The 5:47 AM Body 

Paola Lee, the Philippines

I. 

The jeepney idles at the corner of Commonwealth and Don Antonio, engine coughing diesel into the 5:47 AM haze. I count the rosaries swaying from the rearview mirror—seven today, plastic saints catching the first bruise of sunlight. Diyos ay pag-ibig, one declares in faded letters. God is love. 

I press my thumb against the metal edge of the seat and think: I want to believe. 

Instead, I look at the manong beside me with hands shaped by decades of steering wheels, at the student across from me with earbuds leaking a heartbreak anthem into the morning air, at the way our bodies fit together inside this narrow metal cavity as if intimacy were not a choice but a condition. The saints keep swinging. The loop continues. I feel nothing where faith should be, and everything where strangers are. 

Phoebe Bridgers sings it better than I ever could: I want to believe / Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing. “Chinese Satellite” plays on repeat during these commutes, the irony thick as smog—searching the sky for meaning while sitting in a vehicle held together by prayer, memory, and spare parts, staring at the same gray metro Manila morning I’ve known since I was fourteen. 

But what the song doesn’t say—what I’ve learned in the years since I let go of God—is this: feeling nothing in the sky doesn’t mean feeling nothing on the ground. 

This is my communion now. This 5:47 AM routine. This is my liturgy: the squeal of brakes, the choreography of “Bayad po,” the brief socialism of shoulders touching, thighs pressed against strangers’ thighs with nothing transgressive about it anymore. Just bodies sharing space because we have to. Because we’re all trying to get somewhere. Because the city doesn’t care about our personal bubbles. 

II. 

My mother used to pray before every trip. A quick sign of the cross, a whispered plea to San Cristóbal—insurance against trucks, fate, and the casual violence of metro Manila traffic. She did this even for the tricycle to the sari-sari store. 

I don’t remember when I stopped praying with her. Only that it happened the way paint peels: first a chip, then a corner, then suddenly you’re staring at bare concrete, wondering when the color left. 

Maybe it was 2020 and 2022, when prayers multiplied but bodies piled up faster than funeral homes could process them. Maybe it was earlier, when I learned that kind people die senselessly and cruel ones age into respectability, that the universe doesn’t balance its books the way Father Gomez promised in Sunday school. 

Or maybe I just traded one faith for another. Instead of God, I believe in schedules. Instead of miracles, I trust the probable: the jeepney that arrives within a five-minute window, the bus that’s always late but reliably so, the UV Express driver who knows my face even if he doesn’t know my name. 

I stopped believing in divine intervention. I started believing in infrastructure—flawed, breaking, underfunded infrastructure held together by underpaid humans doing their best with duct tape and habit. 

It isn’t transcendent. It isn’t beautiful in the way faith wants beauty to be. But it’s real. 

III. 

Let me explain why I love public transportation in a world where anyone with a choice is buying cars or where Grab exists. 

It isn’t environmentalism, though that helps. It isn’t thrifty, though my wallet approves. It’s something that sounds embarrassingly sincere when spoken aloud but feels unavoidably true when I’m standing inside it: 

Public transportation reminds me that I am not the main character. 

In a jeepney, I am one body among fifteen. My deadline is not more sacred than the nanay rushing her child to the clinic. My exhaustion does not outrank the construction worker’s. The executive and the janitor breathe the same exhaust, duck under the same low wires, negotiate the same potholes. 

There is something radically equalizing about that. Something that strips away the illusion that my suffering is uniquely important. 

When my depression is heavy—when my body feels like ballast and my mind catalogs reasons I don’t deserve ease—the commute structures me. It demands that I exist. It insists that I participate even when I want to disappear into thought, into numbness, into myself. 

The jeepney doesn’t wait for healing. It leaves whether I’ve slept, cried, or stared too long at my reflection wondering why my face never quite feels like mine. That indifference clarifies. It cuts through. 

IV. 

The ritual is precise. 

5:30 AM — alarm. Snooze once, never twice. 

5:45 AM — out the door. The sky that particular Manila purple, where smog and possibility coexist. 

5:47 AM — at the corner. The UV Express door is already sliding open. The driver nods. I

nod back. 

6:03 AM — Fairview Jollibee. Traffic predicts the rest of the day. 

6:20 AM — Quezon Avenue. Vendors weaving between cars, selling survival in small increments. 

6:45 AM — arrival, though arrival was never the point. 

This ritual predates me. My father took jeepneys for decades before he left—one of the few facts I have about him. My lolo before him rode whatever vehicle ran on shared routes. This is inheritance: not money, not property, but the muscle memory of passing coins backward, the knowledge that you are part of something larger than your destination. 

V. 

Nietzsche asks whether we could live our lives again, exactly as they are, endlessly repeated. Every joy. Every humiliation. Every dull morning. 

I ask myself this on the 5:47 AM commute. Same route. Same diesel. Same faces aging beside me. If this is all there is—no heaven, no cosmic correction—can I still say yes? 

Some mornings, no. Some mornings the repetition feels like punishment. Some mornings I want to scream at the traffic, at the heat, at the absurdity of earning money to survive so I can wake up and do it again. 

But most mornings, I find something quieter than despair. The rhythm steadies me. The repetition becomes attention. Not prayer to anything, but prayer as practice—the radical act of noticing that this moment, ordinary as it is, is happening, and I am inside it. 

VI. 

My body and I are not allies. 

There are mornings when I avoid mirrors. Mornings when every reflective surface feels accusatory. My face never looks correct to me—too this, not enough that. I’ve spent hours negotiating angles, searching for evidence that I deserve space. 

There are no mirrors in the jeepney. Just bodies. Shared heat. Shared necessity. No one studies my face. No one audits my worth. The lola beside me only sees someone who might pass her fare forward. The student asleep on my shoulder doesn’t catalog asymmetry—she needs rest, and I am simply there. 

The relief is profound: to be ordinary, unremarkable, unexamined. 

VII. 

Last month, the jeepney broke down on Quirino Highway. We spilled onto the road—fifteen strangers stranded inside morning chaos. Someone joked about retirement. Someone laughed. A lola sighed with perfect resignation.

Most of us stayed. 

When the engine finally restarted, we climbed back in. The driver didn’t charge us. We didn’t ask for our money back. 

VIII. 

Meaning isn’t found like buried treasure. It’s constructed. Like roads. Like routes that evolve from necessity. 

Rituals are architecture in time. They give shape to hours that would otherwise dissolve. Wake. Commute. Work. Return. Again. 

This isn’t emptiness, but structure. 

The loop isn’t a trap. It’s a slow widening. Each return reveals a difference. Last year, I cried passing Fairview Jollibee, overwhelmed by how easily everyone inhabited their bodies. This year, I barely noticed it. 

That is growth, visible only through repetition. 

IX. 

I’m writing this in the back of the UV Express. 6:11 AM. The usual chokepoint near Lagro. The sun is harsh now, erasing purple with certainty. 

The manong is here. Same seat. The student’s music was louder today. Another rosary has been added—eight now. 

And I understand: this is it. 

Not the imagined future where everything resolves. Not the version of me who finally believes or finally stops missing belief. This. This is returning. 

The cycle weighs. It aches. But it also holds. And in a universe without guarantees, persistence may be the closest thing to grace. 

Paola Lee (INFJ-T), is a Filipina writer, collector of contradictions, and independent researcher passionate about advocacy, literature, and politically engaged storytelling. In her freetime, she writes creative nonfiction and poetry, usually circling themes of memory, identity, girlhood, inequality, and survival. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Thieving Magpie, Perspektif Magazine, Eunoia Review, Bluemarble Review, among others. She is participant of Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program for Nonfiction and the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop & SUNHOUSE for hybrid next summer, as well as part of community of practice at Youth Transforming Narratives while living somewhere between fluorescent light, unfinished questions, and the Philippines.