Sleeping isn’t always pleasant if you live in the tropics. The heat gets you, wraps you in its stifling blanket. It’s especially unpleasant in the afternoons. 2 PM, and the sun presses down on rooftops, rises up from the cement, and finds its way to curl up next to you like an obsessive lover.

I lie here, and I lie here. The electric fan has its head swiveled permanently towards me, going at full throttle. Sometimes I pull the pillow over my head, when I’ve forgotten to pull down the blinds the night before. The phone, which used to ring constantly, has decided well enough to leave me alone. My neighbor’s radio wakes me up everyday, at seven in the morning. A male voice sings along to it. I listen for a while, then turn my face away from the music and go back to sleep. This is the only sound that intrudes the silence of sunlight, the drab beige walls, the monotony of window blinds that go forever from one end of the wall to the other. Photographs listen from behind their glass prisons, images of people with tilted heads and vague smiles and forgotten thoughts. I get up to go to the bathroom. I still do brush my teeth. I eat canned peaches.

I went home shaking.

My sister was on the telephone, crying. She has still to get used to it. I’ve ceased answering. My friends drop by occasionally; sometimes I let them in. Mostly I don’t.

I’ve placed a banig over the bedspread. It’s a trick to beat the heat—the material is cooler than cotton and retains none of the suffocating warmth. Only it leaves patterns on my skin: I feel it when I trace a finger on a cheek; the intricate design of woven straw, a tattoo that weighs heavily on the flesh, colorless, leaving its markings sunk in too deep.

I bought it in Vigan; Doy hated the pastel color, but I thought it was funny. We toted it back to Manila, nearly leaving it in the bus along with the antique picture frame he got for a song. You’ve charmed her, I kept insisting. Poor lady didn’t have any defense against that polished city panache. Did you promise to come back and marry her?

They come like this, the memories. I’ve long stopped trying to smother them. The sunlight dances in and paints the wall with its translucence and I’d remember entire conversations, the way his hands moved as punctuation, the exact placement of sunlight on his face. The light turned his lashes brown.

Here, the coffee mug. There’s a chip at the lip of it. Doy would balance a cigarette there; he used it as an ashtray. Walk around, wave it in the air, hold it by the handle: What the fuck are you afraid of? Why do you have to keep running? You work, watch your endless movies, your idiotic bar hopping, your idiot friends with their idiot's chatter…my God. Are you so shitlessly scared that if you stood still, the world would continue on its momentum, and you’d fall right off?

Fuck you, I’d go.

That winning grin he’d flash at me. Fuck you right back.

People would assume we were lovers if we didn’t look so much alike. My girl friends were all over each other trying to get Doy’s attention. He’d just laugh it off, try to whisk me away: let’s go to Bataan. The city drove him crazy, with the heat that fries the brain. And always, I can’t. I can’t just leave my work, Doy, you know that.

Lying here, watching the cigarette smoke form a thin mist in the air. It makes the sunlight appear more solid than it is. I have the coffee mug-ashtray balanced on my stomach. I don’t smoke, really; I just light them and let them burn out. When my sister came last time, she fanned at the air with her nose wrinkled up, declaring that I needed to go out more often; look at yourself, you whom I couldn’t catch at home at one in the morning, and now you’re always here! She pulled up all the blinds, and white light flooded in. I sat up on the bed, blinking. He’s gone you know, she told me. Like I didn’t know. Her voice softened. Regretfully, respectfully: he’s gone.

I turn over on one side. The coffee mug slides off me, bounces on the mattress, clatters on the floor. It falls into fragments. The cigarette dies a natural death. That doesn’t sound quite right, though. Natural death? It makes more of a picture of suddenness, a scene of eloquent morbidity: the jagged white pieces, (there was an accident, ma’am) the cigarette, a thin, folded thing, (might easily have broken all his limbs, just like that) the scatter of ashes like broken teeth, and brain parts. (No, not even traces of blood, not anything… with the snow, and all…)

It is hot. My shirt is sticking to my back, transparent by now with sweat. I wonder at the time. Bright, bright windows; then lethargy slinks up with its creeping arms, and I am coaxed into sleeping.

In darkness, I see it again: a thick earthy blanket covering my face. I try to lift my limbs, and twigs and soil and brown and red and gold leaves move with me, undulating in a sigh; breathe in the breath of autumn. I turn my head to the side, softly, silently, and you meet my gaze. Smiling, smiling. What are we doing? Shush. Don’t let her find us. Above, a rustling. Counting backwards: five…four…three…two…one…Ready or not, here I come! You reach out a hand, and your fingers intertwine with mine.

Hibernation. He told me its secrets underneath the leaves. After winter, that’s when she’ll find us. But here is the quiet. Here is where everything is still. Things will die, and decay will lay claim on them, but here, in the underground, in the underworld, things go on. We sleep. But we go on.

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