The rains come and flow even into the most well-built houses in the neighborhood, finding their way into the seams of rooftops and the interstices of windows, staking their claim on everything in answer to those who cried for salvation from the heat and to those who doubted that the wet season had arrived. I stop painting toward midnight, still two pieces short of my summer collection. I retrieve my faux timber-wolf fur jacket and have a late snack at M.'s cafe. Everyone in the street and in the cafe gawks at me.

Outside the cafe, beyond the glass walls, is an endless downpour. There is rolling thunder and there is sheet lightning. The scene I am in would make a great beginning for a story; it is, as a matter of fact, exactly the opening of my book Maligayang Pagdating Sa Sitio Catacutan except that it is not raining in that one. I order and pay for stuff I haven't had, to know what the locals are eating: a chocolate chip cookie (good), a polvoron (good, but my sister Sylvia still makes the best), tapsilog, and two glasses of iced tea. Alan, the chef, tells me that M. intends to have a steel awning made to hang along the facade of the building (I will end up paying for this, of course, but will be glad to because it will fall within the Cubao New Orleans French Quarter motif).

I have my journal but decide to go back to the house instead of writing. Upstairs, Aubrey has her bedroom AC on--a good idea even in rainy weather. There is nothing on TV, all of the stations have replays. I dare not pick up my brushes again, though, because, if I do, I shall be painting well into dawn and end up losing blissful sleep.

A good night for lambanog, but I'll pass and continue reading Picasso: Creator and Destroyer in bed.