After living two years in the new country, my brother took to drinking to find "spirits." He keeps to 7 bottles of beer every afternoon and at 5 p.m., gets in his car, listens to Sinatra and heads towards downtown L.A. He knows that at a precisely calculated driving speed, the blur of trees and railroad tracks along San Fernando Boulevard and Avenue 19 outside his car window will remind him of "home." A blur resembling the busy streets of Reposo and Kalayaan, quiet now that the night ladies have found their customers for the evening and all that is left are quiet roads with stunted, jeepne y exhaust blackened trees lining the narrow sidewalks.
He knows that at just the right volume, his tape of 40's Sinatra will sound like it did years back in his father's automobile, on their way home from a weekly visit with uncles and cousins and then remember that on certain stoplights, his father would give away a few centavos to make a young beggar girl pressing her mother or grandmother's face on the car window, go away.
He knows at just the right time of day, the golden hour when the sun falls on the buildings just right will make him remember how once again to feel whole, like how he used to be so long ago. He knows to stare beyond the tall, shiny buildings and put on his dark glasses because with just the right mix of shading, his eyes and spectacles can make the horizon glow in the same color of Manila smog and sky. This same color he saw for 16 years in the back window of our father's rented house before suppertime.
Los Angeles is for him a city of memory where colors intensify and the small Makati creeks he used to play in become vast oceans he knows he will never return to.
© Irene Suico Soriano
top