There's A Place In The Sun For Anyone

I've seen this happen in other people's lives,
And now it's happening in mine.
- The Smiths

What I recall most acutely from all the Sunday masses I attended as a child wasn't the heat stunning me into paralysis, or the gaudy frocks I wore, or the bright wallop of envy I felt when I saw the other kids playing tag while the priest intoned all those baffling words and Mom's hand on my lap kept me seated on the pew. Every squirm and fidgety motion was sent into retreat by a censuring glance from Dad, and I sighed and leaned back against the comfortless wood, thinking of my bike and my new fighting fish in its glass jar at home. I thought of how time expanded and lengthened without compassion in the small church, an hour feeling like three, the mystery of the host without its former charm now that I was permitted to take it.

I remember it all with great clarity, but one detail pitches out in starker color. My family almost always occupied the same pew on the same row, unless another family had gotten to it first. We weren't the only ones inclined towards that sort of regularity: nearly every Sunday, a woman and her daughter slid into the pew in front of ours. I hardly paid any attention to the mother, who remains formless and shifting in my memory, but I remember watching the daughter with a kind of obsessive intensity that may have been, in hindsight, completely unwarranted.

In fact, I do remember the daughter still, and what she looked like, and what she wore. I remember studying her while she went through the invariable religious motions in her modest dresses. She must have been just in her late teens, but I remember thinking that she seemed so grown-up, her movements possessed of a calm that I could never invoke from my own spare body.

When I think of it now, I don't understand why I was so fixated. She wasn't very remarkable, was pretty in a muted way, and she never drew any attention to herself. But I zoomed in on her anyway and created vast improbable fictions for her to settle into. I convinced myself that her name was Rose. She had countless friends, was popular in school, was kind and intelligent and universally adored. She liked a boy who liked her back, and he held her hand and helped her with homework and eliminated the need to understand fractions or the chaos that a wayward decimal point could cause. Rose had read every Nancy Drew mystery, and as a matter of fact, owned a complete collection of it, which was ranged neatly over her neat study table in her neat sun-dappled bedroom.

Sometimes she turned around in her seat and caught me looking, a development that always gave me a brutal shock. I would whip my eyes to another point in the church until she turned to face the priest again, or I would fake a yawn or brush some invisible piece of lint off my skirt. In any case, my little invented world for Rose pressed on, although I couldn't get rid of the feeling that even as I spun plot after labored plot for her, a crevasse of infinite proportions persisted in the space between her pew and mine. None of my stories were ever adequate.

I didn't see Rose for a long while until I was in High School. By that time, she had completely receded from my concerns, and I was too busy wrangling with my own adolescent preoccupations, my ineffectual dramas magnified by a storm of hormones and a bloated sense of suffering. But then she reappeared one Sunday, surprisingly smaller than I thought she was, and once the initial flare of recognition had quieted down, I found myself oddly embarrassed by her presence. It appalled me that I'd devoted so much time in my childhood to a trumped-up fabrication, realized what a pathetic exercise it was at escaping from the playground's ruthless politics or at banishing a nine-year old's secret loneliness. I don't know why it was such a big deal to me then, but I was a teenager – everything was a big deal. I paid severe attention to the priest afterwards, and concentrated so feverishly on every part of the Mass that I went home that morning with a headache banging away in my temples.

Anyway. I'm not sure why I brought that up. Earlier this evening, I was smoking in the stairwell with a cooling mug of coffee, reading a book that Jose had given me for Christmas. A little boy – I didn't know there were children in this floor – had come out from one of the units to stand by the windows facing the stairwell, and he remained there for a curiously long time, staring out at Katipunan Avenue in a posture that struck me as too solemn for someone so young. He looked like he was waiting for somebody, expectation and frank yearning articulated in the angle of his neck and in the way he leaned against the grating. He was real and he was a ghost of things past. I wanted to say hello.