There’s a choreography to crying in public in this city, and I’ve gotten good at it the way you get good at anything you practice (even without meaning to).
First tip: a Grab is the most reliable place to cry in Metro Manila because the traffic guarantees you the time, and the driver, bless him, will not ask. You look out the window. You let it happen somewhere around Guadalupe and you’ve usually recovered by the time you’re off the bridge. If he’s playing the radio, even better! OPM at the right volume is a privacy screen, a love song doing the emotional labor so you don’t have to explain yours. I have arranged a genuinely embarrassing amount of my emotional life around the EDSA traffic. The slow crawl I cursed every other day of my life is also the traffic that held me on the bad ones.
Second: the mall bathroom is for the tears that ambush you mid-errands. Here, the trick is to get the farthest stall. And the trick within the trick is the hand dryer: you wait for someone to turn it on and you let the noise cover the part you can’t control. The loud sob you can’t swallow, the shaky inhale. Then you come out, you wash your hands like a regular person with regular business, and you get on with your day to Get Things Done. Powerplant 3F is the gold standard. Clean, quiet, good lighting to assess the damage afterward. (I won’t tell you the other two. A girl needs her spots.)
And then, there’s the back pew of a church I don’t typically frequent. I’m not going to pretend it’s entirely spiritual, because I’d know I was lying and so would you (and God). It’s that a church in the afternoon is the only place in this entire city that’s cool and dim and asks absolutely nothing of you. No one wondering, at all, why you’ve gone still in the middle of a Tuesday.
You can just be a person who is having a hard time, inside a building that was conveniently designed for exactly that. I light no candle, I make no deals. I just sit until the thing passes through me and out, and then I say Thank You, get up, go home, and reheat dinner. Or take a long nap.
For a long time I thought knowing all this meant something was wrong with me. That a well-adjusted woman in her thirties wouldn’t need a map for her breakdowns. That the healthy version of me would cry at home, under her sheets, like the wellness accounts imply you’re supposed to: somewhere soft, with tea, with a journal, processing.
But I’ve stopped believing that. And here’s the turn I didn’t expect to find when I started writing this down: The map can either be evidence of dysfunction OR evidence that I kept going.
Every one of those spots is a place I found while still out in the world, still doing what I needed done, still showing up. Not a place I retreated to instead of living, but a place that let me keep living through the part where I needed to fall apart for 8 minutes. Gets ba?
That’s the thing nobody tells you about being a functional adult. The goal was never to stop needing to cry. The goal is to build a life roomy enough to hold the crying and the bouncing back, the falling apart and the showing up, in the same hot, loud, crowded afternoon. Manila, for all its noise (maybe even because of it all?) turns out to be exactly that roomy. It does not ask me to choose.
I hope you find (or better yet, already have) your spots too. And I hope, on the days you need them, the traffic is terrible and the song is sad and nobody, nobody at all, asks if you’re okay.
