Highway 54.

Going back is a bit a heady, like dark beer after weeks of iced water. By bus, the way here to Manila has been reduced to scents, noise and images, of recollections in between sleep and stopovers:

A fellow passenger was peeling more than 5 cucumbers and eating them right after the other. I can remember the scent, and the way they crunched as he ate them and how small the knife he used in gingerly peeling them. I kept checking the green bag on the overhead rack for signs of its impending fall on my head. The smell of grilled hotdogs waking me up through my empty stomach. I could identify three different languages being spoken and the bus conductor spoke all three of them in his high-pitched singsong voice. The passenger beside me was ingraining his customized message alert tone in my mind, like an aural fingerprint.

With my eyes closed, I kept coming back to my recent memories and unconsciously closing off the impending polluted welcome of Highway 54, I was still beside my daughter, taking in her scent and traces of unscheduled meals on her face. She, in her sleep, seemed undecided whether to embrace me or her mother and didn't keep a single position in the space of an hour. I was watching my world sleeping together, exhaling in different regularities.

And looking out the bus window, Manila was slowly encircling me again. And the traffic of income was suddenly there, obnoxious and noisy. I knew I was back when the first wave of heat hit me when I got down from the bus, when the slickness of garbage was sliding under my shoes.

These are the days.

(I was hoping I could write more, but the thoughts though forming would turn to smoke. I guess those thoughts would be more at home on paper)