Windows

I find myself staring out windows a lot.  In bed, I face the windows to look up at the sky trying record the sways of branches to assess the weather.  On rides, I look out to follow the electrical wires that travels from blocks to blocks.  I detect movements and watch people with the comfort of knowing that there is a protective barrier splitting me from them.  However, lately, I have been wanting to be apart of the other side.  I look out my windows sometimes and wonder if this is what I will be looking out into about a year from now, a season or a month even.  It seems as though the dancing palm trees I saw about a week ago took the place of the bouncing pine trees of my summer.  And now in their places are dried montionless evergreens.

On my 5am drive to the airport, I saw a bunch of students in their uniforms lining up to wait for Jeepneys to school.  I started to romanticize about the life they would lead from that moment.  They would finish their school day.  Maybe a lucky one would have a date after at one of the local malls, lying to his parents that it was a study group.  College, then a job, finally meeting someone, move into a small community of villas, children.  Each day beginning their mornings to the same windows, riding down the same streets, hearing the same sound of traffic, seeing the same people.  I wonder if the same people are looking at me, wondering about what will be outside my windows tomorrow, dreading the same images outside their same windows.

Its incredibly silly to say this at 21, but it’s a truth that I want my window to stop returning different images.  Leaving Manila this last time was a hard hit for me. Not that this time, its some sort of final farewell. Its actually quite the opposite.  It’s the fact that I know I want to go back that made it so hard. Manila has made me want to become a fixture next to the palm trees outside the windows.