By Laurel Fantauzzo

1.
Madasalin, corner Mapagkawanggawa

The rain has been trying to tell me something all night.

The rain takes up residence in my dreams. I hear it arriving and arriving. It replaces all other sounds. It replaces the air itself.

When I wake, the rain roars at me.

The storm has no name. Not Ondoy. Not Pedring. Not my name.

If the storm is nameless, perhaps it will be harmless. Perhaps there will be no damage to describe. Perhaps the waters will recede as quickly as they arrive.

2.
Anonas, corner Aurora

I have never known how wide this street is—wider than my arm span, wider than the sky. This street has never felt so vast before.

The traffic. The vendors. The commuters. They have been replaced by water, water, water.

The water is gray. The water is a gray field.

Children play in the water, leaping in and out. Their laughter competes with the roar of the rain.

It doesn’t matter how poor they are, how rich they are, how dry they are, how wet they are. Children everywhere will always find a way to play in the street.

They play in the flood. In the baha. They do not fear its undercurrents, its stray lines, its opaque surface.

The water is neck deep, later. A man still pushes his bicycle through the baha. He lifts his front wheel so that it cuts forward through the water. He presses the bottom of the frame to the top of his shoulder. He is his own Moses.

The water is waist deep. I enter it. The water is cool. It holds me as I move.

Girls in shorts and white T-shirts clutch their sandals around their wrists. They laugh and gossip. They walk barefoot through the water around me.

I pause at the front window to a tailor’s shop. It is dry and quiet inside. Bolts of cloth lean here and there in a mad rainbow. A black cat naps near a pile of red pincushions.

The tailor nods, smiles at my wet pants, and keeps mending a hole in a damaged white shirt.

3.
Malingap, corner Maginhawa

I arrive home and slosh upstairs. I text my friends that I walked in the waist-deep baha.

Take doxycycline!!!! they text back. I have never read that word before. It’s a remedy, I realize, for the harm that hides in the water.

I wash my legs thrice, with three different kinds of soap. Baha, baha, baha repeats in my mind.

I say it out loud to my Filipino friends again. Baha, I say. I walked in the baha. They say I am pronouncing their word for flood incorrectly. They say it for me and tell me to listen. Baha. 

I can’t get it right, though I hear the difference. I keep trying.

4.
That night, as the storm continues, I have no dreams. Only rain.

5.
Once, I visit a mountain called Banahaw.

My Filipino guide takes me to a cave. We pause and crouch at a shelf of rock. He lights a candle. His face glows in a circle of flame. He tells me to lower my body into a pool of dark black water below. I am not to emerge before the water closes over my head.

He says all of this in Tagalog. I understand only his hand gestures. He smiles. I laugh at the dance his hands make, the candle casting huge shadows.

Then I obey him. I lower myself into what I cannot see.

The water closes over my head.

The water holds me. I have never heard this kind of silence. I have never felt this kind of peace.

Something about this place, I think, will always recede beyond my understanding.

I stay under for as long as I can, listening.

 

—Quezon City, Philippines, 2007-2012