The city felt different on Friday.
Not quieter. Cebu was not quieter on a Friday than on a Thursday. The sari-sari store opened at six. The tricycle route ran its first pass. The boulevard did its evening thing at six with the copper light and the food stalls and the families.
It just felt different.
I noticed it on the bus to work, which ran the same route it always ran and deposited me at the same stop and required the same walk up the same stairs to the same office. Nothing about the route had changed. The route was the route. But somewhere in the texture of it, in the way I moved through it, there was a space that had not been there on Wednesday.
He had been in the city for three weeks.
I had not fully registered how much space three weeks of someone took up until the three weeks
