Friday, March 17, 2006

 

Longing

I'm behind the wheel, making that same drive to the office past the Martinizing dry cleaner, the Dairy Queen, and the pet store-turned- Buddhist temple, and suddenly, I am barricaded in the back seat of a different car. The air-conditioner is blasting, I'm sitting behind the white-uniformed driver from the Mandarin Oriental, or behind Kamuching Adap in a baseball cap driving the Obispo's Toyota van, or behind Pedro Baraoidan and his barong tagalog as he drives us to Bauan, or behind F. Sionil Jose's silent, bearded driver as we nudged our way to De La Salle.

Manila Bay is going by on my left, the water quiet but pulsing in the blinding tanghali sun, palm tree after palm tree breaking up the view of the bay, or it's the broken hills and fruit trees and cattle in Batangas, or a parade of tall buildings and squeezed-between shops nearly toppling into the narrow streets, and between the cars and the views are people old and young hawking newspapers, bags of peanuts, and window-washing, and I get the longing.

I'm brushing my teeth in my overlit bathroom upstairs, and it happens again. I am squeezing through the doorway in the bakery leading to the dark polished stairs taking us upstairs to the Obispo living quarters, and the air is redolent with eggs and flour and sugar, even more than it reeks from tricycles and jeepneys, and as we climb, the air gets hotter and thicker, and I hear the whirl of the floor fans, and the chatter from Karla's television in the waiting room of her dental practice and I nearly clutch my chest, from the longing.

I long for the Phiippines and the Filipinos, in the way a child longs to return to a circus, a sandbar, a toy store a museum, a junkyard, a cave she only began to explore before it was closing time, or too dark, and she was just too tired.

After 18 days, I had to take myself away. It was all too much, and my life-that-just-goes beckoned to me. But the Philippines calls to me in these moments of longing, like a loon at dusk, or a train whistle in the dead of night. Whatever I am meant to do there, I'm not finished.

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