=== PAGE: journal:021f_bayangan ===
====== Entry — In transit, Bayangan ======
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I don't know Bayangan well. I want to be careful about how much I build on top of that foundation, because I've done it before with people I didn't know well — constructed a version of them from the available evidence and then been surprised when the person didn't match the construction.

What I observed, in the years we shared that house, was someone in the particular posture of a person waiting. Waiting for the approval to come in, waiting for the power to manifest the way it was wanted, waiting for the signal that they had done enough to be enough. I know that posture from the inside. I lived in it for years. Whether Bayangan would want to be recognised that way is his to decide, and I'm not going to lead with it.

What I wonder about, on this train, is what the waiting did to him over time. I knew it for three or four years — the specific erosion of chasing something that keeps moving. He had more years of it than I did, by the shape of things. The power never fully manifested how they wanted. The approval never came cleanly. That's not a small thing to carry and it doesn't leave you unchanged.

I left at seventeen. Bayangan, as far as I know, didn't leave. I don't know if that was choice or circumstance or something in between. What I know is that every year you stay in a house that is measuring you against a standard you can't reach does something to the architecture of how you understand your own worth, and those renovations aren't easy to undo.

//I hope the years have been all right for him. That's not a small hope, actually — it's the specific hope I have for someone when I understand the particular shape of what they were up against and genuinely don't know whether they made it through.//

//I'm going to try not to assume. I'm going to walk in there and actually look at him and see what's in front of me rather than what I've built from a distance.//