Am I two-timing?

A city is not a landscape, I now realize; it’s the heart’s structure recalled blindly within its chambers. But it has taken time for me to sense that I prowl Vancouver’s streets in search of Manila, the “city of my affections,” an endearment borrowed from word-image icon Nick Joaquin.

Disbelief over this thought would strike anyone who has lived, or still lives, there. Indeed, what do I miss in Manila? How can I not remember the chaos in its streets, the high decibels made by the groaning engines of buses and jeepneys, the music from stores and snack nooks vying for ears from across each other? What about the grime and the rawness that have become its nature?

In contrast, Vancouver is calm, rarely frazzled. Even during rush hour, only staccato steps, light laughter and snatches of conversation counter the deep breathing of pneumatic brakes from buses plying their routes on main streets—no honking, except when extreme risk of an accident pops up; only  an ambulance-and-fire truck tandem might rent the air.

And because buses run on electricity, and no diesel in gas pumps, skies tend to be iridescent, except on foggy days in the fall and hazy ones in the spring, and especially when frozen in winter, so much so that Orion, the Pleiades and Venus rising would hang over you seemingly so close and stark, ready for picking.

Yet, so placed that in the vastness seem sparse, drawing out a longing for occasional shooting stars, which had granted a few wishes in my growing up under perforated Philippine skies—a rookie-astronomer once attributed this to the archipelago’s location on the equator.

Still, what I don’t ever see here well up as poignant thoughts, like Manila’s mangy dogs prowling and sniffing at the air like ghosts under a day moon or skeletal cats meowing their hunger at shadows.

Yet, more heartrending— who wouldn’t agree— are children on Roxas Boulevard, who dart by car windows, a sniffling runny- nosed baby strapped to their fragile bodies, right hand up with eyes begging for sympathy and alms.

Vancouver, too, has a few dark spots, like a stretch of Hastings Street by Chinatown, where I would stumble on the city’s homeless people. A couple of them have taken a permanent post by the granite steps of the cathedral, switching days. Could poverty incarnated into ghosts possibly haunting me?

Like carrying a hidden side of the moon, I stroll on Vancouver’s West End relishing shades of giant chestnut leaves, often pausing in a pergola by a formal English garden, once a private estate. Or am I merely searching for pocket corners in scented streets veiled by shivering shadows of champaca trees, like those in Malate?

And then, promptly getting on to English Bay at the end of the street, my spirit hums. Most times silkysmooth, this bay unfurls at the feet in tiny wave rolls, so unlike Manila Bay that overpowers with its irony of vastness, fullness and even grandeur at its incomparable blaze at sunset; even English Bay’s late summer sunsets ooze sweet peach.

I understand if you tell me that not much of the city I recall remains, except, perhaps, the din, grime and chaos in the streets, but especially of Manila Bay, how it breezes into one’s spirit unencumbered against the ancient walls and washes in at the Luneta, romanticized as a promenade in colonial times.

But jarred today by a structure on the spot where indio bravo Jose Rizal had been secreted out of his cell in Fort Santiago through Postigo, a back gate in the walls of Intramuros, for execution, who wouldn’t feel aghast seeing on The Filipino Channel the desecration of a national monument and legacy of beauty?

I do, each time just thinking about it. Yet, removed from Philippine life since, what right have I to be outraged? I guess I’ll be two-timing for years.