WE'VE seen it many times, many places: streets with no names, lines without end. On this nameless uncertainty are our cities built.
I’m in Iligan this morning and right outside the window, at the break of dawn, a huge crowd already gathers. Someone holds a pen, an envelope. Another hugs close to her chest a heavy pile of papers. Under the tree, beside a truck, someone calls out names. He who calls out names holds the power of forming circles of people around him.
It’s rained heavily the whole night. And the morning’s barely recovered from this surprise. Puddles form in the mud the shape of sleepy faces.
***
Why were we never told that it was easy, so easy, to begin a conversation? With a question: any question. What is your name? What is that place beyond the wall, where the people gather every morning to have their names called? People hunger for their names every day.
And already a whole life’s been told: a son, two daughters, four apos. The woman who mops the front porch has seen many mornings like this, has told many people other stories like this one she is telling about her life. She’s fifty and she still needs to work. She still wants to work, I warrant. Why are we so embarrassed to admit it sometimes? That work sustains us. Gives us a pattern to our days. Shapes our mornings into the orderly configuration of tiles that need to be kept clean, days that need to be divided into the tender manageable hours in which we are expected to “come up with something”: a paper signed, a room that needs to cleaned, a garden tended.
The flower bush’s disorder longs sometimes for the snip of a pair of garden scissors, the well-meaning clip of the fingers. A tire from across the street, in the vulcanizing shop, frowns waiting for the air that will return to it its rubbery smile.
Now it’s only she and her husband that lives in the house that they’ve built for themselves. All the children are gone. One on the other side of the city, working as a security guard, another off to Davao to teach. The trajectory of her life takes the shape of something we’ve seen before: the simple dramatics for the search of a “good life” and whatever it takes to have it. Fifteen years, cleaning bathrooms, picking up the careless waste of strangers, and telling stories while she’s at it. What will we do with our lives without our work, and the rare dignity that it gives us?
***
Today, it’s a poem on trains we need to read. On the loneliness of trains, the sadness of memory, the tragedy of forgetting, like the direction the water takes in rivers straight to the sea, the poet says. He is young, of course, but he knows his days like no one else. He knows the route the train makes, the route he takes every day, mirrors the cracks on the face of an old woman he’s seen everyday. Or that the train is as distinct for the direction it takes as for the rumble thlat follows its wake: memory and its remnants like the short afterword of a letter long gone. Or that the train forgets, that we forget this city which has long forgotten us first, this young poet knows. Even if he, in time, will forget what he knows.
***
This morning, I wake up to write on a street that, I think, is named Bonifacio. Who will tell me otherwise?