Something Good Awaits Me There

At the end of the day, I am just trying to get home. This is the entire ambition of the late afternoon, of the hour after everything has finished and the body has given what it had to give and all that is left is the ride, the road, the particular quality of city light that comes in the early evening when the sky cannot decide between orange and gray and the jeepney moves through it like a vessel through something thicker than air. The breathing matters more than it sounds. There are days when it is not automatic, when you have to remind yourself of it the way you remind yourself to eat, to drink water, to rest — days when the breathing is itself an act of intention, a small and private insistence that you are still here and still going and still, against all reasonable evidence to the contrary, okay.

I have been making this ride since Grade 9. That is the span I keep returning to when I try to understand why I say what I say on the jeepney, why the words have the particular burden they carry, why a sentence I first said as a ninth-grader still gets in my mouth every evening with the reliability of weather. That is not a long time in the life of the world, but it is a very long time in the life of a girl, because the distance between Grade 9 and first year college is a complete rearrangement of what you understand yourself to be. You cross it and you look back and the person who started on one end of it is recognizable to you the way a photograph from childhood is recognizable — familiar in the features, strange in the smallness, beloved in a way that includes a kind of grief for everything she did not yet know she was heading toward.

What I say, on the jeepney, going home, is this: I hope something good awaits me there. I say it inside my own head, without audience, without the adjustment that other people's presence requires. I say it whether I am coming from town or from church, from a friend's house or from a food chain where I sat too long over a meal I ate slowly because I was not ready to go back out into the heat. I say it from wherever the day deposited me, and what I mean by it changes slightly depending on where I am coming from, but the structure of it stays the same: the hope, the direction, the waiting good. I have carried them across four years of afternoons and I do not intend to put them down.

Allow me to say something about hope that is not the thing people usually say about hope. Hope is the feeling you perform when you want people to think you are handling things well. It is not the face you put on for the group chat when someone asks how you are doing and you say okay naman, with the period, which means fine enough that you do not need to talk about it, which means not fine at all but managing, which means hope is the only tool left and you are using it. Real hope, the kind I am talking about, the kind that has survived four years of jeepney rides and all the things those years contained, is structural. It is the thing the whole structure of continuing rests on, and it is not pretty and it is not effortless and it does not feel, on the inside, the way it looks from the outside.

From the outside, a girl who hopes looks like a girl who has not yet been disappointed enough. This is what people think and they look at persistence and see naivety. They look at the refusal to stop expecting good things and decide it must mean the person doing the refusing has not yet encountered enough bad ones. I know it is wrong because I am the girl, and I can tell you from the inside that optimism is not the absence of acquaintance with difficulty but the decision, made in full knowledge of difficulty, that difficulty is not the final word. That the jeepney is still going somewhere. That the hoping itself changes the quality of the ride, because it gives the movement a direction that is toward something rather than merely away from something else.

There is a difference between those two kinds of movement and it matters enormously. Away from is the movement of escape. Toward is the movement of arrival. Escape and arrival can look identical from the outside — same jeepney, same road, same girl with her bag on her lap and her eyes on the window — but they feel completely different from the inside, because escape is organized around what you are leaving and arrival is organized around what you are going to, and what you are organized around is what forms the whole interior landscape of the ride. I have organized myself around arrival since Grade 9. Around the house at the end of the road, around the people inside it, around the specific and irreplaceable good of being somewhere that knows your name.

From church, the ride home is the quietest version of the ride. There is something that happens inside a person after an hour of being in a space organized entirely around the acknowledgment of something larger, and what happens is a kind of softening, a loosening of the grip you keep on your own anxieties, a brief and genuine sense that the things you have been holding tightly are held, also, by something else. I do not know how to talk about faith without sounding like I am either performing it or apologizing for it, so I will simply say: I have it, and it is not separate from the hope I carry, and the hope I carry is not separate from it. In church it is a prayer, while on the jeepney it is a sentence. But what they reach toward is identical — the belief that goodness is present, available, awaiting, real.

From a friend's house, I come home with a different kind of fullness. The fullness of having been known by someone who chose to know you. There is a friend whose house I have been going to since before Grade 9, which means she has seen the earlier version of me, the one who did not yet know what she would become, and has continued seeing me across all the versions since, and this continuity is a form of love that you feel in the body as a specific warmth, a rightness, a sense that you are not assembling yourself from scratch every time someone looks at you. I ride home from her house and the hoping is already half-accomplished because part of what I hope for is already in me — the conversation still alive in me, her voice still somewhere in my ear, the afternoon still warm with what it contained.

From the food chain, the hoping is simpler and not less true. I have spent many afternoons alone in fast food restaurants with my homework and my thoughts and a cup of something cold, watching the city outside the window conduct its business at a pace I could observe without having to participate in, and there is a particular peace in that — the peace of the solitary hour, the peace of the meal that asked only that you show up and choose, the peace of being in a public place entirely on your own terms. Nobody wants anything from you in a food chain except your order. The transaction is clean and complete and leaves you free. I eat and I think and eventually I gather myself and I go back out into the afternoon and I get on the jeepney and I say it again: I hope something good awaits me there. By which I mean, from the food chain: I hope the evening is gentler than the day. I hope the house is warm. I hope someone saved me rice.

The jeepney itself deserves more attention than it usually gets in accounts of what Filipino life feels like from the inside. In the rain it is wet along the edges. In the heat it concentrates the heat — completely, inescapably, with a thoroughness that leaves no room for pretending you are not in it. The music is whatever the driver has decided it will be. The passengers are whoever arrived at the stop before you and after you and have nothing in common except the direction and the fare. You are in extreme proximity to strangers. You hold your bag a certain way. You develop, over years of riding, a precise and unconscious knowledge of the city's rhythms — which stops take longest, which intersections are reliable traps, which hour of the afternoon the traffic thickens into something almost geological.

And yet, the jeepney is also where I have done some of the most honest thinking of my life. The mind does something specific when the body is in transit — it loosens, it associates, it follows what it would not follow at a desk with a purpose. On the jeepney I have worked out things about myself that I could not have worked out sitting still. I have understood things about what I want and what I am afraid of and what I actually believe, as opposed to what I have been telling myself I believe, in the specific quality of inattention that the ride produces, when I am watching the city and not watching myself.  I open my mouth inside my head and the sentence is already there, has always been there, is waiting for me like I am waiting for something good to wait for me.

I am a first-year college student now. This means the days are longer and stranger and more demanding than Grade 9, which was itself long and strange and demanding in the ways that Grade 9 is. It means the distance of where I am and where I am trying to go has become visible — I can see the form of the future from here, not clearly, not completely, but enough to know that it requires more of me than I currently have, which is also to say that I am in the process of becoming someone who has it. This is an uncomfortable place to be, but it is also, I have come to understand, the only place where becoming happens. You cannot become from a position of already having arrived. You can only become from here, from this in-between, from this jeepney between the place you left this morning and the place you are going tonight.

There are days when the hoping is easy. When the day was good and the body is light and the evening air coming through the open side of the jeepney carries something that almost resembles coolness and the city is doing the thing it sometimes does in the early evening when all its difficulty becomes, briefly, beautiful — all those lit windows, all those lives, all that ordinary human persistence moving through the dark. On those days the hoping is almost involuntary, almost joy, a forward leaning of the entire self toward the home at the end of the ride.

There are days when the hoping is harder. When something in the day broke in a way I was not prepared for — a grade that came back wrong, a friendship that showed a crack I had not seen before, a moment of loneliness so sudden and complete it felt like weather, like something that came from outside and was not mine but was happening in my body. I say it more deliberately on those days. I say it carefully, with both hands, understanding that the saying is part of the having. That the hope held intact through a hard day is stronger than the hope that was never tested. That the girl who says I hope something good awaits me there after a day that gave her every reason not to hope is the girl I am trying to become.

I want to say something about what home actually is, because I think it matters to be precise about it. Home is not only the house. The house is the address, the structure, the walls that hold the particular smell of a family's cooking and a family's history. But home is something that the house contains and also something that exists — it is the knowledge, held in the body while the body is still on the jeepney, that there is a place organized around your return. That your absence has been noted and your arrival is expected. That the door will open for you because you are the one it was built to open for. This is, in fact, an enormous amount. I have not always known how to name it but I have always felt it: this gravitational pull of the place that expects me, the warmth that begins in the imagining before it is confirmed in the arriving.

I am just a girl with an optimistic mind and a persistent heart on good things to hold onto. I know what this sounds like from the outside. I know it sounds like the kind of sentence a person says before the world teaches them otherwise, the kind of self-description that the years have a way of complicating into something more guarded, more qualified, more careful about what it promises itself.  The boarding of the jeepney and the saying of the thing and the meaning of it — these have survived. And I think that is worth writing down, as a record, as evidence about the present: that this is what I am, today, on this jeepney, going home.