Beating the Sunday Blues

“This was a good Sunday,” my housemate said as we arrived from a father’s day lunch-dinner at my Uncle Nino’s place. That morning she was lamenting that she had the Sunday blues yet again. What made it better for her was belting out the Queen’s I wanna break free and gulping down five bottles of beer. While I, I buried my blues with a little induced happiness courtesy of a friend’s magic box.

Sunday blues, we concluded a long time ago, is an affliction of the migrants of this city like we are, or anyone who has left the shore of the heart where they have roots (not my phrase, I only borrowed from Pablo Neruda).

(I still consider myself an alien in Manila, even if I literally have roots here —the vines-with-yellow-flowers I had planted when I moved into my apartment three years ago. But figuratively speaking, I still feel my roots are in Tacloban—but then again that’s another story).

Mine started when I left home for college and transplanted myself in Quezon City. Every Sunday, for all of my college years and beyond, I would wake up with a hole in the pit of my stomach and by mid-afternoon, the dread from that pit would have already risen up to constrict my throat. It was the psychological/physiological effect of homesickness that hits me hardest on a Sunday. I come from a conventional extended family that would converge where the Queen Bee was. So in our case, our Queen Bee was my grandma who lived at home so my aunts, uncles, cousins would almost always have lunch or dinner at home after Sunday mass.

So being away from home meant spending what used to be family-Sundays either nursing a bad hangover or going to church alone and having lunch at Rodics. To manage the blues, I used to go to the last mass, because at that time of the day, there were less families in attendance, more singles present, until I stopped going to church altogether (but again, that’s another story).

Another manifestation of this syndrome is the dread of facing another Monday of school or work. We (my fellow Waray migrants) have been lamenting that if we had the comforts of home, manic Mondays won’t faze us at all.

Now, after more than a decade here in Manila, we still have the occasional Sunday blues. It is not as regular as before, but when it hits, it can still be as bad as the first time I spent a Sunday alone in my dormitory at 16.

For a long time, I have always thought that the main reason why 80% of the tight circle of friends I keep are Waray or Bisaya was because my Tagalog is almost hopeless. Well, ok, that too. But then, I realized that this syndrome is the reason why I have built a solid support group of friends who spoke my language and who suffered from the same affliction—my own little family of rootless people to help me manage the Sunday blues.

Later on, as I traveled more and more, I have seen the same Sunday blues that afflict me and my friends along the sidewalks and parks of HongKong where Filipino workers congregate; in the Chinese restaurants in Saipan, where Chinese workers converge on their day-off from the factories; in Catholic churches where Pinoy expats of Indonesia and Cambodia go to be with other Pinoys. All of them trying to beat the blues by recapturing the familiarity of home in the adobo they share for lunch, or in the gossips they exchange in their local language, or by just basking in the collective cloud of homesickness and longing that permeate from the pores of their fellow migrants.

So like the migrant workers based in far, far, away land, my friends and I have already devised ways to beat the Sunday blues—usually coffee at brunch or late afternoon with family we consider our friends or with friends we consider our family would be enough to do the trick. And if we are lucky, we completely forget it as we did last Sunday. We will probably do this until the time comes when we return home or when we stop resisting from making this place our home, whichever comes first.