The cathedral is a few blocks away from
Poulette and Main but we need to drive there.
My aunt talks about her college days during breakfast
when she would hang on to the back of the jeepney
on the way home after class, then would crawl inside
into a seat before crossing the bridge to our hometown.
My grandmother would be waiting for her in the corner
where she gets off every afternoon like clockwork.
She was already abroad when the bridge over Batiano
was turned into an arch. I said I never saw pictures of what
they looked like as children. Well, she answered, memories
are just fine if you’re not well off. I think the earliest picture
of my mother I know was on her wedding day, getting ready
in front of a mirror in sepia. Eerie that I never saw her before
she started her own family. Once we dug up a picture of another
aunt’s visit to Niagara Falls, the one who dared to go to Canada
first. It was at night, so the sight was barely in the background.
Five women in coats on their day off a few years after EDSA.
She wrote on the back of the photo that it was freezing. I think
she lost touch with everyone she was with that evening. The
picture was supposed to be sent home, a form of assurance;
she can’t remember why it wasn’t. Growing up, I came across
several pictures of the ceiling in one of the albums stored below
the living room center table of our ancestral house, if you can
call it that. Made of wood, painted just bare white, a second
floor beyond it. A refuge for the next flooding. The unadorned
photos, around ten I think, encompassing all corners of the ground
floor, is placed between scenes of guests in the fiesta and homecomings
later in December. The picture was supposed to be sent abroad, a form
of assurance; back then I didn’t ask why it wasn’t. After the mass,
one shorter than I’m used to, we posed at the gothic façade.
A better angle could be framed if we got down the stairs overlooking
the 403, at that point I knew it didn’t matter. Another one for the family’s
migratory archive, made up of what is there as much as what is missing.
