You are going home at 50 kilometers per hour. For hours, you inhale the black smoke puffing out of the jeepney that runs on sour gasoline. Sour, the smell of the driver that drives with his hands loosely hung over the black steering wheel. The sour makes you want to drive off the bridge. The bridge is gray and the river underneath it is black. Underneath it is ground zero. Underneath it is black. Blackbirds fly overhead. Over. Your head is empty. Emptied, like the streets at black dawn, when the silhouette of your mother is black and everything that’s black turns invisible. Indivisible. In the visible, you see nothing, but the black smoke seeps through the window of the jeepney and you are back again. You pull the black string for it to stop, and as soon as you do, the window of the jeepney flies out into the abyss until the black walls of your dreams are exposed and everything is suspended into the air, and you are left with the driver. And you are left. The driver takes a left in the corner with just the black steering wheel and his seat, then he stops. You step outside and outside is nothingness. Is this home?
--
You are suspended in blue air for the next sixteen hours. For hours, your mother sleeps beside you. Your mother is blue from the veins under her barely translucent brown skin. Your mother lies against you. You lie against her in more ways than one but you are here in the same space together and yet the space is so wide. Why do you love her this way? Your love is a pale and desaturated blue. The blue of fireproof asbestos. The blue of the space between the sky and the ocean and the blue of your childhood that exists in film negatives where all the highlights are blown out in the most picturesque part of these blue peripheries. This isn’t the blue of sadness and this sadness isn’t blue. This is the blue of the left behind, post-rapture, mid-tribulation. This is the blue of the shirt you wore the last time you saw your grandmother. This is the blue of the last time, not knowing it was the last time. Why didn’t you last? Why didn’t you—
--
You are in Whitewater, Wisconsin and you are in America but you do not know where you are on the map at all. All of the borders are white in Whitewater. The water isn’t white but the people are and you are aware of how far you are from home, where the back of your eyelids turn white when you lift your face up to the sun. The sun is shrouded by white clouds here and the warmth on your skin isn’t painful. You grew up knowing that pain and you grew up remembering it because the clouds in Manila were gray and sparse and too far up but now you are just too far. Far enough that when you see where home is on the horizon, you only see the white of its nonexistent shadow. It is like the shadow of the glory of God when He walked away from Jacob. You walked away and you are here now. Now, hold on to the parts of yourself that are white, your voice, your sclera, your nails. Nail them to your skin until the pain is white and the world turns inside itself and you see white noise and white static. Now, you can disappear into whiteness. Here, your whiteness is brown overexposed. Here, your brown is whitewashed. Here, you are a why. Why are you here?
originally appears in the Eunoia Review
