The seats inside the LRT-A are one of my most favorite places in Metro Manila. This one you must know; this one you must remember. You never really know whether the train is noisy or quiet. You sit inside and watch as it drags on from station to station to station. I try to listen intently wondering what the noises were about-one time there was this girl who was holding her lover’s hand talking loudly by the train door. It made me wonder about all the elaborate possibilities of you and me on the train.

Dear Future Lover, let us ride the train; let us call it a date. The trains sounds like this: contented, midway between a flight and a quick sprint as it carries the weight of all the passengers and the heaviness in their sighs.

It drags from the Santolan station to Katipunan. There is a tunnel there. This one you must know; this one you must remember. It makes all the difference. The train, as it enters this tunnel, makes whirr sounds like dashes–the way you drag your pen on a page, or check marks you used to do on quiz papers of the boy who sat beside you when you were 9, back in elementary school.

Dear Future Lover, let us ride the train; let us call it a date. Let us do it on a Sunday morning when everyone else could not be bothered to drag their bodies out of bed. We will be half-drunk from the night before. We would play Bloc Party’s Sunday on my iPod.

We will think of it as a secret: everyone else intends to move from point a to point b, we are just in it for the ride-the happiness and the privacy it affords as we hold hands like school children laughing at the stickers in the train coach.

We will take random trips to Quiapo-I will have my future told: of you and me when we are 80-we will go down the Recto station. We will take a trip to this church, St. Jude, I will tell you stories of my walking around Legarda, you will tell me stories about your college year. We will go to the National Bookstore in Cubao-the one beside Gateway-we will talk about paperclips, and glue, and all the books you read when you were little.

Dear Future Lover, let us ride the train; let us call it a date. We will take trips at noon. I’ll find you first I guess. I hope I see you soon.