Quiapo, On A Sunday Evening.
This evening, after dinner, my mom asked me to buy rice from a carinderia (a small, home-based eatery) down the street. Our dog had to be fed, and sometimes my mom feels wasteful giving our dog the fair-trade organic red rice, or something, so she asked me to buy a single serving of white rice to feed Choco with, instead. Choco should be grateful, especially since we give her people food apart from the dog food, but mostly she just whines at me when I don't feed her by 7 pm.
So, going out to buy rice. 8:30 pm, in the more suburban areas of Quiapo (if those areas actually exist). Now, I am nineteen and not at all an idiot, and am capable of commuting quite long distances, and in possession of working knowledge of the train system -- but I usually treat Going Down the Street as some sort of event. I dress up in jeans, and sometimes wear a jacket, and I tie my hair in a severe bun and use sneakers when most people would be content in their sandos and puruntong shorts, or, for that matter, shirtless. I don't know what it is about walking the streets that makes me so nervous. Granted, it is Quiapo, which I guess is kind of the inner village of an inner city (although it's not as bad as the Pier area of Tondo) -- but I live down the street from a 7-11, an Iglesia ni Cristo church, a small parish for San Lorenzo Ruiz. People here are homebodies and homeboys/girls. Except when they're not, and there's a scuffle, and someone stabs someone who owes them a bit of money, with a kitchen knife.
That has actually happened.
However, for the most part, our area of Quiapo is more quiet than anything else. Calm and residential and all that. Of course you have Plaza Miranda as the site of the infamous bombings that partly triggered the 70's Martial Law, and the Villalobos street with it's Chinese merchants and noisy hagglers, and Quiapo market with it's touristy-ghetto goods and people coming from all over to try out straw hats, the DVD Mecca of Piracy where Muslim vendors try to outsell each other's wholesales, the side-streets which all lead to Chinatown or another unpretentious shop of odds-ends, and, of course, January 9's heart-attack-inducing Black Nazarene festival, which is always a hairsbreadth away from a stampede (and people have actually died there). There's the mindless traffic of buses and jeepneys and the eternal stuffiness of super-saturated Manila smog hanging over everything -- but, for the most part, our street? Pretty quiet.
You have to believe me.
But every time I find myself stepping out -- back straight, head bowed, shoulders completely set like a sack of potatoes, and a silent scuffling walk -- I feel like I have to be hiding from the world. I don't make eye contact with anyone, although these people are supposedly my neighbors. I am aways ready to break out in a run.
That is probably not too strange, considering where I live.
But is it really dangerous, I keep on thinking? Should I really feel proud of my Mark Zuckerberg-as-portrayed-by-Jesse-Eisenberg walk, the robotic, people-don't-touch-me walk that I have absorbed through countless rewatches of the movie? There are kids out in the street, below ten, playing pretty carelessly. Sometimes I hear them playing ball at 12 in the morning. They chant mean kid-bullying chants, but that is really neither here nor there. There are other youths, people my age but I have never tried to relate to, or tried to talk with, or even know the names of. They lean against cars and flirt with each other. There are old men drinking under their awnings of galvanized iron, playing chess sometimes, bellies hanging out, shelling peanuts. Sari-sari stores and people lounging in front and texting. (Why do these things seem so vivid right now?) They all have their own lives, and I shouldn't really look at every pedestrian whose face is half in shadow as a sort of potential mugger. Should I?
I should try to walk more brightly, I think. Next time. Next time I decide to buy pan de sal, or buy Choco white rice, or, I dunno, explore one of Villalobos' trinket stores -- I should raise my chin up a bit, yes. I will play Spring from the Four Seasons in my head instead of In the Hall of the Mountain King, as the soundtrack to my commute. I will, at one point or another, stop clenching my fists so compulsively every five seconds.
(Of course, I'll still be walking fast like I can't wait to get elsewhere. I still live in Quiapo, after all, where sometimes loiterers get mugged and bystanders get run over -- I am not enough of a romantic to stroll.)
In the meantime, I will try to cope with my commuter's paranoia by writing about it on LJ and Googling various Baroque symphony selections for my commute soundtrack. (Sometimes I wonder if everyone I meet on the street has as many useless turrets on the architecture of their thoughts as I do. I think that's the part that I'm most worried about, that everyone else knows How To Be Street Smart when I face them on the street, and I worry that they know that I don't. Idiot.)