Ate Cely's carinderia still has the same table by the window. Third leg shorter than the rest. The wobble I account for without thinking about it anymore.
I put my bag on the short-leg side. She used to say 'wag diyan, sira 'yan, and I'd say it was fine and she'd let it go.
That's Ate Cely. Who still runs the place. Who has never, in two and a half years of lunch twice a week, learned to look at me and count one.
"Dalawa ba kayo today?"
Isa lang.
She recalibrates and goes back to her pot. I find the table. Set my bag on the short-leg side without deciding to.
I order the sinigang. It was always the sinigang.
Dani said once — a Tuesday in October I have not been able to stop locating precisely — that the sinigang here smells like the inside of his lola's refrigerator. The specific smell of a Tupperware washed a hundred times that still holds the ghost of what it carried. I said corny naman ng analogy naman and he laughed with his whole chest, a little too much for the joke. That was the whole conversation. But I have ordered the sinigang every time since then. I never decide to. My mouth just says it.
The table wobbles when I set the tray down.
The thing is — I didn't know what Dani was to me until four months after he left for Cebu.
Not left. Transferred. Work. The kind of transfer you say yes to because the number has too many digits to say no to. I heard about it from a groupchat. His name is still in it. He never leaves groupchats. He just stops.
There was no last lunch. I know this now. We ate on a Wednesday — the table, the sinigang, Ate Cely's dalawa ba kayo — and it was fine, and then Thursday happened and then the groupchat, and that was the geometry of it. No door closing. Just a door that was open and then, at some point I cannot locate, was no longer there.
I think about that Wednesday sometimes. How I complained about my thesis and he stole a piece of my pork and said 'di mo pa rin natatapos 'yan? and I said 'di mo trabaho 'yan and he grinned and gave the pork back, already chewed, just to be annoying, and I said ay sus and ate it anyway.
I ate it anyway.
I've been thinking about that for seven months and I still don't know what it means exactly. I have a guess. I'm not doing anything with the guess.
February — before Cebu, before everything — there was a lunch where I felt a sentence forming in my chest with a specificity that scared me. The kind that, once said, changes the shape of the room permanently. I had gotten as far as opening my mouth.
Dani got a text.
Sorry, kailangan ko na. Two hundred pesos flat on the table, exact for both of us, because he always knew the exact amount — always had it ready like he'd been counting in his head the whole time. Bayad na, sige.
Then the door.
The sentence dissolved somewhere between the two hundred pesos and the door. I don't know exactly where. I've tried to find it since and I can't.
I ate the rest of my sinigang. It was still good.
I don't know why that felt like something I needed to remember.
Ate Cely sets the bowl down. Ingat sa mainit.
Salamat.
The steam smells like my mother's kitchen and Dani's lola's refrigerator and also just like sinigang, which is what it is, which is all it has to be.
Outside, the jeepney is calling the route. Someone on Katipunan is selling something. The afternoon does its thing.
I pick up my spoon.
The table wobbles. I shift my weight — the way I've learned, the way my body learned before I did — and then it settles.
I eat.