to just be here
in the sound
the city not alone
summer exploding
all over it
green and wild
not excessive but
sufficient to
sun and heat
I feel
outside
of time alone
in light
where everyone
is heading out
to the sidewalks
to light fireworks
the initial slap
of hot humid air:
I did not plan
especially to be
here feeling
time light
and sound or heat
American in
particular what I
feel of it failing
When asked about my first time, I think about
Wheat fields on my windowsill—
a golden sliver sprouting through
my plush red velvet curtains.
A slick lick of sweat up my spine,
accompanied by an
uncomfortable explosion of heat.
It crawls inside the ring of my bellybutton,
proposing itself on crooked knees
but I am the one folded in half.
Most girls talk about their first time
with bottled anticipation: to be bent back
by the weight of some young boy
onto his childhood bed—
the back of his car—
the sea-green couch his parents bought
during their first year of marriage,
but now they live in separate houses.
Most girls act as if they had
unhinged some long protected secret.
As if they suddenly knew how to
fuck with freedom and laugh, untouched,
at catcalls (water off a duck).
But I am a slow learner and
don’t know how to swim.
When asked about my first time,
I think about wheat fields on my windowsill—
In line at the ticket counter, an old woman prods my back with the tip of her umbrella. “Aren’t you going?”
I blink. There’s still a faint ringing in my ear, like all the sounds gone out of the room.
Though that’s not even a little bit true. Because suddenly then, it’s like I can hear all the sounds in the room at once. A car horn in the lot outside, a bitter low grumbling of someone in the line behind me, and a hazy voice talking on the loud speakers overhead.
The old woman prods me again, this time with more force. The worn plastic tip of the umbrella pushes into a tender spot between my shoulder blades. It hurts enough to make me yelp. But before I can even think to snap back at her, a man from the ticket booth pokes his head out and calls with a booming voice, “Come on! Next please.”
I’m sweating a little. It’s only May but there’s a heat wave. It might be 95 degrees out for all I can tell. I fumble for my wallet as I glance back. Though not at the old woman, beyond her.
There’s a girl I thought I recognized earlier. She stands with her arms raised in ridiculous exaltation beneath the vent of the air conditioning unit.
It’s not Gwen, I tell myself. Because it can’t be. I don’t know this girl.
“So, where to?” the ticket man asks. He can tell I’m only half listening to him, but he manages to punch out a pass that will get me from here to Minneapolis.
He only pauses just before handing me the ticket. “You going to be alright, miss?”
I look the ticket man in the eye. I hadn’t noticed him until then. He has sweat beading on his brow and sports a mustache that looks wet with humidity. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I just haven’t slept much.”
“Remember to drink water. Dehydration can be a real problem on a day like this,” he says as his eyes drift up over my shoulder towards the old woman, still wielding her umbrella. “Next customer, please.”
My bus wasn’t leaving for another half hour, so I found a seat in the waiting area amidst a family of tourists all in matching white polo shirts and a lone woman stroking at some kind of animal in a carrier on her lap. The girl under the air vent is still there. She really does look a lot like Gwen. She’s shifted out from directly beneath it to make room for two small girls playing on an iPad. The steady blast sends ripples through their hair.
After the accident, I’d seen Gwen’s face everywhere. That wasn’t a surprise. A barrage of grief counselors had told me comforting things about how it was only natural she’d be on my mind, even after the shock of the initial crash was over. They talked about survivor’s guilt, possible post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares - the list goes on.
“After the accident, I’d seen Gwen’s face everywhere. That wasn’t a surprise.”
The first time it happened, for a fleeting moment I’d forgotten about the accident while walking to a Psych lecture. A skateboarder with long golden brown locks had gone skidding past me and brushed against my shoulder in a way that felt so familiar, that I called out, “Gwen!” Though then the skater turned her head and the memory of it all rushed back. She looked nothing like Gwen really. It was just a moment, her posture on the skateboard, the way her hair caught the light as she sped by.
It would happen again and again like this. With a girl blowing bubbles in gum in line at the pharmacy, with a woman in big, hand-knit scarf once winter came, with a street musician whose mascara had started to run. Though on second glance, none of these people ever actually looked all that much like Gwen.
Though, the girl under the vent could be her twin.
She has her eyes shut tight, breathing deeply as though in some kind of meditative state to fight off the heat. And lucky for me, it means she’s completely oblivious to the fact that I’d been staring for now what is probably getting to be kind of a long time.
She wears a denim jacket decorated with pins and patches, a hole at the shoulder reveals a ribbon of bare skin beneath. A purple canvas backpack is slung over her other shoulder. I don’t recognize any of these things as Gwen’s but all of them seem to possess an essence of her. I try and try to place them.
But it’s not her.
It’s a trick of the mind, of dehydration, lack of sleep – something. The last time I saw Gwen’s face was over a year ago. It was in the moments while the paramedics worked to cut the seat belt off me that I watched the color begin to drain from her lips.
But another part of me knows I’d never forget her face. And not just for the crash. She’d been my college roommate, my nightly drinking buddy, the girl who’d dyed my hair and stole my socks. I’d stayed up hundreds of nights in a row with her trying out makeup tutorials on the internet and watching TV shows we’d never admit to anyone else we’d watched. I knew about the scar on her arm from a time she’d tripped at a flea market sent her arm flying through an old window and the little raised mole beneath her right eye she was forever hiding with foundation.
A bus for St. Louis is announced over the loud speaker, and at that, the girl’s eyes flutter open. She glances in my direction and embarrassed, I look away. I turn my attention to the boy and girl in matching white polo shirts picking through a bag of Doritos and then too at the creature in the carrier on the chair next to me. I still can’t tell what it is.
The girl follows the flow of passengers heading towards the bus for St. Louis, pulling the torn jean jacket from her back. My eyes follow her arm. The white slash of a scar stands out on her tanned forearm.
I rise from my seat. I can’t help it. “Gwen.”
The words don’t come out as loud as I would hope, but the girl turns her head anyway. There’s a small dark mole beneath her right eye and the look she gives me is unmistakable.
It’s her. Somehow it’s her. She sees me and freezes.
A look of panic washes over her. “You’re not supposed to see me,” she says so quietly I nearly miss it. Then, she pivots on her heel and walks quickly toward the bus.
I don’t follow right away. Gwen is here. Gwen is alive. It’s a lot all at once. But then I see the back of her head disappearing into the bus, and follow after, but to do what?
I don’t have a ticket for the bus so I walk along its side and search for her face in the dark windows. Maybe she sees me - no, I’m sure that she does. I call her name again and again until the bus pulls away from the station and disappears down the street.
A sandwich with brie and apple would
on any other day
be a nice idea
you
are telling me about how you curate your
Soundcloud and the next
thing I know, brunch is
over
pistachio twilight clings you are
spidery eyelashes all buttoned up
well hung tall
hips and long lungs this
fuchsia smoky sky warms sleepy
stomachs, my toes
wiggle I can
taste burnt
marshmallow in your throat and on
your teeth you
tumble so bewildered blue
nails hair undone
creamy sweater softly floofs
on flakey
knees, a distasteful posy
I’m sitting in a café that once was an eyewear shop. When I was a kid, I knew it was an eyewear shop because of the beige marble floors that had been kept when the store changed. Back then, I took those floors to mean you could lie on them whenever you wanted to. Of course, that wasn’t the case, so I always got a scolding for it.
Seeing these floors again gives me a strange bout of nostalgia, like I’m the five-year-old who once lay on them.
The café is located in Balibago. I don’t come here that often because of the traffic, though this is where I grew up. Across the café is Johnny’s, the blue supermarket that’s been here forever. Next to the cafe is the Wild Orchid—a traveler’s inn—and Rosas, where you buy handicrafts. Everything else is new storefronts on the not-so-new buildings. When I was younger the shops seemed a little more spaced out, a little more breathable.
Back then, I used to find the area so boring, so lifeless. But then again, I was a kid, and kids get bored easily.
“Across the café is Johnny’s, the perpetually-blue supermarket that’s been here forever.”
I take a glance at the view outside. Balibago is stuck in a perpetual rush hour, so the only people who visit it are residents, workers, and late-night bar-hoppers. I don’t have to be here, technically speaking. There are a bunch of other cafés where I live, mostly just a walk away. And getting to Balibago is a pain in the ass—you’re either caught in a rotunda from hell or stuck driving through narrow alleyways. But I go here anyway, despite everything.
I take a sip of coffee.
The café reminds me of the coffee shops in Makati, where I used to spend my spare afternoons. You’re sure to find a ton of them around, with Makati being a business district and all. And there’s all sorts of interesting people—entrepreneurs, college kids, people with their own start-ups. I guess thought I’d be able recreate that feeling again.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing nowadays. Recreating the past.
It’s not just places, either. Other times, its people. Feelings. I see doppelgangers of people I used to know in the crowd. I find moments where I’m thrown back in time.
I don’t really know why I do it, exactly. Rose-colored glasses, perhaps. I know that for every pretty-looking coffee shop, there’s a lonely night at a convenience store. For every sharp-looking barista, there’s the friend who was never really sure of you. The past is never pretty, I know. But it doesn’t make it all the less tantalizing.
The table up ahead comes alive with conversation. I try to keep my ears to myself, but end up half-listening. I can’t remember what they talked about, exactly. But there’s something about it that seems familiar, even if I can’t register the words.
We used to do the same things, back in Makati. A similar mix of people. A similar conversation. Even the way of speaking sparks familiar, ebbing and flowing in the way I’d used to speak with friends.
The second time I go to the coffee shop, I stay until the sun sets. When they turn on the yellow incandescent bulbs, for a moment I feel more at home than I’d ever been.
I’m a perennial outsider for the most part. Even in the places I’d grown up in, I always had that looming feeling that I’d never be a part of them. A foreign body in a foreign land. The last time I visited my old university, I felt like a ghost, hanging onto a life that wasn’t mine. I stalked the halls wondering what it would feel like to sit on those desks, as if I’d never really been there.
When I came back to my hometown, even the streets I’d known well felt foreign. I’d thought to message some old batchmates when I got back, but the cold realization that it’d seem out of the blue hit me like ice. How well did I know them exactly?
(Did they even like me, I wonder.)
(I wasn’t exactly the best person in high school.)
Of course we were friends, I tell myself, remembering how we laughed in-between lessons and the strange inside-jokes we shared. Of course I belonged, I tell myself, watching the sun set behind familiar mountains.
But that’s just it, really. I only feel like I belong in retrospect. Not in the Balibago of my childhood, not in the Makati of my past. Not even in the simulacra of those places that I find in this coffee shop.
Life always has a way of catching up.
Outside, more cars join the onslaught of traffic, moving like molasses. It’s time to leave.
I get up, bid goodbye to the kindly baristas, and head out just before Balibago gets too crowded. I can’t stay here forever, after all. Nor can I stay in my memories.
Driving down these dusty streets, then, I take a glimpse of what my childhood home has become, tuning my ears to the rumble of the cars around me.
It’s chaos, I know, with car horns and pedestrians and everything else coming together in terrible cacophony.