Logbook

12:01. Officially, nothing. The date has changed and no one felt it. Somewhere a security guard initials a logbook, and that signature is the only proof the old day made it out alive. This book is a logbook. I am initialing the hours.

12:24. Streetlight through the jalousies files the room into strips: bed, floor, chair, me. Filed under what, I don't know yet. That is what the writing is for.

12:58. Texted no one. Composed, polished, deleted — the full ritual. After midnight the drafts folder is the most honest room in the phone, and I have decided to live in it. Kung nabasa mo ito: hindi ko sinend. That was the point.

1:41. The last jeepney passes with its lights on and nobody in it, upholstered in orange light, patient as a confessional. Every city has one vehicle that drives around all night carrying only the idea of passengers. Tonight I saluted it from the window. The driver did not see me. Attendance was still taken.

2:30. My neighbor's baby practices crying and stops, mid-note, as if remembering the assignment isn't due till morning. The wall between us is thin as a page. For a moment the whole building listens together — one creature with forty windows — and then lets itself be a building again.

3:12. This is the hour the letters used to go out, when there were letters: the hour with no supervision, no witnesses, no weather. Whatever is said at 3:12 is said under oath. Whatever is written survives on one condition — that it never, ever gets sent. Here. I am keeping all of it. Consider this book the evidence room.