Incubate

Kapwa Tarot draws from her process of incorporating pre-colonial Filipinx myth and symbolism into a tarot deck. The appearance of the cards in my life coincided with the launch of a writers’ room I helped set up, a room that started with five female and non-binary Filipinx Australian creatives and is slowly expanding. We now call ourselves Ka-llective.

And so when he began to travel for his studies, the boy found his mobility offered him a vantage point from which to relate to people and place. The boy would commute every weekday of his teenage years to and from his suburban home in the southwest and his selective school in inner city Sydney.

Recently, the spirits from my mum’s side have been particularly active. I hear them when I am scraping the frypan after dinner or watering what is left of my lavender or dreaming of scootering up and down the driveway at my family home.

The call lasted six hours. My father dipped in and out the room, took cigarette breaks between pouring bourbon and cokes and laughing with the gallery when another person’s camera froze on an unfortunate facial expression. I felt guilty for being seventeen kilometres away from my family.

I’m tramping along a railway embankment in the wake of a Bankstown train, clinging to a cyclone fence for dear life.

For the daily commuter, rituals such as staring aimlessly out the window at soccer fields and storm-laden clouds will no longer define the way travel is experienced once trains go underground. I will miss glancing at the contours of passing suburbs to gauge the time remaining before my next stop. Many times, they have triggered a mental note about what to cook for dinner that night based on a restaurant I happen to notice at Blacktown station. I will no longer be able to note the additions of bright pot plants to newly renovated apartments, or the development of large tracts of empty vegetation into housing lots.

Generally, Filipinos are very superstitious. Dad gets creeped out anytime I wear something second-hand. ‘What if you’re wearing a dead person’s clothes?’ he asks. He prefers to live in new homes, as he believes old ones are haunted by the ghosts of previous residents. He scolded me as a child for cutting my nails at night because it brings bad luck and he warned me not to sleep with wet hair in case I woke up blind.

In this pocket universe, time is unwavering and inescapable. The paper is printed daily, the waste collectors drive round neighbourhood streets picking up rubbish weekly, and trains are patiently waiting to deliver their passengers from one end of the line to the other at every given moment.