The Moon Knows What You Did

I was seven when my Lola said the moon keeps a ledger of our sins, that its white face is the face of a god too tired to look away. In the province, we called it mata ng gabi, eye of the night, and I believed it followed me from the river where I stole guavas from Mang Celso’s tree. I ran through the rice fields, feet black with mud, and the moon swung low like a lantern held by a hand I could feel pressing between my shoulder blades. My Lola said the moon once was a woman who watched her children drown and did nothing, so God pinned her to the sky forever, open-eyed. Now she watches us. She watched me pocket coins from the offering plate. She watched my uncle stumble home smelling of lambanog and another woman’s hair. The tides are her breathing. The eclipses, her slow blinks of disgust. I have carried her gaze across oceans, to cities where light pollution should have buried her, and still she finds me through the thinnest cloud. In Manila, the vendors fold their tarps at midnight and she is there, pale over Divisoria, over the jeepneys coughing exhaust into the dark. I am twenty-five now. I have done things I will never say aloud. My Lola is gone. The guava tree is gone. The river has moved its mouth. Still the moon rises, still she opens her one enormous eye, and I feel it on my neck the way a child feels a hand reaching through the dark.