with gray hair, and whenever I’m in town I see him hunched over his stove, working on dinner. It is a great comfort, especially when so much of life is uncertain. I do not know for whom he cooks. I’m assuming it’s for at least one other person, else why would someone go to all that trouble so consistently? Maybe I just want to believe that. Maybe I don’t want anyone to be alone.

In the night, after the cold, the snow came. We awoke to a world wholly transformed from the darkness the evening prior. Sun glistened off every surface outside, a world of white – the brightest white – galvanized by the lightest blue sky, and all that glorious light poured into the condo. Any hesitation about the darkness of my color selections went out the tightly closed windows.

That day, we began the bedroom – in a deep blue. That included the ceiling too, which I thought I would soften with a little trompe l’oeil cloud action. If it sounds tacky and cheesy, it totally was. There’s no accounting for the taste of a twenty-year-old, particularly if said guy was raised on a diet of Norma Desmond, Madonna, and ‘Priscilla: Queen of the Desert’. That said, it didn’t look entirely atrocious. (Okay, the white fringe of the canopy bed that was to come may have been atrocious.)

As curls of smoke rose from one of my Uncle’s ever-present menthols, he paused and looked around. Every now and then he did that. Surveying what had been done, and what there was yet to do. I didn’t quite have that grasp of the big picture yet, I either fell so completely and close-mindedly into the task at hand or grew antsy at seeing only the end result. My Uncle could gauge both, but he had experience and I had none. He went into the other room. We needed a hammer. And nails. And something else, the memory of which now – at long last – eludes me, quite sadly. This is why I write things down. A trip to the hardware store was needed. I volunteered to make the trip, being the only one who knew where it was, but I hated to miss one moment of anything – so enraptured was I in having time with my favorite Uncle. I hurried out into the bright, beautiful world and stopped. It was a brilliant day. A gorgeous day. The cold had lifted a bit with the arrival of the snow. The sun was shining, unobstructed by cloud cover. This was how we survived the winter, I thought. With this brightness, with this light. You never got this in the summer. The temperature was the pay-off, but at that moment, surrounded by sun and ice crystals and light ricocheting off every spot around you, the pay-off was a bargain. My trip to the hardware store was my only time alone for those few days. There was beauty in solitude, and there was beauty in companionship. I’ve always felt slightly in the middle. When I got back to the condo, the guys had started on the bathroom. (That would be the peach bathroom – the only real misstep of the whole endeavor – and the room that would be painted over the most – its brick wall defying a complementary color to the very end.)

I set the bags down in the cluttered living room, and removed my coat. We were nearing the close of our time together, the close of these few precious days, and the beginning of my time alone here. There was suddenly a heaviness in my heart, far weightier than the hammer in my hand. I wasn’t quite ready for it to be over. I would never be ready for it to be over.

On the last morning there was still some work to be done, but we finished on time. The clean-up was quicker than anticipated. Begrudgingly, with dragging feet and stall tactics in full-effect, I helped them pack their things. My Mom arrived as scheduled, and soon they were on their way. I didn’t return to Amsterdam with them, I stayed in Boston. A new life had begun. A new home had been created. It had taken family, and that’s why it would sustain me. There was love here, even if it was only the love that I had given ~ it still counted.

All of the important people who have made me into the man that I am (for better or worse) have inhabited this condo at one point or another. They’ve visited and spent time within these walls. They have slept and eaten here, retired and woken, laughed and possibly cried. I’ve done all that and plenty more, and it’s still not enough.

Tonight, I sit at the laptop typing this out, and feeling as grateful to be here as I did almost twenty years ago. Two decades. Living, laughing, and loving… Here’s to the next twenty.

Looking out the window onto Braddock Park, I am sitting at the table in the front of the condo on a reasonably warm late December evening. I haven’t written here in a very long time – not on a computer at any rate. It feels strange and exhilarating, a return and a new beginning all at once. The first time I did so was in the earliest part of 1996. We’d only just closed on the condo that previous November, and it didn’t quite feel like home. I’d stayed here in the first few weeks – in a sparse, barren, completely unfurnished place that didn’t even have a light in the bedroom. There was no couch, no bed, not even a chair to sit upon – and I loved every minimalistic minute of it. Without television or stereo or computer to entertain, I was alone with my thoughts. Any voices I had in my head were free to chatter, to no avail. Once those voices tire out, they tend to leave you alone. Still, such quiet was not meant to last – at least not when it concerned wall color and furniture. I needed to put the Ilagan stamp on the place, or it would never be ours.

That year, my favorite Uncle and a few cousins were visiting for the holidays, and we cajoled them into going to Boston and painting the condo. (By ‘cajole’ I mean my father probably gave them a hefty sum to put up with my fanatical attention to detail and color coordination, and paint the place in a professional manner.) It’s what my Uncle did for a living, so it would be done properly, and I was itching to try a rag-off technique I had been reading about in some painting book. I also wanted all the white walls to disappear, so after New Year’s Day my Mom dropped us off and we set about that first night to prepping the place for painting the next day. According to my Uncle, the preparation was where the real work in painting happened – and also the most important part of a proper paint job. We sanded and scoured, set up ladders and laid drop cloths, made a bunch of coffee and smoked a bunch of cigarettes. It must have been midnight when we finally crashed – on cots and sleeping bags (there wasn’t even a bed yet).

The next day, they were already working when I awoke. The kitchen was almost done, in a rich astroturf green. No boring neutrals here, not for some time. I was more excited about the living room. I taped off the plastered crown molding and painted it in goldleaf. Yes, I was that garish at the ripe age of twenty. (All gay guys have to grow out of this phase. Some never do. I was lucky.) For then, though, the gold went perfectly with the bordello red I had in mind for the living room. I figured the rag-off technique would soften the glaring hue, and to an extent it did.

My Uncle would roll the color on, and I’d take a rag and dab it quickly before it dried, leaving a mottled look and a softness to the walls. In person and up close it worked quite well. In photographs it simply comes across as a fire-engine worthy explosion of bright, flaming red. Let’s make it gay indeed. My Uncle and cousins never said a word. Well, they probably did, but nothing too harsh or I’d have remembered. Instead, we all worked into the evening, when it was time for a break.

One of my Uncle’s favorite things to do was watch a James Bond movie. A new one had just opened that Christmas, so I brought everyone to the Copley Square Cinemas (back when there used to be a movie theatre at Copley Place). We ordered popcorn and watched the movie, and when we finally began the short walk home, the temperature had turned brutally cold. If it was frigid for me, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for a few native Filipinos, one of whom had only ever encountered the ‘cold’ climate of Washington, DC and only saw snow for the first time when he visited us in Albany once. I will always crack up remembering my Uncle that night, rushing down the street with a tiny scarf tied around his head like some ancient Russian woman, looking like a crazed bat out of hell and asking me frantically why it was so cold. I literally had to stop walking because I was laughing so hard.

That night we returned to the condo, to its warmth and solid walls, to its honey-like amber hardwood floors, to its hot water ~ and we gave thanks for its comfort. I knew then that I was home.

{To be continued…}