In Cubao, the cicadas start singing as soon as the sun sets. The tree branches turn a deep olive, like dark lace, and the fruit bats scribble wild sentences across the lavender sky. Sometimes I smell the perfumed smoke of dried leaves set to fire at the feet of acacias, but it is only a memory of evenings from my childhood in San Fernando, Pampanga.

I am beginning to enjoy sunset, twilight, and dusk all over again, now that I am calm and centered in my captain's cabin bedroom and not fighting for survival in devils' traffic, attempting to get home alive.