There is something about last trips that you particularly like. So you begin to recall the most recent one and dig the burrows of memory and found for yourself images that are hard to make out. It’s been a while since you’ve taken the ride and really, really found the joy of doing it.
In an attempt to hit something hard and to start building images around it, you try to shape and reshape the shadows and nameless faces in a half-empty slow-moving ride home and probably put backstories into each of them. But in the end, it’s the wind on your face that grabs notice.
It’s a moonlit night and you are clinging by the rear entrance with your foot slightly above the running board; the position affords you the view of the mountain’s silhouette ahead as the jeep ascends toward the town at the foot of Mt. Cuernos de Negros. The wind is already balmy at this time of day. And the stillness of the landscape, like after the rain, heightened what you want. So you close your eyes and feel the wind on your face. And inside your head, one after the other, diverse images gradually fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
The last trip home is at nine. Or sometimes, depending on sheer luck, it can be thirty minutes earlier. In some rare trips, if you’re lucky enough, the jeepney leaves even with just five or six or seven of you. It is through these trips that you can have the whole window to yourself and claim enough leg room and more than enough potential story sketches. The drive is not the kind that jolts you. Rather, it is, as always, slothful, lethargic and dangerously sappy.
In front of you, near the rear entrance, is a woman, silver-haired and with tiny wrinkles at the corner of her eyes. Her hands are busy holding empty plastic containers. Many of them string together in a leash. She seems to have been abandoned by her family and left to fend for herself. What strikes you, more than the empty bottles and the grease on her skin and shirt, is a puppy, heads occasionally bobbing from the sack. The pup, in a state of malnourishment and therefore lacks the energy to bark, sits quietly on her lap.
At the other end is a couple with one texting while the other in a med school uniform is sleeping with head comfortably resting on the other’s shoulder. The boy has what appears to be the girl’s thick book. A few spaces beside you, just behind the driver’s seat, are clerks in their uniform with grocery bags by their feet and students in their uniforms with books peering from their bags. The driver, who seems to stare blankly at the road ahead, has the look of assurance that with the pace, his trip gives everyone, himself included, the time to leave yours and his disquietude, even for just a while, and intently listen to the hum of the universe.
