Unang Liham

Dear dark: tonight the brownout took the whole street, and for once the city and I were the same shade.

You should know I have been meaning to write for years. Every evening the fluorescent light came on at six and I lost my nerve. Brightness is a kind of small talk. It fills the room so nothing true can get a word in.

I write to you the way one writes to an old teacher — carefully, and about everything except the thing.

Here is what the neighborhood does when you arrive: Aling Nena lights the emergency lamp she has owned since the Marcos years and sets it in the window, not for herself, but so the street has somewhere to look. The Delgado twins begin their concert of complaints. Someone, somewhere, laughs the specific laugh of a person losing at cards in the dark.

The candle knows only one word and says it all night. Somewhere a tricycle passes, carrying its little cone of light like a secret it intends to spill.

My mother used to say the dark was for sleeping. My father used to say it was for praying. They were both wrong, or both right, which in a marriage is the same thing. The dark is for the sentences that cannot survive being seen while they are said.

You have held my grandmother, the last page of every notebook, and the space between the last jeepney and the first bird. Hold this, too.

I am not afraid of you. I want that on the record, here, in ink you cannot read. What I am afraid of is the moment the lights return and I go back to being the person the light expects.

When the power comes back, the neighbors will cheer, and the street will forget it was briefly one long room where everyone lived together. I will not cheer. Some letters can only be finished in your ink, and I am not finished.

Yours, in the meantime — which is the only time there is.