Here is the church, here is the steeple Sara Elisabeth Morabe Murphy
I’m finding it challenging to listen to a playlist full of desert music while trying to write about being in the Philippines. It feels false. Like an unnecessary photo filter, posturing and insisting on dusty yellow orange hues on top of color that didn’t need correcting. The only thing that doesn’t feel wrong is the stream of constant movement that this music conjures up. The movement is constant outside the window in both memories. I pulled these songs together specifically for solo road trips, and hearing them again now I can see the creeping rose dawn and blurred mesquite without even having to close my eyes. I don’t remember what music I would have been listening to in the Philippines, aside from crackly karaoke speakers at open air bars or brassy fiesta performances at night in the Tanay town square. I’m sure I was trying to conserve my iPod battery life as much as possible and besides, it would have been rude to listen to my headphones in the car, even on longer trips between provinces and it would have been inconceivably disrespectful to pull them out in a tricycle trip. It’s ok to drown everything out when you’re driving alone and want to take breaks from wherever your mind takes you without having asked you in the first place. It’s ok to lean on a playlist when you’re stuck inside your apartment during a pandemic and want to try to steer your mind back to the country your family left but kept coming back to. Alternative transportation. It’ll still get me where I’m trying to go. So I sit here in three places at once. I’m in my car two years ago in June speeding south down Highway 5, alone and waiting for the sun to come out hot and keep me company. I’m on my couch and it’s April we’re still sheltering in place for however many days and I’m actively summoning memories of driving to and through Cavite. It’s January 2011 and I’m in an air conditioned car looking at the blue green brown blur of trees, of the sky, of the place my grandparents were born, of a fragile jumble of houses on the edge of the sea and the outskirts of town, of the smoke of burning garbage. I’m in these three places but I’m most focused on the last, I’m honing in on being halfway through a trip halfway around the world, on the jeepney chrome and all the old churches with all their old steeples, on the fields and malls and farms and factories, on the faces of people who look like my 94
