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I know who I want to take me home
I'm writing this sitting in my coffeeshop that is not actually a coffeeshop, because my coffeeshop that is actually a coffeeshop is full, and I have a table beside the window and cold not-too-sweet milk tea and am being struck, as I always am on and after train rides home, by how beauty can be found in the most ridiculous places, and also disappointed in the sore lack of sappy songs in the Pod. I am not talking about semi-sweet trying-at-quirky here. I mean out-and-out mainstream romcom sappy, movie slow dance scene style. Sometimes you need adolescent angst, and sometimes you need adolescent sappiness. (Adolescent, I think, is my word for honest raw emotion with no trace of irony, self-awareness, or good sense.) If I'm going to maintain my probably-nonexistent hopeless romantic cred I ought to at least have a soundtrack. (The other quintessesential part of the hopeless romantic equation, unfortunately, is the one that has long since been taken care of.)
And of course I could not be here writing this, I could have stayed one and a half more hours in Manila and watched One More Chance with the rest of 2016 (I don't yet feel at ease calling them the classmates- the classmates implies that the part where you feel like a class is inescapable, and so is reserved for Intarmed and the Pisay classes, and Garnet are the Garnetians and Champaca really did end up staying the Champakers and Muonsters Inc. are Muonsters Inc. because with a name like that what can you do) and just ridden the wave that is the Metro Manila rush hour, but I was sitting on the floor behind Allison and Jereel and Niko half-watching Friends With Benefits when Allen walked in with his youngest brother, smelling like Allen, and I was hit by the sudden need to go home, to get on that train and walk to that other train without being able to tear my eyes away from the view of the grey grey sky and the crisscross of roads and sidewalks and overpasses that the connecting walkway allows you and take up what I think of as my spot on the first car of that other train, just behind the driver's section, where you can see the railway and the city sprawl in front of you, to find my safe spots again.
Four months ago I was sitting at this table and making 48-hour chick slides on the Pad and I didn't know that Alexander Leandro dela Fuente existed, and didn't particularly care. Plus one month and I was in the College of Medicine and Arsenal had finished the season empty-handed and deflated and life had stopped feeling like a triumph in itself, and thank goodness for ridiculous movies about Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr being boyfriends with unfortunate irreconcilable ideological differences, because I was utterly lost. Plus two and one Friday a bit like this one he walked me to Pedro Gil station- it was after four hours of dissection and he didn't know where the station was and he didn't get to walk the girl he likes to her car, and I could hear the orchestra swelling in the background when I watched him turn the corner to get himself back on the way to Adri. I sang on the train all the way back. Jillian Francise Lee on the train is an entirely different person, and I like her very much. She sings and she insists, Yeah, go on, take the seat, at every opportunity and she just smiles at the kids who bump into her, and I kind of wish I could be like her all the time, live like nobody I meet will be there the next day, and so it's okay to, if not be completely open, at least feel things openly, only I can't manage it in a way that's, to say the least, thermodynamically viable. Train rides with strangers you don't expect anything, and every small act of kindness means exactly what it is.
I keep distance by nature, and if the flip side's that I don't know how to bridge gaps and say what I feel and end up just running back to where, if I go there, I'm sure that no one will kick me out- well. Well. I know who I want to take me home, but useful tip that everyone probably already knows anyway: just knowing never changed anything.
And of course I could not be here writing this, I could have stayed one and a half more hours in Manila and watched One More Chance with the rest of 2016 (I don't yet feel at ease calling them the classmates- the classmates implies that the part where you feel like a class is inescapable, and so is reserved for Intarmed and the Pisay classes, and Garnet are the Garnetians and Champaca really did end up staying the Champakers and Muonsters Inc. are Muonsters Inc. because with a name like that what can you do) and just ridden the wave that is the Metro Manila rush hour, but I was sitting on the floor behind Allison and Jereel and Niko half-watching Friends With Benefits when Allen walked in with his youngest brother, smelling like Allen, and I was hit by the sudden need to go home, to get on that train and walk to that other train without being able to tear my eyes away from the view of the grey grey sky and the crisscross of roads and sidewalks and overpasses that the connecting walkway allows you and take up what I think of as my spot on the first car of that other train, just behind the driver's section, where you can see the railway and the city sprawl in front of you, to find my safe spots again.
Four months ago I was sitting at this table and making 48-hour chick slides on the Pad and I didn't know that Alexander Leandro dela Fuente existed, and didn't particularly care. Plus one month and I was in the College of Medicine and Arsenal had finished the season empty-handed and deflated and life had stopped feeling like a triumph in itself, and thank goodness for ridiculous movies about Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr being boyfriends with unfortunate irreconcilable ideological differences, because I was utterly lost. Plus two and one Friday a bit like this one he walked me to Pedro Gil station- it was after four hours of dissection and he didn't know where the station was and he didn't get to walk the girl he likes to her car, and I could hear the orchestra swelling in the background when I watched him turn the corner to get himself back on the way to Adri. I sang on the train all the way back. Jillian Francise Lee on the train is an entirely different person, and I like her very much. She sings and she insists, Yeah, go on, take the seat, at every opportunity and she just smiles at the kids who bump into her, and I kind of wish I could be like her all the time, live like nobody I meet will be there the next day, and so it's okay to, if not be completely open, at least feel things openly, only I can't manage it in a way that's, to say the least, thermodynamically viable. Train rides with strangers you don't expect anything, and every small act of kindness means exactly what it is.
I keep distance by nature, and if the flip side's that I don't know how to bridge gaps and say what I feel and end up just running back to where, if I go there, I'm sure that no one will kick me out- well. Well. I know who I want to take me home, but useful tip that everyone probably already knows anyway: just knowing never changed anything.