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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, October 12, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | Leaving Enchantment



I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but every time I am about to leave Dumaguete for an extended trip to somewhere else, my anxiety goes off like a fire alarm in a gigantic bonfire. Be it via a ferry, or a bus, or a plane. [But strangely not cars. I think this is because cars imply a simple day-trip—and hence an eventual return to Dumaguete without the trappings of travel.]

When I am about to leave Dumaguete, I feel my entire existence go on molasses mode—and there is a high percentage of my psyche going bonkers: it absolutely cannot fathom, cannot stomach, cannot execute the idea of leaving. I don’t try to analyze why: it is just a gut feeling that demands to be tolerated. You don’t want to leave, it taunts me. Why are you leaving?

I don’t really listen to it. It’s just a nagging voice at the back of my head, soft but cruel. Besides, I know most of my trips somewhere else are always essential and cannot be postponed, and I know that nagging voice will eventually fade once I really get on the business of traveling. But it is loudest as a trumpet announcing the Rapture while I am on transit to the airport, to the port, to the bus terminal.

Once, about a decade ago, I was invited to attend an important literary event in Manila, and the organizers were spending everything for me, including a hotel and plane ticket. So I packed my bags, and got ready to go. My anxiety cartwheeled as usual. When I got to the airport, I found out that the organizers made a huge mistake in booking my flight: my ticket indicated that I was to leave Manila for Dumaguete instead of vice versa, and I never really bothered checking because I assumed the organizers were good at this stuff.

So I couldn’t leave Dumaguete.

And you know what I felt right after realizing that? A huge sense of relief. True, I pretended to be disappointed and said so to the organizers over the phone—but in all honesty, I happily went back to my apartment, unpacked everything, and felt mightily spared from having to travel all the way to Manila. It was a relief—but it was not a proud moment. This memory has haunted me ever since.

And yet this is also true: the moment my bus speeds out of the city limit, the moment my boat starts churning the waters and leaves the port, the moment my plane hops from taxiing down the runway to actually flying in the sky—I feel all that anxiety leave my body like a mass of hot, heavy air. I’d find myself heaving a sigh of relief, of finding contentment that somehow I found myself out of the enchanted clutches of Dumaguete.

What’s going on?

I call this “enchantment,” because it feels like that. Like some voodoo of place that keeps me tied to Dumaguete like a clutch. And Dumaguete, being Dumaguete, plays this spell so well it almost feels sinister. Everyone who comes here—even the ones just stopping by on a backpacker’s whim or the ones arriving on academic assignments—find themselves tethered in ways they cannot explain. “There is something about Dumaguete,” they say, and it is not a marketing tagline; it is testimony. A poet once told me he had come here for a three-day visit and ended up staying for thirty years. A painter I know swore he would only last a semester teaching at Silliman, but the semester multiplied into decades, and now he is retired here, almost proudly unable to leave. This is the city’s enchantment: it lures you in with its easy pace, its acacia-lined boulevards, its sea that turns gold at sunset, and it whispers—why go elsewhere when everything you’ve been longing for is here?

The irony, of course, is that the very same enchantment is also what makes leaving so difficult. Dumaguete is both paradise and prison, but only because it is so good at being paradise. You leave reluctantly, and when you do, you spend much of your time away plotting a return, as if absence were a kind of punishment. I’ve seen this play out countless times: students who study abroad always circle back, retirees find their way home, even tourists become residents. It’s not Manila they pine for, nor Cebu, nor Davao. It’s this small coastal city that seems to live rent-free in everyone’s heart.

And so when I feel that crippling anxiety before leaving, I know it is not mere neurosis. It is the spell of Dumaguete tightening its grip, reminding me that departure is a betrayal, even a temporary one. But once I’m out there, on the road, in the air, at sea, the spell breaks. I begin to see myself again, stripped of the comfort Dumaguete provides, and in that distance, I also begin to appreciate it more.

That’s the other side of enchantment: it works even in absence. The city haunts you when you’re gone. The taste of tempura at the boulevard stalls. The echo of laughter in a silong filled with guitars. The salt of the wind carried inland by habagat breezes. Dumaguete travels with you even when you leave it, which is why perhaps the relief I feel after departure is not the relief of escape, but the comfort of knowing that the city will not leave me, even if I leave it.

Maybe the lesson is this: Dumaguete holds you in a paradox. You can’t bear to leave, but when you finally do, you realize you never really left. Its enchantment is not geographic. It is spiritual, psychological, emotional. It is the sense that this is the place that knows you best, and you will always belong to it, no matter how far you go.

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