Ang 11:42

The 11:42 is the most honest train in the city. By then everyone has run out of the face they wear for work, and what boards at Ayala is simply people.

I ride it for research, I tell myself, being a writer in the way that unemployed men with notebooks are writers. The truth is the fare is cheaper than aircon and lonelier than my apartment, and some nights you need a loneliness with other people in it.

A man in a barong holds a cake box like a sleeping child. The cake says HAPPY 60TH ESTELITA. He has missed the party; the cake has not. There is a whole novel in how carefully he holds it, and I am not a good enough writer for that novel, so I will just tell you: he held it level through four stations, and at Buendia he checked the ribbon.

Two nurses compare blisters at Guadalupe, professionally, the way carpenters compare thumbnails. They speak in the specialized tenderness of people who have spent twelve hours being tender for money and have some left over anyway, which is the mystery of nurses and has never once been explained.

A student rehearses an apology into her phone camera, deletes it, rehearses a worse one, keeps that. I want to tell her the first draft was better. It is the oldest rule of apologies and of writing: the version with the shake in it is the true one.

The aircon drips its one cold comma onto the same lucky seat. Regulars know the seat. We let tourists find it themselves; the city has few enough initiations left.

At Boni, the doors open on no one. The platform stands there like an unanswered question. The train waits its polite three seconds, gives up, and goes on — which is, if you think about it, most of adulthood.

Between Shaw and Ortigas the lights flicker, and for two seconds the whole carriage exists only in the window reflections — all of us doubled, hung out there over the city, the cake man and the nurses and the girl with her ruined apology, riding a train of light beside the real one.

I have thought about that other train more than I should. The one made of reflections, where everyone is on time for the party and every apology is accepted. On bad weeks I nearly board it.

The announcement says the next station is the last station. It always says this as though it were news. Around the carriage, the city's tired children stir and gather their bags — home, whatever that means tonight, is about to be true again.