Toronto Report #4: Come Dance the Silence Down Through the Morning

1. A fluffy orange cat was lounging in a patch of sunlight on the sidewalk today. When I meowed at it, it padded towards me and rolled over at my feet, wanting a belly rub. I obliged the creature, beside which my cat Meta would have looked malnourished. In her last e-mail my mother said that Meta has stopped waiting by the living room window after almost two weeks of doing so. If cats have nine lives do they have nine hearts too? If you break a cat's heart will it forgive you, or will it have forgotten you two years later?

2. On the way to the airport, my father tuned in to the RJ station, which happened to be airing Beatles songs at 6 in the morning. So the last songs my ears were treated to in Manila were "Penny Lane", "Two of Us", and "In My Life". Part of me scoffed at how contrived it seemed, between tears and sniffling.

3. "Mr. Jones" was playing today, at the Second Cup where I drank brewed coffee at the counter with strangers. And I wanted to shake the sleep off someone's eyes to tell him how this song, to me, will always smell of rainy days at the end of summer, Xavier Grille barbecue, and 2005. If I had a phone I'd have called up one of the Bayaws.

4. Went to a barbecue today at the house of the former CW coordinator, and finally met my 6 classmates. And--surprise, surprise--the South African girl I'd corresponded with turned out to be white. I think I wanted her to be black for my own selfish reasons. One thing about being the third-world, non-white, non-Canadian girl in my peer group is that it gives me license to be the outsider, to observe, to have my anti-social tendencies excused, to hover on the fringes of conversations I don't want to join.

5. My cousin and I were watching a TV special on conjoined twins, who, for some genetic reason, are almost always girls. One of the women interviewed was born with a twin connected to her chest, with whom she shared a liver and other organs. When her twin died soon after, doctors had to separate them. Forty years later, she wonders how much of her body and personality are really her twin's. She describes this visceral missing for the sister she never knew, the pensiveness she feels on birthdays, and the loneliness she's had all her life. (Talk about a conversation-killer: I was born with a twin. She died soon after birth.) This woman saw her twin as the embodiment of all she had lost, all that was missing in her life. Unlike the rest of us bumbling around with this aching emtpiness that wants to be named.

6. People on bicycles, not to mention Rollerblades and skateboards, are a common sight on the streets of this city. But the other day, a man on a unicycle was waiting calmly, towering over pedestrians at an intersection. (Who still makes and sells unicycles in this day and age? And what sort of man would buy one, and use it on a busy urban street? These are the people I want to meet.) When the light turned green, he stretched his hands out to the world and pedalled. A punk crossing the street from the opposite direction gave him a smile and a high five.