(2017) AHWW 22 Zine

THE 22 ND ATENEO HEIGHTS WRITERS WORKSHOP FEBRUARY 4–6, 2017 RIVERVIEW, CALAMBA, LAGUNA

HEIGHTS 22nd Ateneo Heights Writers Workshop Zine Copyright 2017 Copyright reverts to the respective authors and artists whose works appear in this issue. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any means whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright holder.

This publication is not for sale.

Correspondence may be addressed to: Heights, Publications Room, MVP 202 Ateneo de Manila University p.o. Box 154, 1099 Manila, Philippines Tel. no. (632) 426-6001 loc. 5448 heights-ateneo.org HEIGHTS is the official literary and artistic publication and organization of the Ateneo de Manila University.

Layout by Anfernee Dy Typeset Amasis and Amasis MT

THE 22 ND ATENEO HEIGHTS WRITERS WORKSHOP FEBRUARY 4–6, 2017 RIVERVIEW, CALAMBA, LAGUNA

P A NEL IS T S Mark Anthony Cayanan Dr. Conchitina Cruz Faye Cura Luis Francia Gabriela Lee Allan Popa Dr. Vincenz Serrano

FEL L OWS Nikki Blanco [Nonfiction] Tracey Dela Cruz [Nonfiction] Bee Leung [Nonfict ion] Wella Lobaton [Tula] Cymon Lubangco [Tula] Kurt Marquez [Poetry] Ryan Molen [Fiction] Chaela Tiglao [Fiction] Alie Unson [Nonfiction] Jolo Urquico [Poetry]

T able o f C o n t e n t s Introduction • 08 Nikki Blanco • 10 Tracey Dela Cruz • 14 Bee Leung • 28 Wella Lobaton • 36 Cymon Lubangco • 42 Kurt Marquez • 44 Ryan Molen • 48 Chaela Tiglao • 58 Alie Unson • 66 Jolo Urquico • 72

Introduction Since its beginning in 1995, the Ateneo HEIGHTS Writers Workshop has made it its objective to promote a culture of writing among Ateneo students. Under the guidance of a panel of established writers, students are given the opportunity to further develop their craft in a series of panel discussions and writing exercises. Many of its alumni have gone on to pursue successful careers in writing.

Now an established project, the workshop continues to be a way for HEIGHTS to serve the community. In recent years, the past workshop directors have taken note of the increasing amount of submissions to the workshop, with it taken to mean an increasing interest in writing among Ateneans. However, the question of representation persists even after so many years.

With a limit of only ten follows accepted for the workshop, to what extent can the Ateneo HEIGHTS Writers Workshop claim that it is effective in cultivating the craft of Atenean writers?

In many ways, this was at the root of the problems faced by this year’s workshop.

For the first time in recent history, only two fellows writing in Filipino were accepted into the workshop, both fellows for tula—an intensification of last year’s problem of a marked lack of Filipino prose. More than the problem of language, the workshop was also challenged to accommodate a greater number of essayists with four of the ten fellows accepted for nonfiction, more than any number we’ve received before.

Accompanying these was the challenge of diversifying our panel. While the workshop has come to establish its own set of regular panelists, this year saw an increasing need to include more women panelists with many of the works written not merely from a female perspective, but also tackling particularly the concerns surrounding femininity, female sexuality, and the female body. Consequently, the workshop saw its most diverse panel in the past three years, boasting not only three female panelists but also a total of four panelists from institutions outside the university; and where discussion was most fruitful was at the points where these varying perspectives came into dialogue with one another.

After 22 years, what perhaps this workshop experience points to is a need to be more critical of the project behind the program. It is to be expected that the literary scene here in Ateneo displays its own dynamism—a dynamism that demands to be constantly acknowledged.

Thus, more than just catering to the ten accepted fellows and regular roster of panelists, I find that it is time to take a more active stance beyond the workshop in encouraging writers— from different disciplines and different backgrounds—to come to the fore and have their works read; to be recognized as part of the community of writers here in the Ateneo. In the end, the challenge for both the workshop and HEIGHTS is to recognize and respond to the constantly shifting and emerging trends present within the Ateneo writing community.

This special issue contains the works of the fellows—works selected by them and revised based on the comments they received during the workshop. Alongside their pieces are

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essays tackling their creative processes, their influences, and their eventual hopes following their workshop experience. For the fellows, I hope that the works in this zine will serve as a reminder for you to continue honing your craft. For the readers, it is my hope that these works will translate into a call to be part of the ongoing process of developing the writing community here in Ateneo.

Marco Bartolome Associate Editor April 2017

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Nikki Blanco

4 A B C OM, Fe llo w fo r No n fic tion My initial interest in the essay as a genre began in my freshman year with Dr. Vincenz Serrano, who gave my class works such as “Black” by Alexander Theroux and “Erato Love Poetry” by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. At the time, these works were not what I would have associated with the term “essay,” because my understanding of the genre was limited to academic requirements.

I returned to these works later on in my creative nonfiction classes with Martin Villanueva. It was during this time that I would come to define the essay as a genre that attempts to make sense of things that preoccupy the writer. Philip Lopate says: “To essay is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether or not you are going to succeed.” It is with this concept of the essay that I write my works.

When asked about my writing process, I tend to give a somewhat simplistic answer: I go back to my most poignant memories, the ones that are difficult to forget and perhaps even more difficult to understand. It’s the process of understanding that I later translate into essays.

“On Haunting” was, in many ways, one of the essays that proved difficult to produce, not only because I had limited myself to a tone that was hard to deploy, but also because it was of a subject matter that I resisted to confront. I hope that in the course of my revisions, I was able to heighten the idea behind the work. But more than anything, I hope that my continued engagement with the genre further informs my notions and conceptions of it.

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On Haunting NI KKI BL ANCO

Haunting manifests itself in different ways, and we have given it many meanings. When I think of haunting, I think immediately of old houses and how we immediately assume that they are occupied by the spirits of their past residents.

My mother once told me the story of her high school retreat house and how, when it was time for them to sleep, they would hear chains being dragged on the tiled floor. My father, she said, could feel spirits but not necessarily hear them. Before I was born, my parents had vacationed to Baguio and spent a night in a house that had been converted into a kind of hotel. That the house was full of guests was the first thing my mother noticed, but when she had made a comment about the noise to the concierge, she had been told that theirs was the only occupied room.

When people die, sometimes their spirits linger. Sometimes they stay because they cannot leave those that carry on living. Or sometimes they cannot disassociate with that which has become far too familiar. When a limb is severed, the feeling of the limb remains. Phantom limbs, they call it. Sometimes, my mother said, she could hear my grandfather’s voice calling her after he had died. Perhaps the living are the ones who cannot let go, who will the haunting to being.

Some say that spirits are confused, are left wandering because they do not know that they are spirits. He once told me that ghosts are drawn to people who can see them. They’re looking for help, he said. Maybe it’s because they want to escape. To escape means to let go. But I know that we cling to that which we know.

Places aren’t haunted, people are. Sometimes the haunting is imposed on us, and sometimes we impose it.

Was it my fault that I yearned to draw warmth from him? And was it his fault that my yearning only incited coldness and discomfort?

To haunt is to frequent; it is something habitual. The children in the neighborhood used to gather on the street late at night, pieces of blank paper and clear drinking glasses in hand. It had become a ritual. We would scribble down the alphabet in a circle and placed it flat on the cold pavement. The drinking glass would be placed at the center, our fingertips making their way to the butt of the glass. We waited, every night, for the glass to move. And when it did, we were convinced that we had summoned the supernatural. But we later found out that it had been one of the boys whose fingers could not keep still. We had been persistent, the elders calling us ghost hunters. And I thought that persistence was enough for the yearning to yield results.

He was seated in the backseat of my car, our other friends surrounding us. This had become a ritual, nightly visits to a local coffee shop, boisterous laughter always earning us glares from other people. He fell silent suddenly. Perhaps he thought we hadn’t noticed, but I did. He told us later on that he had felt something in

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the car, another ghost perhaps, because this wouldn’t have been new to him. But I was convinced that it was the yearning yielding results. To be haunted is to be in a constant state of distress.

Ghosts are perhaps in varying states of distress or anxiety, always wandering and never finding whatever it is they are looking for. We are haunted perhaps by that which we cannot escape, by the things that we look for but never find.

There was a chill in the air as he and I scraped the pavement with our shoes one cold night. I had walked with him in search of answers. We had consumed too much alcohol and were saying things that we hoped we wouldn’t remember the following day. I hooked my arm around his in an attempt to preserve what little answers I had found, what little had manifested of the yearning that never seemed to abate. Was this what being haunted felt like? The incessant need to be near. The feeling of being close but never close enough.

That was when I found out that he could see ghosts, not just feel them. And he had told me that as we walked, he saw a child that was begging. The child had talked to him, he said. And when I asked what it had said, he told me that it was asking to be taken away by us. It asked me if we could help him escape.

I had convinced myself that he had felt my haunting, even when I stayed silent and unable to say anything. I understand yearning to be haunting, in a sense that we attached ourselves to the comfort of the object which we yearn for. But the image he painted of the boy begging to be released stayed with me. I wonder if ghosts know of comfort, of the feeling of being released from haunting. Do ghosts have a choice? I suppose not. Did I? He once talked to me of haunting, of knowing what it felt like to be in a constant state of distress. And he had asked for escape, the kind which he said only I could give him. I remembered the way I had wrapped my arm around his and thought perhaps that this was how ghosts understood haunting. Attach yourself to that which gives you comfort, to the familiar. Yearn for that which gives you answers.

There is a forest where people go in search of answers, finding that the answer comes only when the searching stops. When the haunting ends there is a feeling of emptiness. There is silence in emptiness, the kind that could only be called resistance. There was resistance in the way we both let the emptiness swallow more of us. But the yearning persists, and so does the haunting. Perhaps yearning is haunting.

I think again of ghosts and how they are not the ones who haunt but are the ones who are haunted.

I understand haunting in this way.

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Tracey Dela Cruz

5 B S P S Y , Fe llo w fo r No n fic tion My interest in the essay as a genre began in 2015, when I sat in a “creative nonfiction” workshop class under the invitation of a friend. At that time, I still considered myself a writer of short stories and the only notion I had of the essay was derivative of fiction— essays were just stories that actually happened. The CNF class was discussing the concept of hybridity, and it was the challenge of the professor, Mr. Martin Villanueva, to his students to be weird, to experiment with form and look for new ways of articulation.

This moment, I think, made me want to shift my focus from fiction to the essay, a genre more elusive if not fickle about what it is.

While many of the writers we’ve discussed in class had their great ideas in defining the genre of the essay, I find myself gravitating to Philip Lopate’s criterion of the (personal) essay as having “an open form and a drive toward candor and self-disclosure.”

This candor that Lopate talks about concerns itself less with fidelity to the reality of an event than to the writer’s own vulnerability as he attempts to achieve deeper levels of honesty. To lie, in this sense, is not to withhold the truth or to make stuff up, but to deny the reader of sincerity as the writer bares herself through her piece.

Drawing from this, I believe an awareness of one’s vantage point and subject

position is essential in writing essays. The self-reflexivity of the writer, evident in the manner of introspection, sets the essay apart from a mere commemoration of the past.

I wanted this to be what surfaced in my essay for this zine, a piece that is very close to my heart but, hopefully, despite its honesty, does not tend toward a simple self-indulgent rant, but speaks of a larger middle-class struggle.

I am grateful for all that I’ve learned from the 22nd Ateneo HEIGHTS Writers Workshop, and I hope this is only the beginning. I like the idea of the essay as being an attempt (thank you, Montaigne), as this lends it some uncertainty and open-endedness.

Still, it is an utterance in the world. What shape might it take.

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Reunion TRACEY DEL A CRUZ

From our house in Quezon City, we drove to my childhood home in San Juan where we’d convoy to the cemetery. The house along Barasoain Street is packed today, which makes Tatay happy. I imagine he’s been lonely, having been left in that house, together with my uncle, who was often out for work or away for weeks to visit his children and his wife in Infanta, Quezon. This year, a few of my cousins are missing together with two of my aunts, opting to stay in their homes in Caloocan and Infanta respectively, instead of coming with us to visit Nanay’s grave.

The house in Barasoain is the same, if only sadder. Think of it as symbolic of the derelict life that befalls anyone who stays. Even as the surrounding streets of Biak-na-Bato, Wilson, P. Guevarra became increasingly gentrified—fancy new restaurants, a small mall with a Rustan’s supermarket, a Starbucks, a soon-to-open cineplex, a new Jollibee branch where McDonald’s used to be—the street of Barasoain remained unchanged.

Its one-step-above shanty houses, the thin stray dogs, the somehow always dirty, littered road, istambays loitering about, and the many children—always too many children—being walked about all screamed to me a sorrow I had been all but too happy to leave behind when I was fourteen. Some people weren’t so lucky.

My grandfather is thinner now than I last saw him, his eyes more clouded, but his demeanor remains—the aloof cheerfulness, the way he crosses his right knee on the left when he’s sitting, his palms resting on the edge of the sofa. He keeps pushing plates of food at me even when I say I’m not hungry. Can he sense that behind my refusal is a mild disgust of the imagined unsanitary utensils? I don’t even drink water here, not even if it is in the purified water containers. I always bring a bottled water.

Have I always been so cruel. This was the house of my grandparents, the one they moved in to when they married, the house my mother and her four brothers grew up in. It was supposed to be a place of character, of family history, but there were little to no reminders of the generation that came before. I believe this is symptomatic of the trait we all shared; none of us were sentimental about these things, except perhaps for my mother, who was a step away from being a clinical hoarder. She was the one who filled the otherwise empty house in an attempt to make it beautiful: rugs, tablecloths, expensive plates, tea sets, figurines, framed pictures and paintings, cross-stitches of heavenly hosts, vases of flowers. We rarely ever took the plates out, only on special occasions, and even then most occasions weren’t special enough. The figurines gathered dust in their shelves together with the vases. I broke most of the tea sets playing with them.

When my mother, brother, and I moved out and took our possessions with us, the house in Little Baguio looked sad and bare. At twenty, I’m amazed that I ever thought our house was big. If I stand on tiptoes, my head reaches the ceiling now. I walk through the old room I used to share with my mother, brother, and

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grandmother, and marvel at how tiny it is. How did we fit a bunk bed, a bedside table, two dressers, and two fans here. Where did we put all of my mother’s books, our clothes, our toys. Where did I have the room to study.

My grandfather asks again if I want to eat. I acquiesce, careful not to let the fork touch my tongue as I share with my brother a plate of pancit prepared by Tita Em and Tita Mer. My cousin’s son, Daniel, is three years old now. The last I saw him he was still a baby with no words, always sleepy. Today, he points his toy gun at me and fires imaginary bullets. I play dead. He asks his aunts what my name is but keeps forgetting. In a few years I will be the obscure relative, his awareness of me nothing more than the vague recollection of having seen me at family gatherings, knowing me only by name.

That’s how I knew most of my relatives: only by name. Our house is located at the end of a narrow alley branching off of Barasoain and the neighbors were related to each other in one way or another. On special occasions we’d visit other relatives, the more affluent ones, who decided to leave this barangay. They were the dream. Even at a young age, I knew that our house in Little Baguio was not the place I would grow old in.

My mother raised me to be ambitious. Even though we could barely afford it, she sent me to a private school for elementary, and then to a science high school, and now in Ateneo. According to her, a good education offered the social mobility I would need in the future. When I asked my relatives for help because I wanted to study for a term abroad, they had all asked why bother, and it was my mother who rose to my defense, as she had when I first told them I was going to get delayed for a year because I took up another degree.

Some of my cousins started college but never got to finish, not because they didn’t have money but because they just didn’t want to continue anymore. Others got their degree but were underemployed. Others got pregnant and opted to stay at home. None of those options are particularly appealing to me or my mother.

The plan is to aspire, work hard, leave, and never look back. * We arrive at St. Joseph’s Cemetery at around 2 PM, a sticky afternoon. Across from the Dela Cruz graves are those of the Planas family whom we all knew to be Iglesia ni Cristo, so we never bumped into them on All Saints’ Day, and we had a spot to sit on during our visits. Tatay had brought with him two tarpaulins and a bundle of rope so we could arrange a makeshift roof for shade. “Too bad we lost the tree,” we say repeatedly as the afternoon seemed to grow warmer. The grave that had been exposed when the tree fell during the storm had not been repaired. I don’t know what the relatives had done with the bones.

Nanay’s grave is the only one I care about so I light a candle only for her. When my brother graduated, we visited her grave and smoked a cigarette each as we shared fond memories of our lola, laughing as we imagined what she would have said to Kuya if she had been still alive: Dapat lang graduate ka na. Tagal-tagal na eh.

We loved her, everyone in the family did. She was a mild-mannered woman, slow to anger. The one who

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took care of my brother and me when our mother was at work. She cooked the family meals and washed the clothes, opting out of using the machine when she could and washing the laundry by hand instead, claiming it was cleaner this way. She taught me how to wash after myself, prepared the bottles of milk I kept sucking on until I was five. She was too young to die at sixty-nine.

I never paid much attention to the other markers beside Nanay’s. One is for Francisca Dela Cruz, the other, for her husband Loreto. Tatay sees me reading their epitaphs and he says, “That’s my father and my mother.”

It’s the first time he has ever mentioned them to me. Growing up, I had never even heard their names. There were no pictures of them in the house, not even in Tatay’s room.

It fascinates me that Tatay would say that, his voice soft with a tenderness I have rarely seen in him, a tenderness that I imagine was foreign to my mother as well. She told me that when she had admitted to her parents she was pregnant with Kuya and that she didn’t want to marry her boyfriend who knocked her up, Tatay was livid. He had screamed at her, almost hit her, had even asked her to leave his house. Just imagine how much worse it had been when it happened again, three years later, this time the child belonging to a married man. Nanay was just quiet, even as her husband seethed and raged. When Kuya was born it was Nanay who raised him. She changed his diapers, prepared his formula, rocked him to sleep.

My mother was twenty-one, still a student, still working part-time at McDo. “I never took a cent of their money,” my mother had told me, her pride so sharp I could feel the hair on my arm stand to attention. She bought the milk, the diapers, took my brother to the hospital for his shots, had sent him to a private school for elementary all out of her own pocket.

During the 90’s, biyahera’s were all the rage. A friend of hers used to bring sacks upon sacks of clothes from Hong Kong to Manila. She and my mother would sell the clothes and earn a small profit. This, together with what she earned from McDo, was how she got by for the first few years of motherhood. It still baffles me how she did it. I can barely handle school alone. I don’t know how my mother handled a job, a kid, and getting an education. * My mother wonders out loud if my father is still alive. She does this sometimes, offhandedly mentioning him, how much I resemble him, what he could be doing now. As per usual, I shrug, not caring as much as she thinks I do.

If my brother ever wondered about his father, he never mentioned it. As a child I wondered about mine rarely, longed for him only on moments it became obvious how difficult it was for my mother to bear the burden of the bills by herself. Even now, my knowledge of my father is terribly limited. Back when I was six, I knew he was a self-employed man who made frames for a living. He had a car. He came by every year for my birthday to give me a present. Some nights he would visit my mother and talk to her in the living room. The last I saw him, I was eleven, and we had lunch, an uncomfortable silence between us.

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Every time I would get really sad or act out, my mother would ask, “Is this because of your father?” and it would exasperate me even more, not because the mention of him pissed me off, but because my mother used to think that all her problems when it came to me could be boiled down to the absence of my father from my life. She was like this with everything: my depression, my shyness, that one time I cried begging her to let me go to a party. And when the father copout never worked, she turned the blame to the crowd I hung out with.

Or worse, to herself. But rarely to me, almost never, as if it were beyond imagination that I could mess up.

“I can never live up to the daughter that lives inside your head,” I remember saying to her five years ago as we sat in the kitchen of the third house we had moved into. I was explaining to her why it was so important to me to go to a party, the first college party I had been invited to. She had wept, apologized for unwittingly pressuring me, told me it was okay to fail as long as I try my best.

Three years later, when I told her about my worsening depression, how much I wanted to die, she said, “Can you just get over this?” When I think of this moment, I still remember the hurt—the pain of a torn muscle that tells me something will not be forgiven.

A few days later, out of nowhere, my mother apologized, but for the wrong things. “It’s probably because of me,” she said. “When I was pregnant with you I was sad. Maybe that affected you.” * The heat having become unbearable, some of us, my mother one of them, seek shade in front of graves that have no visitors. I stay, sit with my uncles and listen as they discuss politics, specifically the extrajudicial killings that have become rampant ever since Duterte was seated as president. They exchange stories they have overheard, articles they’ve read in newspapers or heard over the radio.

Only one uncle is in support of the current president. Tito Noy is a social activist, aligning himself with the National Democrats, and had been more active during his college days before he became a husband and a father. I remember when I was younger, his room in Barasoain used to be packed with books on history and government, he’d play songs that spoke of revolt on Sunday afternoons. It’s hard to imagine him as someone ready to be violent in the name of a revolution I had no awareness of when I was eight, his thin frame and his spine curved to an almost perfect C have always suggested a kind of frailty. But during the 2016 presidential elections, while the votes were being tallied and it looked like Bongbong Marcos would win, he had messaged my mother and said he would drop everything and take up arms again if he had to.

“Try to look past the killings and look at the peace talks,” Tito Noy says. “And he’s trying to make a break from America. They’ve been in this country since 1898.”

“He’s doing peace talks with the Reds because he knows he’ll need them,” Tito Jo retorts. “The military will hold a coup in a year. He’s gonna need the firepower.”

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Tito One agrees. “We’re just headed to civil war.”

My mother moves back to our side and, wondering why one of the grave markers was missing, asks, “Where is Tiya Neli?”

Tito Nan, deadpan, answers, “She’s already dead,” before bursting into laughter.

I like to watch my mother interact with her four older brothers whenever the family comes together on the first of November and Christmas. It’s hard to explain how she seems more animated around them, more feral, as if they drew out her most juvenile side. Having grown up with rough and tumble boys, my mother spent most of her childhood out in the streets trying to catch up with them. I imagine her coming home to Nanay’s quiet fury at her soiled clothes and dirty face.

My mother’s rowdiness would follow her through her life. In high school, they used to have shortened periods one Friday each month. During these days, she and her barkada would spend the morning bullying grade schoolers for money so they could buy beer and cigarettes, and the occasional joints, to consume while watching rented VHS tapes in the afternoon.

Growing up with four older brothers, she always had to fight for a seat at the table, so in college she took up engineering, trying to compete with Tito Nan who was on his way to becoming a contractor with his own company. She took a part-time job at McDonald’s in Morayta, the first branch to open in Manila. Eventually, balancing work and school got difficult, so she shifted to accounting.

Now, at forty-six, my mother has slowed down a bit. Only a bit. In a recent trip to Europe she had enjoyed Amsterdam the most, talking about how much she loved dancing with strangers at different clubs. Sometimes she’d invite me to go to bars with her and her friends when there’s a singer she wants me to listen to. I’d always politely decline.

“You are so much like your father. He was the kind of person who also wanted to be alone.” Apparently I carried a lot of him with me. How does my mother feel having raised such a delicate flower of a daughter?

(How does my father feel having never known what kind of daughter I am? Does it ever cross his mind.)

I was the favorite but I’ve often envied how my brother takes after my mother, all that confidence and charisma, how he can afford to go on trips, attend gigs, hang out with all sorts of people. It placed an incredible amount of pressure on me to be the “good kid”, the standup child who studied hard while her brother partied.

Even when we were younger, I was the one who was entrusted with money every time our mother went on business trips or retreats. My brother could do whatever he wanted; little was expected of him.

I remember back in high school, having finished the UPCAT, I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, worrying that I would fail. I couldn’t fail, especially since my brother had passed and was then studying

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Statistics in UP-Diliman. (When news of him studying in UP reached the rest of Barasoain, he became a sort of minor celebrity.) The shame would destroy me. For weeks, I’d stay up reviewing in my head the questions, trying to recall if I had put in the right answers, terrified I had messed it up. At some point I remember declaring that if I didn’t pass, I would kill myself. At that time, I really meant it.

I passed, to my overwhelming relief, and my mother just shrugged and said, “I knew you’d get in.” She was like that with everything: “I knew you could do it” (even though my chances had been slim) “Of course, you know” (even though I already said I didn’t) “That’s just easy for you” (even though I slaved away trying to get it right). Every parent wants to believe their child is special, gifted as if the mere force of that belief were enough to make it actual.

“Did Tatay tell you get a part-time job?” I asked my mother once, on a drive home. She said no. “Was it because you were paying for your tuition?” Tatay had been paying for it. “Because of Kuya?” No, she was already working part-time before she got pregnant. “So why?”

“I wanted to, and I needed to.”

Prove something? Perhaps I’m more like my mother than I know. * Any family reunion won’t be complete without at least one of these questions: When will you graduate? So where are you working now? Do you have a boyfriend already?

When will you graduate? May, I reply, and there is visible joy in Tito Jo’s and Tita Mer’s faces. It’s been a longawaited occasion. None of my relatives ever could understand why I chose to take up two degrees, much less why Literature was one of them. When asked, I would just shrug and reply, “No reason,” because having no reason for it was easier than explaining how much learning about literature moved me, excited me. If only I could hold a light to their faces, shake them, scream, Is expanding one’s mind not enough of a reason? They’d never understand.

“So what do you plan to do afterwards?” Tito Jo asks.

“Law.” He is shocked. “You want to be a lawyer?”

I nod.

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“How much longer will that take?”

“Four years,” I say, quickly adding, “but I’ll work for a year first.” That seems to appease him.

Tito Jo is my favorite uncle because he’s handy to have around the house. He can fix anything, even the sad state of his marriage when Tita Mer had found out about his affair a few years ago.

Our house in Barasoain stands beside a creek so it floods easy on rainy days. I used to watch Tito Jo shoot large rats scurrying on the wall across from our backyard using his rifle. It was always cool. He is the most lighthearted of my uncles, the funniest, the kindest. He was also the only one among his siblings that didn’t smoke so it was a guarantee that their house wouldn’t smell like cigarettes.

Tita Mer is my favorite aunt because she had helped raise me, too. I used to have lunch with her and her son, and nap in their house after school. Next to Nanay, she was the best cook in the family. She hails from Isabella where her parents own a small plot of land to farm. She took me there one summer. I used to help pump water from the well and pick snails from the fields.

My mother trusts Aunt Mer with her life, and has always been indebted to her for taking care of me. I try not to feel so bad when she hires Aunt Mer to wash our clothes and clean our house on the weekends. Aunt Mer herself never complained, saying she liked helping my mother out, reminding me to be good daughter because my mother had much on her plate. But the discomfort remains. When I watch Aunt Mer, forehead slick with sweat, there is a guilt I cannot name, a fear that in her mind she is shouting accusations—so, do you think you’re better than me now? * “Where are you working now?” This question is directed to my cousin, Flor, who is the same age as I am. She used to take civil engineering but dropped out of college and has been working for a BPO company recently.

“I’m resigning soon,” Flor replies. “Pay is really bad. Lots of delay. And they don’t give us nearly enough.”

She has gained a lot of weight in the last three years, something we never let her forget. She’s almost as heavy if not heavier than her older sister, Krish, mother to three-year-old Daniel. After some talk about what working as a call center agent is like, Flor asks money from Tito Nan to buy soda and chips.

Tito Nan is the oldest and fattest out of the siblings. He runs his own business and often employs Tito Jo as a construction worker. Despite having the most money, he was never overly concerned about his appearance.

His staple outfit: faded denim pants, slippers, and a short-sleeved button-down that he kept open, revealing a

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white sando underneath. Today, he forewent the button-down. White sando with yellow stains. He can really afford to give more effort, if only to be presentable in front of Nanay.

When I was younger, I used to spend weekends with Tito Nan’s five daughters, in their house at Caloocan.

You had to hike up a slope of dirt for a couple of minutes to get to their barangay which is why I’ve always thought Caloocan was a province outside of Metro Manila. It seemed like the farthest place ever.

I loved spending time with my cousins but I hated their house. It had a tiny, dirty toilet and water was available only during certain hours of early morning so we had to store them in drums. My cousins weren’t the neatest people either. They’d walk in and out of the house in their slippers even when they left behind streaks of dog shit.

Their house has seen many renovations in the past few years. Even the dirt road you had to climb was eventually paved with concrete. The interior of the house was redesigned, the toilet replaced, the furniture upgraded, and it didn’t even cost as much because they used leftover materials from construction work Tito Nan had overseen. The house in Bagong Silang grew more beautiful even as its residents stayed there less and less, home becoming less of a living space than monument for display. Tita Sal steals a fortune from her husband to buy drugs, Flor spends more and more nights with her boyfriend, Krish and Tan both get married and move out, Jil starts cutting herself. * Tito Noy has teased little Daniel to tears. He’s the kind of kid that throws a fit apparently, screaming, hitting Tito Noy with his tiny fists as the rest of the family watches, entertained. It only makes him cry harder. Tito Jo steps in, grabs his little brother by the shirt and pretends to beat up him up. Daniel stops crying, watches the scene with a face of righteous fury.

This is not how I want to remember him but this is what I remember most: Tita Jess kneeling in front of my mother, her face buried in her belly, weeping, reeking of alcohol. The bruise on her face. The hole on the door of their room. The bandaged knuckles of Tito Noy who didn’t come home for days.

It was not his last affair but it was the only affair of which I knew the mistress. I saw her often enough because we were neighbors, because she was my second cousin, and I’d see her whispering with Tito Noy which hadn’t appeared odd because we were, after all, family.

Tito Noy was someone I used to look up to. Next to my mother, he was the only adult in the family who liked to read, who spoke often about the value of good education. He had promised to lend me his books when I was old enough to understand them. He was very visible in the community, having worked most of his life in the district government. He is currently a councilor.

There are many good things to remember him by: fixing all the computerware whenever they stopped working,

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Reunion • Tracey dela Cruz

his fried pork chop that somehow always tasted so good, how he carried the fridge to the second floor of the house even though he’s stick-thin. But other memories would cloud those: his wife in tears, him tucking a knife in the waistband of his shorts, him rubbing against me, taunting, Will you tell will you tell. * I am playing with my phone when I hear Tito Nan tell Jil, “Why don’t you be more like your Ate Tracey? She does nothing but study.” It’s a quip at me. I used to be teased for being a homebody, for always opting to stay and read or fiddle with my dollhouse while my cousins played tumbang preso, langit at lupa, and patintero outside.

My mother pipes in, pointing to Jil’s hand, “What’s that?” Faint straight lines. “Is that in right now?” She’s teasing. “Next time you do it, do it here,” she points to Jil’s wrist, “and cut deep.”

This offends me but I don’t say anything, because in a family of pragmatists, depression isn’t something that would be taken seriously. In the privacy of our home, my mother would try to be understanding, but among her brothers, she makes light of the matter. When she’s borrowing money from my uncle, she avoids mentioning that we’ve been spending a lot for a psychiatrist and my anti-depressants.

I look at Jil, quiet, smiling in a rather embarrassed and uncomfortable way. I should say something to her even if we’ve never been close, ask her how she is. I know her parents have been having marital problems, there must be some comfort I could offer if only my sympathy, a commiseration in our shared condition.

We don’t really talk about our problems, as I guess most families don’t, and it’s hard to begin now when we’ve already settled into our roles. We hide these things under a layer of superficiality, discuss only the trite and easy, nothing too complex, nothing too real, nothing that would disturb the tense relationships we’ve built.

Some reunions I feel the rubber band stretching to the limit. Something might snap soon. But we divert our attentions to who had gained weight and how’s your studies and how’s work and everything loosens back into the laughter of sardonic humor and benign conversation.

“Elementary ka pa ba? Kamusta school?” I ask Jil. “Okay lang.” * “Do you have a boyfriend already?” Tito One asks. I scrunch my face in mock disgust.

“How come?” he asks, teasing.

“I’m busy. No time for that. It’s not important anyway.”

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“How about a suitor?”

I make a face again.

“Ay, why?”

“Why? Does Jaime have any?”

“Of course! There are lines outside our house every day.”

Tita Mer, listening in, laughs. “Good for Jaime. Jome doesn’t have any. She doesn’t seem like she’s interested in that sort of thing. Kahit dati pa.”

“So what does she do with most of her time?” asks Tito One. “She comes home from work, stays in her room, plays on her computer, eats, sleeps. Sometimes she’ll tell me she’s going out to eat with her friends and I say ‘thank God, finally she’s doing something.’ The neighbors used to think I only had one kid, JJ. They never see Jome so they didn’t know she exists.” * I wish I could resemble my cousin Jome a bit more, if only her aversion to dating and most kinds of social activity, so I could be less distracted and focus on the most important goal of not ending up like the rest of my relatives.

What drives me has never really been the desire to succeed but only to not fail: to not fail my mother’s expectations, to not fail like my relatives, to not fail the next test. I could only enjoy my relatives in small doses, rare and far apart, because they stand as the constant reminder of my own inadequacies, the fears I cannot escape, and always this looming image of myself, of the girl who will succeed, who will help them, who will set a good example for the younger ones because the adults themselves could not. When people expect so much from you, every small failure feels like the end.

I wonder if my mother ever feels the same way, looking at her son. If she fears that there is too much of herself in him. Is this why I’m her favorite? Is this why he takes most of the brunt of her anger?

The biggest fight I had with my mother was in Taipei where she was to leave me for five months for my term abroad. My boyfriend and I had broken up a one-year relationship just a few days before I left Manila, and when we broke up my brother had told my mother about it.

“So did you have sex?” she asks.

“We did. Don’t be angry. He was nice about it.”

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“He molested you!”

“He didn’t. I was the one who asked.” I believe there’s a moment in every relationship when the illusion of someone is just shattered forever; the fulcrum, the volta, a tectonic shift. I believe it was this moment for mother. She had raised me trying to make sure I won’t make the same mistakes. It’s why she sent me to an all-girls Catholic school, why she enrolled me in a science high school with its high-pressure environment, why she was always reluctant to let me stay out late if I was with a boy. She used to look through my bag for evidence of where I’ve been—a receipt, a movie ticket stub, even just the way I dressed would be turned into an accusation that I’ve been up to no good.

She had tried to strike the balance between strictness and leniency, and more often than not hit the mark. Yet despite that, despite all of that.

She didn’t say anything afterwards. I moved my things to the dormitory and she flew back home, both of us without words. I wouldn’t hear her voice until weeks later. * Wanting to escape my uncle’s teasing, I play with candle wax, like I used to do when we were younger. I take the melted wax, solid but still warm, and scrunch them into a ball. Seeing me play with the candles, my brother joins in. After half an hour, the ball of wax is larger than my hand and my brother is bored again so he starts bugging my mom if we can go. This is the first time I don’t feel consumed by an impatience to leave my family.

But we say our goodbyes. My mother tries to bargain some money out of Tito Nan’s pocket but he’s stingy as ever. We drop off two of my cousins at Barasoain before heading home to Teacher’s Village in Quezon City.

During the drive, I try to understand the change in me, the almost pleasant feeling of having spent a day with people I have long refused to love. I recall being alone in Taipei, where I tried to acquaint myself with a new city, thankful for the distance between Manila and myself, between my mother’s disappointment and my stubbornness to apologize. Still, sometimes, that unbearable loneliness.

As it goes with most families, we need not ask to be forgiven. My mother would email me reminders, telling me to eat, to not spend too much, to make sure I travel and not just stay in the dorm. She’d send videos of our cats as I’d send her pictures of places I visited and things she might like.

While my mother doesn’t consider herself religious, she is a very spiritual woman. Every morning, she lights incense, then sits cross-legged on her special mat to meditate for at least twenty minutes. Every weekend, she attends a seshin in Providence village, Marikina, where she and her fellow Zen practitioners sit in a large hall

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to meditate the entire morning. The sit will culminate in a lunch. Every once in a while, they go on retreats in Baguio or Tagaytay and my mother would disappears for days at a time.

When I asked her how she discovered her spirituality, she replied that she was around 22. My brother was around two years old then, my mother already a graduate and working full-time. She said she wanted to find a way to step out of her body and watch it from a distance, which is why Zen Buddhism was particularly attractive to her. Whenever she meditated, it was like ridding herself of herself, to become empty, detached, that not even time could shackle her. It was how she could go for hours just sitting down, breathing in, breathing out. Empty. Quiet. A house or a tomb waiting to be filled.

Perhaps this could be enough, the distance that allows for something that resembles forgiveness (love?) to grow, if slowly. Until Christmas then.

first written: November 1, 2016

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Bee Leung

3 B S P S , Fe llo w fo r No n fic tio n When I began gathering the material that would eventually become this essay, I only intended to write a piece about being away from home. In line with my early notions of the essay as an exploration of a certain topic, I fixated on the image of rain and storms as a motif that could tie together the individual memories. As a whole, I wanted to write about how the weather in particular can serve as a marker of place, and how the differing weather in Baguio and Quezon City further underscored my own displacement and alienation.

Along the way, however, I started to discover inaccuracies in my childhood memories, which I talk about in the piece. From there, I found that many of the threads I was trying to weave together began to unravel. Rather than the whole piece falling apart, I became even more intrigued in the idea of memory in itself as something mutable.

It is the openness to these kinds of surprises that attracts me to nonfiction as a genre. In the essay, there is space to visit and revisit things that we might have otherwise just assumed to be true. In doing so, we further interrogate what, how, and why we know what we think we do. In that way, the essay is never still. I enjoy essay-writing because it both allows and, in many ways, forces me to reorient and further unearth something new out of old thoughts and memories.

In “A Brief History of Storms”, the discovery of my own memories being false led me to further interrogate, rather than just depict, my nostalgia and what I knew of home. This led me to the exploration of science and facts as a way to know truth, alongside my own conflicted sentiments about home and leaving it.

During AHWW, however, comments from the panelists and the other fellows pushed me to reassess what I wanted to do with the piece. The piece was bogged down with all its moving parts that weren’t necessary and didn’t quite tie together. I needed to refocus my visions of the piece and decide what the central thread was going to be.

To be honest, I hate revisions. This is not because I think my works are already beyond revision, but because I’m simply more inclined to starting over and writing new pieces instead. I am stubborn enough to try and rework every line, just so they can fit into the newer versions of my pieces. This essay in its current form owes so much to AHWW; as do I, for the reminder that the best of writing is so often in the attempt, and that not everything in we think our pieces should be needs to be picked up on—in fact, that the alternative can leave us pleasantly surprised.

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A Brief History of Storms BEE L EUNG

When people ask me about home, I tell them this story: that night, I was in the backseat of my dad’s Toyota, tracing raindrops down the window trying to figure out which would fall out of view first. Whenever one drop was going faster than the one I chose, I switched. I still picked wrong mostly. The wind was blowing the raindrops sideways and messed up the whole game. It didn’t matter anyway.

We were out on a drive to get coffee or pizza or groceries—I don’t remember which. See, my dad is the kind of parent who takes his kids out for pizza in the middle of a storm. That means he’s either reckless or just dedicated. Or he was no longer fazed by the winding Baguio roads slick with mud, the car only ten feet from falling over the ledge. The windshield wipers could hardly keep up with the rain, but he said he could see just fine. He could have been lying. All the raindrops were flying past us. My brother in the front seat fiddled with the radio dial, turning the volume up and up and up. The rain was making it hard to hear the weather person insisting the typhoon signal was climbing. The static was louder. The rain was louder. The thunder was louder.

That’s what I remembered the most—the loudness—before the horse came crashing out of nowhere, galloping towards us at full speed. It was black. Or maybe it was just too dark out to tell. Its saddle was only half on, slipping down the horse’s back, slick with rain and mud, reins thrashing in the wind. I thought for a half-second I was going to die. But my dad swerved and the horse ran past us and that was the end of that thought. A few moments later, we saw a group of men running after the horse. It must have gotten away from them.

It doesn’t matter, really. We were all quiet sitting there for a little while. The raindrops were still blowing sideways. The headlights were blinking for a long time.

These days, my little black umbrella is wedged useless in my bag more often than not. I’ve started letting the droplets of water pinprick my skin on the way to where I am going. I miss it on the days when there is nothing but sunshine, but even the rain is sticky here, and so warm. The Katipunan LRT station is below ground level.

The sound of rain doesn’t travel through all that concrete. You might even forget it altogether—the flood of bodies alighting the train might as well be drenched in perspiration rather than the downpour.

Later, when I dodge another umbrella held at eye level on the overcrowded sidewalk, I try to be thankful at least that the rain clears the streets of cockroaches crawling out of sewer grates. Better this than the blinding white of the sun and jeepney exhaust, and at least now I am familiar enough with this place that I don’t need to stop for directions. Another empty comfort: the rain in Quezon City is the same as rain back home, two hundred kilometers away. It’s all just water, anyway. This is an oversimplification I know to be untrue. You might call it a lie. I’m fond of those.

The thing about rain is it comes in cycles. Everyone knows this, at least the basics—evaporation, condensation, precipitation. This is the same anywhere you go, at least the broad strokes of it. It is the repetition that makes

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A Brief History of Storms • Bee Leung

it easy enough to recount. When water is heated, it turns into vapor and swirls in the suddenly humid air. The gas claims more space for itself, pushing skyward. It’s cold in the sky. I would know; I’ve spent too much time shivering on mountaintops. I’d like to think the water droplets huddle together for warmth, but really, they cohere over their impurities. The truth has more to do with optimizing the ratio of surface area to volume.

Clouds fill the whole sky. The sun is grayed and the water begins to struggle under its own weight, begins to give. The next part, we’re all familiar with: rain, plain and simple. Me, I’ve always been more interested in storms.

I used to walk up a mountain to get to school. No lie there. The walk back down to the main road was usually easier, but when it poured, the road turned into something between a muddy river and a waterfall.

Even surrounded by the colorful umbrellas that marked out groups braving the trek, we would make it down drenched, laughing, shaking from the cold. My white socks were never the same. I think I threw them out at the end of that rainy season. We would sometimes try to wait out the rain, but that was no use when the weather stations forecasted another week straight of downpour. Once the rain started, it wouldn’t stop until the next morning, maybe sooner if we were lucky.

If we were lucky, the fog would roll in instead of the rain. Some days when I looked out the window, the only thing to see was the blinding white. We left the doors open and the fog filled the classrooms too, until we were all shivering in the damp. Fog just means a low cloud, you know. Suspended water droplets hanging close to the ground. Then, close to my skin. I liked that thought, that I could be breathing in a cloud.

A thunderstorm in the making. The cold stuck to your lungs with every inhale, it felt like.

The feeling stuck with me, no matter how much I tried to get rid of it.

I didn’t believe in floods until I was sixteen and moved to Quezon City to study the physics of storms and fluid dynamics. Of course I knew they existed, objectively. Logic demanded that the water had to go somewhere, and if it couldn’t flow outward, it’d have to climb up. And yet I was surrounded by the inclines I cursed walking up and down on the way home from school; it only made sense that the waters traversed these ways as well.

This means that I don’t ever recall it flooding in Baguio, although a quick news search reveals it happened about once a year in most of the years I lived there. I have been told that the first time it ever flooded in my hometown, they used the swan boats form Burnham Lake to rescue the people trapped in their houses. No one was prepared. There were no rubber rafts, only the rescue team furiously peddling the giant bird-shaped monstrosity. The image is ridiculous, almost fictitious; the facts compel me to revise what I know of home, but even then, there is a part of me that refuses to imagine.

I remember as a child, seeing the news of another Metro Manila flood, trying to consider how dirty the stagnant waters must have been by recalling the names of all the diseases that the rats swimming in the flood water harbored. I would suppose the mechanisms surrounding the flood: how many garbage heaps must have been blocking drainage, or how many gallons of water exactly it takes to turn a city knee-deep underwater. Rather than a rush of rain on slope, the only movement is the imperceptible creeping, inch by inch, until everything is submerged. I wanted to know, with a sort of morbid curiosity, what that must feel like; I could imagine it so completely, and yet how could I.

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But the horse is vivid now in my mind, right down to the thunderclaps and the leather reins tossing in the storm. I can see it as clearly as my childhood bedroom: sheets crisp, the leaking windows and the buckets under them, and again, the sound of rain. When I started writing this, I mentioned the horse in passing to my dad, hoping he might have other stories that could be woven into a narrative of a home left behind. We were in the car in the middle of another storm, pulling in to the driveway of the place I live in now. Maybe it wasn’t a storm, just raining. I can’t be certain. I’d have to crosscheck the dates. Perhaps I am mistaken: there was a storm, and we were sitting in the driveway, and he was only half-listening to my story.

I am still more afraid of floods than I am of hurricanes. Nine out of ten typhoon deaths are caused by drowning in floodwater.

Drowning must be the most terrible way to die, in a flood especially so. What I can begin to understand is this story: the lack of ocean currents, only the steady rising water streaming into nose, mouth, lungs. I have been told that you fall unconscious long before death arrives. Drowning is silent. When the rain hits the metal roof of my new dwelling, it sounds like a nameless flood. It is different here. I cannot hear myself thinking over the sound of storm winds, which I imagine must be all there is to hear—

See, the winds are what separate a typhoon from any other thunderstorm. They form over the ocean; as seawater turns to vapor and rises, it leaves behind empty space. Nearby air rushes to fill it and warms and rises and leaves behind empty space and air rushes and repeat this until the column of low pressure becomes a tropical depression. When it gains enough windspeed, it turns hurricane, eye of the storm. The winds circle and the arms rotate until finally, the part we are all familiar with: take down the billboards and stick rags under leaking windows. Don’t forget the bottled water and canned goods. Double-check the flashlight batteries and make sure the radio is fully charged. Listen for class suspensions. Watch for floods. Call home.

When it rains every day at 4PM on the dot for three months out of the year, the rain clouds become simply the rhythm which lives play out to. This is the backbone of every childhood story I tell myself: the rain just a minor inconvenience to the place I belong. Just my mother reminding me to get indoors soon, not to wear my nice shoes, shut all the windows before leaving the house; in other words be safe, I love you. Just a fact of life: I am as familiar with the sound of raindrops on the neighbors’ water tower as I am with my own pulse. It is easier than you’d think to get used to a week’s worth of darkness, to lull yourself to sleep with the metallic collisions of rain on glass windows, to convince yourself the storms are a comfort from the warmth of your living room or in the meddling of retrospect.

A false etymology I believed until I was eleven: the word Baguio comes from bagyo, storm. The typhoons hit so often they named the whole mountainside for it.

Let me ask for the truth: if the horse means home, then was there ever a horse at all?

I still haven’t come to understand the weather here, its fluctuations and artificialities. The heat fronts never arrive when I am prepared, and even the storm clouds catch me off guard. So these days, I’ve been tracking the wind. It isn’t as glamorous as it sounds, mostly just the bluish glow of a laptop running computer programs.

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Give me a place and a time. I sift through satellite data to find the records I need. To be honest, I don’t know all the details of how the model works, but it only takes a few minutes to spit out a map. It isn’t difficult. The wind paths are red, green, yellow against the dark blue outlines of landmasses. This line, here, this shows you where the wind was three days ago.

It’s metaphorically resonant, I suppose, tracing where things come from. It isn’t difficult to draw the connection, talk about where the program would place me, what kind of swirling lines there are to trace a life—or have I gone too far?

We are looking for a storm to confirm the hypothesis. The red line curls around an island, but I’d have to cross check a map to tell you its name. For the moment, it doesn’t matter what it’s called as long as I confirm the storm. The yellow line swirls into itself then stretches outward like a question mark. It must be the one I am looking for. This is an oversimplification, not a lie. It doesn’t matter what the storm is called either, as long as I can spot it.

Where I am from, we watch for landslides, not flood. To drown, not of waters reclaiming the land, but of the earth itself. A geophysics professor once told me it would be better to die of a falling rock than to wait to be buried whole. Watch for the ground below your feet before it disappears. I have seen a house in the aftermath, swallowed deep by the earth, and yet: people refuse to leave their homes, choose to rebuild ramshackle houses piled high on ghostland.

When I told my dad about the horse, he told me nothing like that had ever happened. This casts everything into doubt: if I cannot trust my own memory to be true, then there is nothing I have lost. Loss is a kind of having, the reaffirmation at least of something that could have once been held. But there is nothing to be said of losing a fiction except the emptiness of the loss.

I must have dreamed the whole thing into existence. I want to say this doesn’t make it any less real. I want to say it doesn’t matter. I want to say the horse was a metaphor; perhaps then it could carry weight, but what weight? An oversimplification. A myth. A memory. Does it matter what to call it? If there was never any horse in the first place, what am I thinking of as home, and how do I hold what cannot even be named?

I read a 1974 study where participants were asked to estimate the speed of car collisions. Their guesses depended not on the true speeds, but on whether the examiner asked how fast the cars had bumped or contacted, hit or collided. Later, merely the way questions were asked was enough to suggest false details, implant a memory of broken glass on the pavement or the sensation of screeching tires and burning rubber.

The subjects believed. Language holds. Memory is reconstruction. I do not remember where I learned this, but it resonates. I want to say it does.

Ask me how fast the horse was going when it nearly crashed into our car, if there was glass on the pavement. I could tell you. I swear, I can see it now. I wonder if the experiment would have turned out differently if the participants had been asked how fast floodwaters rose or how fast a house tumbled down a mountainside. If they had been asked what was next.

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The truth is, Baguio comes from bag-iw, a kind of moss. It grows everywhere, survives storms in ways taller plants never could. Moss covers the ground, stops erosion, holds mountainsides together. You can read a lot into this if you try. It isn’t that hard.

I would like to think I belong to the place in my memory, but what does that even mean? I know what that feels like: the welling in your throat, the empty table at the coffee shop on the corner street, the jeepneys you still have to crane your neck to read, the five minutes of sunshine, the wind blowing up your skirt and you dropping your umbrella to press the fabric down against you legs, the inability to be lost but the losing anyway, the rain, above all else, it feels like rain, and—the rain is only a metaphor, but perhaps this is hindsight speaking. I must correct myself. I know only what it feels like for a place to have belonged to me, or at least for me to have belonged to it. I remember how those things felt like, or at least, I can imagine how I would want to remember them. I name only what I would like to hold.

For a long time, I took comfort in the thought my memories of home could belong to me; this somehow confirmed home must have belonged to me as well. This is the power of memory: in the absence of concrete proof, we are left to rely on nothing else but what we can piece together, the bits of information that somehow manage to sear themselves into our brains. Memory creates its truth—it insists on the facts of what happened.

Perhaps insist is too strong of a word.

A professor tells me off for saying that my backtrajectories can tell us where the air parcel was three days ago. I need reminding that the program is merely an approximation, a reconstruction, that we are extrapolating from incomplete data. Do not have too much confidence in your calculations. When you track the wind, there is always something you forget to factor in. This is what error bars are for. The curving lines, she says, merely suggest a path.

Memories suggest, they imply, they take the silences of things like the rain and leave different spaces in their wake, turn them into spaces for a constructed narrative, symbols, evidence. Evidence of what? I return to the question: if the horse was never real, then can it still hold meaning, and what? What am I to do with this yearning: I cannot answer the question. Or I refuse. I have always wanted to turn my memories into words, to keep them fixed on a page. As a child, I filled the backs of my school notebooks with bits of conversation, thoughts I anticipated needing to remember. I want something I can hold: some clever block of prose that I can point to as memory, as the object of nostalgia, as home. Something in me, the same part that flips to the end of mystery novels and attempts to trace storm paths as an explanation for destruction, is itching to uncover the truth. If that’s too much to ask, I’d settle for the facts.

But the more I try to pin them down—what color the gate of the house next door was, which jeepneys it was that took me to my best friend’s house, whether it was raining on my eleventh birthday, what song was playing on the radio when the bus left the station, whether or not I was angry with my dad, if I had felt sad the day I returned to find they had changed the curtains in my room as though I were a visitor, if I had ever really liked the rain or if I only wanted to remember liking it—the more the facts reveals themselves as an incomplete data set. The seams are starting to show. If the horse is only fabrication, then what remains to be true?

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A Brief History of Storms • Bee Leung

My brain wants to fill in the gaps, and so it does. When we choose to return, we change forever what is returned to: this makes recollection an empty act. It is fitting that recollect means to gather together again, which implies the need to return. Remember makes me think of mending, but a collection retains its gaps.

As a child, I imagined clouds into shapes, my back sprawled flat against the rooftop. I am struck with the urge to repeat the gesture of naming, of I see it now!, of shifting. This one, a ball. This one, a mug, the outline of a splayed hand, wanting. This one, the house you grew up in. This one, a thunderstorm. This one, a typhoon. Every single one, the shape of rain: a horse galloping through the storm, the men chasing after it, a black Toyota, the mud, the moss, the winding, a girl in the backseat watching the raindrops, the radio static, the object of your longing, an unanswered question, the waking dream, a thunderclap—

34 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Wella Lobaton

2 A B I S , Fe llo w P a r a s a Tula Nagsimula akong magsulat bago pa man ako pumasok ng kolehiyo. Hilig ko ang magsulat at magbasa ng mga kuwento. Lumaki akong napapalibutan ng mga iba’t ibang klaseng teksto mula sa mga nobela hanggang sa diyaryo. Lahat ng may salita at kuwento ay binabasa ko. Ngunit sa kolehiyo lang ako napaibig sa pagbabasa at pagsusulat ng tula.

Napaibig ako sa tula dahil ang tula ay isang pamamaraan ng pagpapahayag na nakamamangha. Ang kagandahan ng tula ay nasa wikang ginagamit. Sa tula, maaari mong sabihin ang gusto mong sabihin sa paraan na hindi kinaugalian at hindi kinakailangang basahain ayon lamang sa literal na kahulugan. Sa tula, ang bulaklak ay puwede manatiling bulaklak, at puwede rin itong maging imahen ng talinghaga. Napaibig ako sa mga tulang nabasa ko at sinabi ko sa sarili ko na baka kaya ko ring magsulat ng mga tula tulad nila.

Naging hamon ang pagsulat ng mga tula para sa akin dahil ako ay hindi mahilig sa liguy-ligoy na pamamaraan ng pananalita. Minsan nahihirapan pa rin ako magsulat ng tula dahil naniniwala ako na sa tula lahat ng salitang ilalagay mo ay dapat may halaga.

Pero iba pa rin ang pakiramdam na ikaw ay nakasulat ng isang tula, na kaya mo rin pala tulad ng mga makatang nauna sa iyo. Nasabi ko sa sarili ko na okey lang kung hindi ako magaling kaagad basta ang importante ay nais ko pa ring hasain ang mga kakayahan na mayroon na ako. Lahat ng susubukan ko ay hindi ko susukuan.

Alam kong malayo pa ang kaya kong marating kung ipagpapatuloy ko ang pagsusulat at pagbasa ng mga tula at ng iba pang panitikan ng ating bansa. Nagpapasalamat ako para sa mga taong nagmamahal pa rin sa sarili nating wika. Nagpapasalamat ako sa mga taong walang sawang sumuporta sa pagpapayaman at pagpapalaganap ng panitikan ng Pilipinas. Nagpapasalamat din ako sa mga taong nagsulat, nagsusulat at magsusulat pa rin.

Hanngang sa huli, ako rin ay magsusulat, magmamahal at magpapatuloy nang may puso.

36 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Ginhawa sa Dalampasigan WEL L A L OBATON

sa dalampasigan tayo nung unang halik, nung unang talik. naramdaman ko ang ang kinis ng iyong balat sa halip ng kiskis ng buhangin sa mga lugar na di nasisilayan ng araw, sa mga sulok ng mga sandali, at sa gitna ng aking hita. sa iyong mga halik nagmumula ang ginhawa sa sagutan ng mga dila hindi na natin kinailangan na magsalita para masabi sa isa’t isa kung ano ang nadarama. pag-uwi ko sa aking bahay, sigaw at sampal ang bumati mula sa aking nanay sa pisngi na paborito mong haplusin. kasabay nito ang mga sigaw at panlalait gamit ng mga salitang mapapait. may isang nakatuklas sa katotohanan ng ating pagmamahalan at nagpalipat-dila na ang balita.

AHWW 22 ZINE | 37

Ginhawa sa Dalampasigan • Wella Lobaton

ang banwa ay ayaw maniwala na puwedeng magmahal ang dalawang dalaga. kaya, sinubukan nila akong lunurin sa dagat ng kanilang mga salita at pangungutya. sinubukan nilang tanggalin at alisin ang aking pagnanais at pag-ibig sa iyo. sinubukan nilang ikulong ang dalagang natutong magmahal, kahit na ito ay ipinagbabawal, at natuto siyang lumaban sa mga dilang walang ibang nasabi kundi ang mga salitang, “hindi maaari.� sa gabing walang buwan at walang bituin na ang dilim lamang ang nagbabantay sa akin, nakuha ko ang lakas na tumakas. ang lakas na nagmula sa alaala ng iyong mukha. at bumalik ako sa dalampasigan, pabalik sa iyong tahanan sa tabi ng dagat.

38 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Ginhawa sa Dalampasigan • Wella Lobaton

yakap at halik ang sumalubong sa aking pagbalik. pinunasan mo ang aking mga luha, ang bunga ng kanilang labis na pagpupuna. inipit mo ako sa iyong dibdib at tayo ay nagpasya na pumalaot. umalis sa banwa na sumimangot sa pag-ibig na namagitan sa dalawang babae. ngayon, hawak ko ang kamay mo habang pinapanuod natin ang pagbukang-liwayway mula ating munting bangka. dumadapo ang mga sinag sa maamo mong mukha. kasing payapa ng dagat na walang simula at dulo. dito naging malinaw sa aking ulo na hindi tiyak kung saan tayo patungo. ito ba talaga ang aking tadhana? na iiwan ko ang aking banwa para sa pag-ibig ng isang dalaga? hinaplos mo ang aking pisngi. tila nais mo akong mapangiti. sa mata mo ako nakatingin, ngunit ang isla kung saan tayo mula ang aking nakikita. wala na akong ibang nagawa

AHWW 22 ZINE | 39

Ginhawa sa Dalampasigan • Wella Lobaton

kundi ipikit ang aking mga mata at pakinggan ang binulong ng hangin bulong na kahit saan tayo dadalhin, ay mayroon pa ring tayong mamahalin.

40 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Cymon Lubangco

2 A B E C , Fe llo w P a r a s a Tula Isang hamon ang pagtawid mula sa mundo ng Ekonomiks patungo sa mundo ng panulaan, ang tingnan pa at unawain nang mas malalim ang espasyong ginagalawa’t kadalasa’y kinaliligtaan.

Ngunit hindi rin matatawaran ang karanasang yakapin ang panulaang Filipino at ang kaakibat nitong kilalanin ang kasaysayan, ang kultura, at ang potensyal ng identidad ng pagka-Filipino.

At marahil ito ang makapagbubuod ng dahilan kung bakit ako naudyukang magsulat sa sariling wika.

Sa harap ng hamong manula, iisang layunin lamang ang nais kong matamasa sa dulo ng kahit anong proyekto: ang makapag-iwan ng kakintalan. Ngunit sa iisang layuning ito, dalawa ang nais kong iwanan ng kakintalan: 1) ang sinumang makababasa ng aking tula at; 2) ang aking sarili, sapagkat nababago ang sarili kong pananaw sa mundo matapos ang pagsisiyasat sa espasyong kinatitirikan sa daigdig. Mula rito, pilit kong hinahanap ang siyang makapagsisibol ng konsepto sa aking isipan––at isa sa naging produkto nitong pagsibol ng konsepto’t pagkakabuo ng isang proyekto ang tulang “Timpi.”

Dala ng naturang tula ang balintuna ng simulain nito. Sa harap ng iba’t ibang nagtatalabang pwersa noong nakaraang taon, mula sa tila lumalakas na tinig ng “populismo,” sa tila pagkondena ng nakararami sa mga kritisismo laban sa kasalukuyang administrasyon, hanggang sa panakaw na paglibing sa isang diktador, tila gumagawa ang mga ganitong pangyayari ng isang sitwasyong nakakasakal, na tila may nais paigpawin mula sa iyong ubod ngunit alam mong walang magagawa ang pagpapaigpaw dito kung ang haharapin mo ay ang nananaig na kapangyarihan. Sa pagkilala sa naturang hangganan, madalas nagiging sandigan na lamang ang pagtitimpi. Ngunit, kung titingnan ang konteksto ng simulain ng tula at ang tula mismo, makikitang tila isang pagpapaigpaw na rin ang mismong pagkalikha sa tula, na ang siyang nag-udyok na masambit ang tula ay ang siyang pagkilala sa pagtitimpi. Kung gayo’y masasabi bang nagkaroon ng pagpaparaya sa pamamagitan ng pagtutula?

Matapos ang palihan, ipagpapatuloy ko ang pagtutula dala ang karanasan at mga

kaisipang naibahagi tungkol sa tulang “Timpi” at tungkol sa pagsulat ko mismo ng tula. Ngunit sa harap ng pagkaudyok na magsulat, marami pang balakid ang dapat na matugunan at nang sa gayo’y higit na umunlad ang aking kasanayan sa pagsulat ng tula, at isa sa pinakamalaking balakid na aking hinarap at patuloy na hinaharap ang kahirapang timbangin ang bigat na dala ng mga salitang ginagamit sa tula. Marahil, dulot ito ng nakagisnang paniniwala na ang “malalim” na wika ay wika ng tula, na siya ring makapaghahabi sa mga tila “malalalim” na konseptong lumilitaw sa aking isipan hanggang sa hindi na mamalayan ang pagkawala ng mga imahen sa tula.

Hindi makakailang isang malaking ambag ang salalayang inilatag ng palihan upang matugunan ang suliraning ito sa pagsusulat, at mula rito, nawa’y higit pang mapapayaman ang kasanayan sa pagsusulat ng tula.

42 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Timpi C Y M ON L UBANG CO

Sa harap ng daluyong ng damdamin at lagaslas ng dugo, may pagpipigil na nakaduduwal at pagtitiis na nakanginginig.

Habang ninanais kumawala ng mga sigaw at pighati, kinakailangang kimkimin sa ubod ang diwa upang maging kaaya-aya sa mga matang kapit ang mga tanikalang nakapako’t nakabaon sa palad. Minsan nama’y sinusulsi ng mga karayom at sinulid ang labing nagnanasang palayain ang tindig at isipan. At sa pagtitimpi, isang katahimikan ang naidudulot sa gitna ng mundong gumigina.

AHWW 22 ZINE | 43

Kurt Marquez

4 A B LI T ( E NG) , Fe llo w f o r P o et ry It is in poetry where I find it most true that, when you offer your work to the public, suddenly it is no longer yours anymore. When I think of empathy and justice, I think, None can usurp this height, returned that shade, but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest. Those words are from Keats, and yet I bear them with me every day. When I think of loving oneself again after heartbreak, I think, Sit. Feast on your life. In other words, I think of Derek Walcott, and yet his words I have claimed for myself. In this way, I find in poetry that can be given, words that can be mine, and which I can offer just as I have claimed. In this way, I imagine voices of personas as accommodating our own voices, finding the words for us, helping us find our own words.

It is in this idea that I have began to explore and contend with the persona’s power and scope as a voice. If even the most particular of sentiments or the most nuanced of ideas can be adopted or if they, in the first place, not personal at all, but actually social in nature, then what would these merging of voices and characters into one persona yield? What if Moses and Telemachus had the same absent father, the same lost mother, and the same amount of water to contend with? What if Dante was Orpheus and Beatrice was to be found in the underworld? Would this combination affect how we interpret these myths?

Would this allow a new possibility of expressing these myths? And would these ultimately color the way we construct our own myths, be it personally or collectively?

To adapt an analysis of Stephen Dedalus which I vaguely remember, I would like to announce that my mind, like everyone else’s, is of borrowed words.

What words might yet do for me is something that continues to evolve, to unfold.

But I do know that in the search for my own words, my own realized identities, this digression and deferment both to the silence and to the words I have claimed from poets love and have loved have led me to desire to explore, to create as I explore, and to persist in the act of becoming as I explore, regardless of whether or not a specific or realized end has, in the present moment, manifested itself.

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Exquisite Corpse KURT MARQUEZ

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening When I think of Virginia Woolf, I think of brushstrokes and rime, and this vaguely limned cantata, almost invisible and always hushed, says the woodcutter, insisting that he was neither a vision nor was he having one, but that he manifests as something in between. Remember this, my children. The heldentenor of a rose may very well cool the rubred eyelid, but this gesture is but pure accidental. Why, this be the ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Minokichi at the Villa Diodati, hung and pirouetting in their midst, an apparition bearing witness to this story of specters, this specter of stories: invoked and then initiated into realizing their incessant-betiding dissolve into the underwater meadows of thirsting ghosts and colorless... Junkets will know this, too, in due time, and I have seen him be still and let be—with a too-intellectually-honest sheepish grin—his always-happening apprehension of his dissolving and whatever it may mean to write the solitude of a name—its very romance—in the two-bit hum of running water; if nothing else, M. would like to know why he was twice spared; digging and clawing, he insists that there are footprints in the snow, insists that there are traces, at least, insists that once he sees them, he can unravel the confession that exquisitely anticipates his hollowing; as it might be, M. struggles to believe the word of his own furies; so instead he frames this desire to conjure as a delight admitted by this defiance; so, at least for a while, stillness, melting into windwhir; a song extending to the distance of these woods; there, faintly visible, a silhouette. Will M. see it and does it matter. Do we just let him be All roads lead to Rome, and when in Rome, all roads lead

to Mulholland Drive.

Yuki-onna You act as if I emerge dissembled in this yearning to merge with myself, remarks Virginia to Tiresias. Dare you deny me this refusal to deny? This avowal? Ah, but don’t explain or apologize, don’t amuse or frame, don’t dwell and evanesce, don’t hesitate with me. Don’t scramble to preempt a prophecy that will just babble, collapse into tattle-tattle. What words I have deferred to the silence come back to me now loud and complete, but you shan’t speak to me, shall you? As you and I both know, you among others know what it is like to disrobe or to see someone else disrobed. Spare me water and stone and Shakespeare; speak to me of being in what you see, and being unraveled in seeing. To bear witness deliberately and to spy by accident: no. To want the silence of your eyes to express the depth of their tremor, to capture: no. Instead, here, something in

AHWW 22 ZINE | 45

Exquisite Corpse • Kurt Marquez

between. Tonight M. is twice separated and is alone once again. Evening tide. Cold, oh how terribly cold. An ocean of clouds, a sea of snow. Terribly cold, and everywhere the snow is falling carefully, falling carefully, lacking confidence in itself to conceal them even for just a little while. Here: an exercise in seeing: should the silhouette unfold into detail what does it mean to frame it together with a frozen lake / thick clouds / heavy snow / footprints? M. imagines the fog clearing, dissolving, and what does it mean to emerge through the air, humming windwhir? Yes, Minokichi exclaims in thought, I have had my vision

46 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Ryan Molen

2 B S Lf S c i, Fe llo w f o r Fic tio n I’m not good at predicting things. Five years ago, if you told me I would be part of HEIGHTS, work on my writing, and be part of the AHWW, I would have laughed. Before entering Ateneo, I had never considered dabbling in creative writing. That is not to say I didn’t have the inclination.

Books filled my childhood. I had always dreamed of seeing my writing printed on a page, or my name appearing on a book cover, but it was an innocent childhood dream.

Now in college, I chose to major in Life Sciences, a pre-med course. I’ve taken at least nine units of lab classes now, and I deal with experiments every week. Fortunately, experiments come with manuals explaining the procedures, but no matter how well we follow the manual, the results are sometimes surprising. Explanations for these unexpected results come in the post-lab report. People have said that my course is quite distant from writing and literature, but I just laugh and show them our post-labs and how we try to narrate and recount where we went wrong.

I’ve forgotten where I’ve heard this from: storytelling is like running an experiment.

Gather your characters as your reagents, set some constants, decide on variables. Next, all you have to do is to watch and record what happens next. This is what happened in “Skype Love”: I knew I had to tell this story, and I knew Sabrina in my head, and there are real Sabrinas out there too. I know one, and as sad it is sounds, most likely everyone knows a Sabrina in their life.

And so I placed her in a story, mixed it around, and watched how it would unfold.

Yet another learning from the laboratory: not all experiments succeed. Something can be better. There will always be something to tweak, rearrange, or refine. I have trouble in examining my work, and AHWW helped me by having fresh eyes and minds that sought to improve Sabrina’s leap from my mind onto the page. I shall try and try again.

Despite the possibility of mistakes and messiness, I always think that at the core of experimenting, there lies the childlike inquisitiveness, the joy in play, the utterance of “I wonder what will happen next”—the same spirit that drives reading and writing stories.

One last note: you don’t run into your experiments blind. You don’t start experiments uninformed. Experiments, whether in the laboratory or in creative writing classes, demand rigor. I’ll never forget the advice of my mentor, Ms. Gabriela Lee: experiment, but experiment intelligently. I don’t know if she intended her advice would hit home—an advice that resonates in both science and writing.

48 | AHWW 22 ZINE

Skype Love RYAN MOL EN

at remembering how you first met someone?

I am. The first time I saw David Mottley, it was through a computer.

It was through a video chat in Skype a few years ago. I was in seventh grade. When I was in elementary school, this was our routine: I would get fetched from school at 4:00pm, would come home to snacks prepared by my Mom. She would ask me about my day, and would leave me to do homework. Then, a quick dinner together at the table, before she retreated to her room for her work and I would either play or draw on my own. As I grew up, this was how we operated and my elementary schoolkid self never questioned it.

I remember that day because it was the rare time we broke the routine. The moment I got inside the car, I felt that she was feeling positive. Her face lit up. I noticed this and asked her about it. She said that she finally bought the laptop she was saving up for. I remember feeling embarrassed, because she wanted to replace her old Toshiba laptop with the patchy screen thanks to me poking it.

We had dinner and I went to my room to finish an art project. Then, my mother called me from the kitchen. This was strange, I thought, since she would usually hole up in her room. I ran down and saw her new laptop on the kitchen counter. She was talking to somebody. I stood a few steps away from her until she gestured for me to come closer and look at the screen.

In the screen was a fair-skinned man who had short, dark brown hair. His nose was rather big. He was wearing this dress shirt. He seemed like he was about to leave for work.

“Sab, look here. Come closer. Why don’t you say hi,” my Mom said.

I stepped closer, about an arm’s length from my Mom this time. The man on the screen smiled and let out a toothy grin.

“Hey there, Sab. Do I need to introduce myself?” said the man.

I recognized him. “David!” I said.

I felt my Mom tap my shoulder. David laughed when I said his name. “Gina, it’s alright, I don’t mind,” he said. I went closer to the computer, examined this face on the screen, and I poked the screen, wanting to touch him, seeing if I could. My Mom grabbed my arm and said go back up if all I would do was ruin the screen of her new laptop.

ARE YOU GOOD

His face was familiar. When I said for the first time, I meant seeing him actually move. Not just in old, overexposed pictures from the nineties, complete with the pale orange dots and fading ink. My mother kept three photos of him. My favorite one was this photo of him wearing an orange floral polo shirt and sunglasses as he leaned on a palm tree in some unknown beach some twenty years ago. I’ve had that image burned into my memory because I used it in a project when I was in first grade.

It was for show and tell. Our teacher told us to bring a picture of our families, stick it on our notebook, and to talk about our parents the next day. Mom told me that she would handle it. So there I was, notebook open, waiting for my turn to be called. On the page of the notebook was my Mom’s work—a picture of me with Mom to my left, and David to my right. His photo was strategically cut and pasted to appear like he was

AHWW 22 ZINE | 49

Skype Love • Ryan Molen

leaning towards me. It would’ve appeared authentic, if the edges of David’s photo aligned with our picture, and if Mom and I were wearing beach outfits instead of our Sunday’s best. I remembered seeing all the pictures of my classmates. All of them were clean and printed on shiny photo paper. In some, the whole family coordinated the colors of their clothes.

When our teacher called me, I stood in front. I read the little caption that my Mom wrote. I introduced myself, and I read their names. Then, I showed our picture to the class.

“That’s a creative picture you have there,” my teacher said. “What is your mom’s job?” I read Mom’s caption and replied, “A company employee.” I think I mispronounced it then.

“And your dad?”

I paused. I looked at the caption again. I tried to read it. Something felt wrong.

“He is abroad,” I read, struggling to read the last word. Was abroad even a job? My classmates then all said either doctors or engineers or chefs or businessmen, but not abroad.

“Ah,” our teacher said. I didn’t get any more questions, unlike the other kids. Our teacher commented, “You must be excited with your dad’s pasalubong every time he comes home.” Looking back, that was a rather vicious comment, but my first grader self didn’t know better.

When Mom fetched me, I asked what abroad meant. She said abroad meant some other country, some place in the distance. I asked what David was doing there. She said she would tell me when I grew up a little more and when I could properly pronounce company employee and abroad. * These days, it’s great that Photoshop is a thing, and manually cutting and pasting photos is obsolete. This was a blessing when I was working on my projects in high school. When I entered high school, Mom stopped fetching me and instead I carpooled with a neighborhood friend, Charlene. She stopped fetching me because her work hours had changed. I would usually have the house to myself until around dinnertime.

I forgot to mention: when my Mom trusted me enough to get me a laptop (that was eighth grade), I created a Facebook account and the other social media accounts followed.

The first day of senior year, I finally made one for Skype too, but only for David. He said Facebook was too trendy. We would have a video chat sometimes, him keeping me company while I was reading or doing homework. Sometimes he even helped, especially if it was about science or biology.

It was still the start of the school year so classes were light. I was reviewing for the college entrance exams and the SATs. I heard the main door being unlocked. Mom had arrived from the office. A few minutes later, she yelled from the living room, “Sab, what do you want for dinner? Tell me so I can call the delivery.”

That night I was feeling extra lazy to stand from my bed. I was in a cozy position, having a video chat with David. I was telling him about my day in school. I yelled back, “Can we have Chicken Bonchon?”

“What? I didn’t catch that,” she replied from the living room. David was laughing at me. He asked, “What in the world is that Chicken Bonchon, anyway? That’s all you order all the time.”

“It’s delicious, I swear,” I told him. I turned away from my laptop and shouted, “Mom, did you get that? Can you order the bibimbap with…”

Before I could finish my order, my mother opened the door. “Oh sorry, I ruined your father-daughter moment…” she said. “Hello, David.” She waved at the camera rather unenthusiastically.

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Skype Love • Ryan Molen

“Oh, Sab. Look who we have here. Hello there,” David said, though his voice sounded more guarded.

“I should’ve knocked, Sab. And David,” she said, “can you please check your messages? It’s important.” She went closer to check on what I was reading. She saw that I had the large SAT prep book opened, and David could see it.

Her gaze went from the SAT prep book to the screen. “Seeing that, I guess you don’t have to read what I said,” Mom told David. “You’ve probably figured it out. But do open them.” David simply nodded.

Once she was out of the room, I told David, “You should check those messages. Girls go crazy when we get seenzoned,” I said, trying to diffuse the tension.

“Seenzone...” he muttered to himself. I explained to him the meaning. “Is that what you kids call it now?” he asked innocently.

“Get on with the times,” I said, teasing him.

“For me, I’d call it being smart with your priorities,” he replied. * Some more weeks passed. Our final exams for the third trimester were coming up. Our teachers were scaring us, saying that these exams were more important than the SATs or the college entrance tests. They said you could pass the entrance tests, but you couldn’t graduate high school if you failed the final exams. Fair point, I thought, but I’d still call that BS, after how hard I studied for the SATs and how I blanked out in the essay writing portion of one university’s entrance test. Instead of going through my notes on graphing functions, I ended up wasting time on my computer. I was thoughtlessly scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed.

Luckily, David was online and we had a video chat. I told him about my study habits. I was afraid that they wouldn’t fly once I’d enter college. I pretended he was a classmate and I taught him the lesson, because that was one study tip recommended in those Buzzfeed articles.

“Sab, I think you’re not absorbing anything much at this point. By the way, won’t you be having dinner yet? It’s almost nine p.m. there,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said. “Mom just got home. I think she already called to have food delivered for us. You know, she’s always going on about Mrs. Morrison, this, Mrs. Morrison that, even when we’re eating. I feel as if I’m having dinner with Mrs. Morrison too.”

“Who’s Mrs. Morrison?”

“Oh, she’s Mom’s boss. Mrs. Morrison is in the States, so she sends the craziest demands at the craziest times for us here. The time zone difference, you know?”

“Yes, just like this, then,” said David.

“But hey, you manage to find time to check on me even when you’re thousands of miles away. And you work too, don’t you? So that’s not an excuse. By the way, David, what do you do?”

David paused before answering. “Yes, Sab, I do work, or else I wouldn’t have money to pay for this Internet. It’s funny you ask that. My official job title is a researcher. Not an actor, or a celebrity, or a doctor, as your mom might’ve told you. Years ago I worked there, but there’s no money for us folks in there.”

“Should’ve gone to the corporate world if you were after the money, then,” I said.

“You mean sell my soul to the corporate world? No thanks,” he said. “That’s not what your mom thinks though. We never agreed on that.”

AHWW 22 ZINE | 51

Skype Love • Ryan Molen

“I kinda wish she agreed with you on that. That’d give her more mother-daughter quality time,” I told him.

“Why, she doesn’t check on you too? I’d like to think she does. She loves you. She orders your food, right? Chicken Bonchon bibimbap a la carte, wasn’t it?”

I was taken aback, and I wanted to slap myself for two reasons: for saying something so insensitive, and for realizing that I’ve been ordering bibimbap too much. “Yeah, but when she does… It’s always to check on me and my grades and college. As if I’d forget about that! It’s all I think about. Every. Single. Day. I don’t even get weekends off. What about my classmates, huh, all they do is go out and party!” If he were in front of me, he might have felt the heat from my cheeks.

My sudden outburst surprised David. “Your mom, Gina, is just concerned for you. I’ll let you know that she’s working hard. I am too. I really want to see you graduate, Sab. But are you trying to make it work from your end?” he said.

That answer irritated me further. He was lucky that he was a thousand miles away, because I wanted to hurl the review books at him. “God, don’t you see all these books? Am I not working hard enough for you?

I’m so sorry you can’t feel it because you’re just chilling over there,” I said. “Guess I have to stop going on the Internet and focus on my studies and make things work, like you said. Good night, David.”

I slammed my laptop shut. My cheeks were still warm, and I felt my eyes watering. When I calmed down a few minutes later, I signed in to Skype to apologize to him, but he was offline. * The night after the last exam, Charlene called me on my cellphone.

“So, Sab… are you going with us to prom?” asked Charlene.

“Well, I don’t know, let me check my schedule. I guess I’ll continue sulking from now till prom about my terrible grades. So, no, probably not.”

I was just pulling her leg.

When I thought she was taking me seriously, I said, “Of course I am. It might be the last time we’d be together with friends and everyone else.

Charlene sighed with relief. Next, she asked if I was going stag. I said yes.

“What if… you know who asks you out, huh? You know, the one messaging you on Facebook quite a lot these days?” she teased. If this were in person, she would be nudging my side with her elbow.

“Ah, whatever. Facebook messages don’t mean anything. If he wants anything, he better come and talk in person,” I said, flippantly. “But I’m going to ask you. I bet you’re going to go with your boyfriend and you’ll all be sweet and sickening there, yuck.”

She laughed. “No, it’s not like that. My dad would know right away if he tried anything funny. My boyfriend won’t probably make it out of the venue alive.” I laughed with her. She added, “At least you don’t have to worry about that, if you ever get a date.”

My laughter suddenly halted.

“Oh, I’m sorry Sab, I…” she stammered.

I paused. It’s just a joke, you know what they say, every joke has a bit of truth. Suddenly, I didn’t want to tease around anymore.

“It’s okay, Charlene. Just send me the design of your dress so we don’t match up.”

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Skype Love • Ryan Molen

* On weekends, Mom has a strange habit of taking naps on the couch. Those naps were strange because they’d go on for hours. Around the middle of February, she was on the couch again after dinnertime. She was still awake. She called me and asked me to get her iPad from her room—she was too tired to get it up, and she needed to finish Level 153 on Candy Crush Saga.

When I went up her room, I found the iPad quickly. But, there were several notifications from Skype.

They were from David. Being curious of what they talk about, I swiped them open. I read some of their recent conversations—most of them were just updating each other of what was happening, and it was mostly about me and my performance in school. It felt like a conversation between me and my groupmates when we’d update each other on our school projects.

The most recent ones were Mom telling David details about my graduation. David’s replies, sent just two hours ago, seemed like he was warming up to the idea.

Would I finally get to meet him soon?

I was browsing through some more of the messages until Mom yelled from the couch in the living room. “Why is it taking so long to look for the iPad?” Her voice surprised me, and I ran downstairs, fueled with the excitement over David’s visit.

I handed her the iPad. “Here it is, Mom. Plus, you should look at your messages on Skype.”

She looked at me. “What about my Skype messages?” she asked, exhaustion obvious from her voice.

I couldn’t help but bring it up. “Is David really going to come to my graduation?”

Mom sat up. “Who told you to look at my messages on my iPad? The last time I checked, all I asked was for the iPad and Candy Crush Saga. Not Skype. It’s not like the icons of the two are similar. One’s blue, the other’s technicolor.”

“But Mom, it just popped up and…”

“Is that yours in the first place?” she emphasized. “Don’t do that again, the same way I don’t do that to you. To answer your question though, yes, but hang tight on the details. Don’t get your hopes up.” She opened the Candy Crush app and started to play.

I felt cheated. This was a time I could find out things for myself, and she doesn’t want to budge. I decided to broach the topic, the one thing I’ve always wanted to bring up.

“Mom, why are you making me study abroad?”

Mom paused her game and lifted her gaze to meet mine. “Haven’t we talked about this yet? Your dad and I have talked about it. How many times have we talked about this? C’mon, count. You did well on your SAT math, so I know you can count.”

“If I was studying abroad anyway, why did I have to take the other college tests here? Why are you pushing me to study hard when the moment I step out of this country, none of this will matter? Explain to me, Mom, why?” I pleaded.

She wasn’t taking the bait yet. She was still level-headed. “Because Sab, it’s important to have backup plans, in case plan A doesn’t work.”

“So, you weren’t completely rooting for me when I was studying for the SATs?” I said.

My Mom stood up, placed her iPad on a table, and sat back down—this time, directly facing me. She met my gaze. “Listen to what you just said. I bought you the thick SAT review books, paid the application fees,

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braved the Manila traffic to get you to the venue… how is that not rooting for you at all?” she said, raising her voice. “Giving you allowance, buying your prom dress, what else? Aren’t I the luckiest mother in the world with this child,” she said. My eyes started welling up.

“It’s that… we never really spend much time together anymore, and when we do, that’s all we talk about. It’s like you see me as this project that you have to succeed in, because the one with David fell through...”

Mom’s eyes widened. I knew I struck a chord within her. She scowled at me.

“Project? You think you’re a project? My God, Sabrina, a project is what I do in the office all day, and I hate doing projects. I wouldn’t have endured being kicked out of the house when I gave birth to you, or when your father left, or those nights when I’d sing you to sleep at three in the morning, or when I’d spent weeks agonizing over your father’s letters when I thought he’d left me. With every letter I sent, I was terrified that he’d never reply. And he’s doing it again now—when I ask him the hard questions later, when I ask him his sincerity in actually meeting you, I promise you, he’ll disappear again.

“It has been seventeen years of this—if you were a project, I would have dropped it and resigned, but I’m still here! And with all that, I still want you to meet him in person, to not rob you of that chance! Your father, and your education!”

Hot tears were falling from my eyes. I didn’t know what to say, and at the same time, everything just came flowing out.

“Mom, I’m just so scared that you’re doing so much work and… what if when I get there, David doesn’t live up to his promise? What if he just ditches me? What if when I get there, he doesn’t see me as his…” My knees began to shake. I struggled at the word. “his… daughter?”

“That says a lot more about him than us. We did our part.”

“Is it always just our part, Mom? Me, doing my best in studying; you, working yourself through exhaustion in your work, and then he gets to call the shots whether to dismiss all of that? I’m so done, Mom, when can we get some sort of assurance?”

I couldn’t bear crying in front of her for much longer, so I ran to my room and slammed the door. The moment I laid down on my bed, I immediately fell asleep, but it was the shallow kind of sleep—I tossed and turned throughout the night. When I was close to falling asleep, a fear would pierce through my consciousness and jolt me back awake.

A few hours later, I felt my Mom enter the room. She noticed that I was still awake. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to her.

She glanced at me. It was dark, but I knew that her eyes were tearing up too. Mom, just like me, teared up easily. She sat down on my bed and embraced me. She said nothing. She was patting my shoulders. She brought my head closer to hers, planted a kiss on my hair, and hummed the chorus of The Corrs’s Runaway, a song that always helped me calm down. She herself was warm. Being warmed her arms that cradled me for years. Hearing her soft humming of my childhood song. Feeling the vibrations of her throat as she hummed.

All those three put me in ease, and made me feel loved.

After humming the entire song twice, she let me lie down and sleep. When she left, I didn’t feel quite sleepy just yet. I opened Skype. Maybe I can talk to David about this. Maybe I can change his mind if he came here during my graduation.

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I waited for ten minutes, but he was offline. *

The hair and makeup session took longer than what I expected. When it was finished and Glenda, the makeup artist, had left, my mother helped me put on my gown. It was brilliant blue, off-shoulder, and sewn with several sequins all around. I asked my mother if we could make it look like Pia Wurtzbach’s winning gown. She reminded me that I might have a beauty queen’s looks, but she didn’t have a beauty queen’s budget.

Fortunately, the gown fits perfectly. Before we stepped out of the house, we paused in front of the large wall mirror perpendicular to the main door. My mother and I stood side by side. I was much taller than her now, thanks to my heels. We looked at our reflection.

“My little girl’s grown up now,” she said. She sounded like she was simply thinking out loud.

“Mom, wouldn’t you want to take a picture of this?”

“No need, Sab. You outgrow that urge to take pictures all the time, just like me. I see you every day, don’t I? If you’re in the moment, then you’d surely remember it, wouldn’t you?”

She was getting sentimental and I knew that if this continued, she would be bawling soon. So, I joked around and in the end, managed to take a single picture of the two of us before we left the house.

“But before we leave… are you sure you really don’t have a date tonight?” she asked, skeptical. I rolled my eyes in response.

The next day, I sent the one photo my mother and I took to David. He never acknowledged it. I’d like to think that it just didn’t send properly. I discovered several weeks later that thanks to the terrible Internet in this country, the photo was never sent in the first place. * I didn’t know which was which: either David went off the grid for the weeks leading up to my graduation, March 26th, or I was too busy to talk to him. Whatever it was, we didn’t talk for weeks on end, except when I reminded him of my graduation day, and if he was coming. All he replied was to remind my mom to bring the iPad so he could watch the video. That idea was pathetic, but I didn’t bother to call him out.

Finally, it was graduation day. It was our class’s turn to march onstage. The entire graduating class rehearsed it for almost nine hours in total. The ceremony was long but it was simple—we fell in line, were called one by one, received our diploma, smiled at the camera, and stepped off the stage. The last thirty second spotlight on us before we finally leave high school.

For our class, I was in the middle of the line. We lined up alphabetically, according to our surname.

When the student before you already began to walk towards the principal to receive their diploma and get their pictures taken, that was the cue for the next person to step forward to be recognized. My classmate before me, Vanessa, earned several medals and even a scholarship for college. She stepped forward, curtseyed, and began to walk to our principal to collect her medals. Each medal was kept in a small cardboard box as big as

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a palm of a hand. As on cue, I walked forward. I knew I was going to awkwardly stand onstage and have an extended screen time—I had to wait for every medal to be awarded to Vanessa.

I stood there, searching for Mom in the crowd. It was difficult. Every mother and father in this school seemed to be very doing parents, with their phones and iPads and cameras up in the air. I even spotted several DSLRs (but I’d like to think each one carrying that camera knew how to use it). They were all competing for the best view of the graduation ceremony.

From the periphery of my vision I could still see medals being given to Vanessa. The crowd began to count her medals as they were awarded: “Three… four… five…”

As the crowd counted, my eyes scanned the hall for my mother. Again, the sea of raised cameras and iPads.

Suddenly, as the crowd counted to seven, I spotted her. There she was, a little farther than the seat assigned to her, but I finally found her. She was standing, wearing a gray, sleeveless dress. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling, but I knew she was nodding at me. The most important thing was that her hands were down. She was not holding an iPad. I tried to smile at her but I heard the sound resembling door chimes—Vanessa’s medals bumping into each other as she walked offstage.

They called my name and I did my part and had my photo taken. I don’t know if my mother should’ve brought her iPad to record me. The others sure did. It seemed like they watched the entire ceremony through their iPad screen. Before I stepped off the stage, I noticed that there was one empty seat beside my Mom.

Of course. No show.

Why did I even expect? To console myself, I tried to convince myself that I saw this coming, but I wasn’t sure if I could ever do that.

But, this I know for sure: I won’t be sending the photo to David.

He can just ask me how my graduation went when I fly to the States and finally meet him in person.

My bad. When I said when, I meant if.

If ever I really get to meet him, get to know him, and maybe love David Mottley as my father, somehow.

Whatever that was on Skype didn’t count.

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Chaela Tiglao

3 B S P S Y , Fe llo w fo r Fic tio n I remember devouring stories as early as when I was a little girl, my favorites being the histories of my family, deeply ingrained in the rich backgrounds of Bulacan and Tarlac. The arrival of the statue of La Purísima Concepción, though I had not been born to witness it, had become the face of Sta. Maria and whose smaller replica my grandmother Adoracion would display in the raised altar on the other end of her dark mansion. The Virgin’s porcelain face, lovely and mysterious, would force my uncle to eye her warily every night before embarking on one of many of his secret excursions. A few hours from Pinatubo, the long American house was once cause for the disturbance of Emerita and Celoy, for neighbors and tourists were always intrigued about seeing the interior. The sala must have been where my grandmother Emerita had been entertaining her guests with her famous delicacies when her nephew burst in, declaring to everyone present that Emerita and Celoy’s son had lit fireworks while standing atop a jeep with his friends— “Their bodies could be anywhere in the whole of Bamban!”

Hearing such stories have made me fixated on history: I am gripped by a certain marvel when fantasizing the lives of people who’ve lived in different kinds of places and contexts. I imagine how generations of beliefs, and circumstances shaped by the beliefs or that shaped the beliefs themselves, have directed the actions of its people and continue to do so today.

What becomes interesting and complex to me is the reference point at which the lines between history and prophecy coincide with the individual and personal motivations of the characters I write or have read about. To what extent must people struggle against large histories? Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude answers this with the unforgiving consequences of a family that remains oblivious to the mistakes of its ancestors. Nick Joaquin’s “Three Generations” proves the inescapability of the past, no matter the effort in preventing it. Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits meanwhile breaks this cyclicality when Alba chooses not to seek vengeance, ending four generations of tyranny.

“Intercession” is not about cyclicality, but it does tell of a community with its own traditions and set of beliefs, as viewed from the perspective of a newcomer. On a larger scale it is a remembrance and reorientation of what we are already familiar with. It is a product of an accumulation of traditions; there is no attempt to dislodge history, but there is an exemplification of how different kinds of history meet and coincide with one another, and therefore not only shape the lives of the townspeople, but hint at the collective unconscious of our own people.

I remain eternally grateful to the panelists and my co-fellows for the feedback, support, and trust they have given me throughout the workshop process.

Always, I have the sprawling island of my tropical country to thank for being a constant well of inspiration.

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so astonished to find Doña Corazon and her son together in the sala as she was at the sight of the woman crouched in front of the young boy with a firm grip on his chin, inclining his scowling face towards the windows where the early noon sun could illuminate his right side: a fresh bruise blooming around the eye, now swollen, the white around his iris glistening pink and contrasting against bluish-black skin. Her alarmed inquiry was cut short when she was pushed out of the way by another presence, Carmelo dashing towards mother and son with a dishcloth bunched up in his hand.

“What has happened?” Juli finally spoke, surveying the scene with alarm. She was both confused and concerned Doña Corazon showed no signs of distress; Doña Corazon merely took the dishcloth from Carmelo and brought it to her son’s face, tending to the bruise as she might wipe the surface of the pianoforte in the corner of the room. Nothing seemed out of place: the portraits of Doña Corazon’s ancestors hanging on the wall remained aligned and pristine, the tables and chairs below them immobile save for the gentle fluttering of the tablecloths from the noon breeze outside. Even the Sto. Niño, there on the altar behind where Doña Corazon’s son, Jaime, stood, had its brown face benevolent and playful. Jaime twisted behind him slightly and scowled once more.

“Carmelo, how do you explain this?” Juli demanded her own son. She mistook the silence as guilt; now Carmelo startled in his spot and turned to address her with wide eyes.

“It is not his doing,” intervened Doña Corazon. Her unruffled behavior bothered Juli, who was now frowning deeply. To Jaime, she said in levelled tones, “You will let him do as he pleases next time, yes?”

“Then I would be in a worse condition!”

“He would have gotten bored,” said Doña Corazon. “Change into proper clothes now and we will call for the physician after merienda. Juli, you and Carmelo will eat with us; we prepared too many for just two people, and you must be tired from the errands I sent you off to do.”

Afterwards, with the sun sinking behind them as they made for home, Juli could not help but pry for more answers from her son. Carmelo, carrying the bilaon of leftover suman Doña Corazon had insisted they bring with them, sighed in frustration.

JULI WAS NOT

“I did not hit him, Mother.”

“Who, then? Was there someone else in that room I did not see? Or are you telling me Doña Corazon would dare lay a hand on her own son? Is this a laughing matter to you?” Juli demanded.

“It was neither of us, Ma. It was the Sto. Niño.”

Juli tripped but regained balance. Carmelo had turned in surprise—then blanched at the anger he found on his mother’s features. “This is a joke to you?”

“No, I swear it! I was there! We had gone to the sala for Jaime’s writing tools—he wanted to write to Don Geronimo in Manila, you see—and suddenly there was the Sto. Niño standing alone in the sala—and I knew it was him because he had stripped his vestments on the floor and wore only a fisherman’s attire— and he wanted to play but Jaime cautioned we ignore him, and I hadn’t even blinked when the Sto. Niño

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jumped at Jaime, gripping his hair and laughing so gleefully, that before I could intervene they had both started to box each other and I could only rush out of the room to call for Doña Corazon!”

Juli was mortified. “Ay, ay! Such excuses!”

“But I am not lying, Ma!”

“Enough of this! Doña Corazon has been too kind on you. What does this say about us?” Carmelo closed his mouth, seeing the obvious distress he had brought upon her. Juli felt a great fear rise in her chest as she watched her son walk ahead, disappointment written in the lines of his shoulders. He had grown taller since they arrived in this island; he was long-limbed now and remained pale despite the scorching sun.

He moved with a certain carefulness, the way his father had when she had first met him. Carmelo seemed to be growing more and more into an uncanny likeness of him. Juli took comfort that though he had her husband’s slender nose and smooth skin, his eyes—large and dark and soothing—were like her own.

At last their nipa hut came into view, and Juli was seized with the familiar feeling of dread and trepidation. Against the setting sun the branches of the molave trees around them turned dark, leaves outlined in gold, or perhaps this was the illusion of fireflies now gathering and blinking their lights. There was enough of the sunlight to illuminate their path and the crops Juli had planted around their nipa hut. This part of town was known for its quiet seclusion; the next hut was a couple of minutes from theirs. The first night they settled here, Juli could not sleep from the paranoia of thieves breaking into their home, or worse, bloodied ghosts appearing inside out of nowhere. No harm had come to them, though, at least not by either, and so she grew accustomed to the silence of this part of town. One of their neighbors, a woman wearing black mourning attire, now passed by mother and son. She ignored them and kept her head down low, which was nothing unusual to them, and besides they only crossed each other in the evenings. They neared their hut, and indeed Juli’s husband stood waiting for them on the balcony, his lips pursed.

His eyes narrowed at the bilaon Carmelo held in his arms, Carmelo keeping his head low as he climbed up the bamboo ladder, muttering a polite greeting to his father, before ducking inside the hut. Her husband’s eyes then slid toward Juli’s, unreadable.

“Alas-singko y medya na,” he reminded her. “Where have you been?”

“Doña Corazon asked me to deliver something in Looc. Then she invited Carmelo and I for merienda before returning home,” replied Juli softly.

“What? Hindi ka ba nahiya?” His cheeks had begun to flush. “Did you want us to look like beggars?”

“No,” she stammered, “she insisted. “It would have been worse if I declined her request.”

She waited fearfully for his response. She could never guess what he was thinking: the last time he hit her was because he had spilled hot rice on his own crotch. He had blamed her for preparing it that way by striking her in the face as soon as she had knelt down to help him. Her cheek was sore and did not lose his handprint for three days. There were more incidents, more reasons he found to use all the time—when they happened, it was still when she least expected it.

“If you came home empty-handed it would have been worse,” her husband finally said. “You were thinking. Now prepare dinner before either I or your son complains.” He spun on his heels and entered inside.

Dinner was a silent affair. Her husband helped himself to heaps of sinigang and left some small portions behind. When he retired for the night, Carmelo waited until he was out of sight and earshot when he said, under his breath: “He never does anything.”

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Juli spun to face him, eyes wide. “Huy. Do not talk about your father that way.” Her tone made Carmelo flinch, but the fear that wound its way to her heart was wild and hammering.

“Why not?” challenged her son. “It is true.”

“Whether it is true or not, you will keep it to yourself, understood?”

Carmelo’s eyes, determined and ablaze, widened when he finally did. Pain and sadness sliced his features; he nodded briefly, tightly. Later, Juli would not be able to fall asleep, remembering over and over again her son’s sudden reaction.

She woke up later in the day the following morning, roused by a kick administered to her hip from her husband, who moved about their room with mild haste. She watched him from the corner of her eye as she folded their blanket: he dressed quickly in a camiso, then took his rosary from their desk and held its beads between his fingers for a few seconds, before placing it into the pocket of his trousers.

Her husband’s devotion was another aspect that puzzled her—she knew this island’s inhabitants were deeply religious, and yet for someone like her husband who despised everything about the place, he was still deeply ingrained in it.

“Where are you going?” Juli now asked tentatively.

It did not seem like he would answer. Eventually, he said, “Atanacio has a game. I’ll be back before dinner. You had better be here before I am.”

She did not miss the threat of if she did not.

Carmelo uttered a greeting as his mother and father emerged into the common room. His father responded by placing his palm briefly on his son’s slender shoulder.

They waited until he left their hut before beginning with their daily activities. Juli, heart aching at the warring emotions on Carmelo’s eyes, whose features had first melted into a certain softness and tentativeness at the manner upon which his father had regarded him, knelt and took her son’s hands in hers.

“Shall we ask Doña Corazon if Jaime would like to accompany us today?”

Carmelo looked at her questioningly, but could not conceal his pleasure. “Can we?”

“Of course. I cannot see why she would not allow him to.”

Juli felt the island’s peerless beauty when the sun rose and the locals began their daily routine.

They passed around the gentle face of a mountain whose wide, golden path curved to present a breathtaking view of the ocean that glittered like sapphires and that spread out to meet the horizon. Here the air smelled only of salt, and the winds were crisp and warm. As they descended, the path flattened, and tall crops and overgrowth bloomed along the base of the range; the constant ocean on the other side was dotted with mangroves here and there along its shoreline, of little and larger sizes, sturdy against the steady tides. There were shrieks as younger children chased one another with fistfuls of sand; their sharp laughter pierced the morning air.

Doña Corazon accepted their invitation with the agreement that Jaime was to be escorted back in time for supper. Juli and Carmelo waited outside the large house that spilled with music—Doña Corazon was entertaining guests hailed from all over the place, but had promised to fetch Jaime. When Jaime met them, his cheek bandaged, he was pensive.

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“What is it?” asked Juli in concern.

“Mother and I can’t seem to find the Sto. Niño,” frowned Jaime. “Do you suppose it is because it is the Santa Cruzan tonight?”

Carmelo had been watching his mother as Jaime spoke; Juli hid her unnerve. “Ah, the Sto. Niño would be a fool to miss our beautiful girls, no?”

“I suppose.” Jaime relaxed. Juli bit her tongue from further questioning. Instead they followed the narrow dirt track running perpendicular from them, which opened into the town: a network of establishments and houses strewn with May flowers and draperies, young men and young ladies rehearsing the processional dance on the wide, noisy streets, Manileños flocking around eagerly, bringing with them their innovative minds as they entered from house to house, for the locals always opened their doors when there was a feast. The townsfolk mostly anticipated the culminating event in the evening: when the parish priest bid them spread the Good News, the mayor would open his doors for the gala, but because there were too many of the townsfolk he would instead light the shore in front of his home with torches, bring out a portion of the orchestra, and redirect more guests towards that space, where the revelry would last till the following morning.

They stayed a while in the home of Jaime’s godmother, for the old woman demanded company for her ritual novena. They watched some games and sang some songs with the more avid townspeople; when they had tired of the noontime sports they made their way for the parish further into town, shielded by verdant trees, its belfry ringing the midday toll.

When she was not at Doña Corazon’s—the woman did not think she would need Juli all the time and so had told her to come to their house from time to time—Juli would make for the Sta. Maria Church.

It was small, its limestone bricks seeping with mold, yet the townsfolk boasted of it. She had not intended to volunteer to clean the church, but its name had reminded her of her hometown, the place she had given up for her husband’s. He had told her, when they had first met—he a passionate, solemn man seeking respite from the memory of a dead, brutish father; and she much younger, much tender, brimming with the full force of adoration—how he had longed to leave the island completely, body and mind. Yet they found themselves in it, and he, embraced by the suddenness of events, was changed little by little by a hard bitterness and madness as if the ghost of his father pursued him, relentlessly, accusing him for the debt that allowed him, his wife, and his son to return.

The widows of the town were nearly done sweeping through the church when Juli arrived. Nena nodded to her in greeting; she was the parish’s most devoted patron, for when her husband had disappeared without any trace—there were rumors of him having a younger lover, but it was not evidenced, and Nena had refuse to speak of it—she found refuge in the sanctum of the church. It was the same for the others; they had all found comfort within the limestone walls. A year later, when Juli would arrive for the first time, the widows would confide to her how they had felt the full grace of the Almighty, the Virgin and her Son, and even the saints, amidst the turn in their lives.

Carmelo and Jaime sat on one of the pews and conspired solemnly between themselves. Juli started with wiping the altar; she offered a short prayer when she reached the Virgin and her Son. She finished with the rest of the saints, shuddering when she finally reached Sta. Rita de Cascia.

Unlike all of the saints, Sta. Rita de Cascia’s was made poorly out of wood. Whoever had made it

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had not bothered to paint her skin evenly. Her eyes were disks that kept even the most daring of children recoil; her lips were not curled up into a smile. She was drabbed completely in black vestments with only the pale sliver of her face peeking out. Her hands, wooden and stiff, held a skull and the crucifix.

“Aling Juli,” Jaime’s voice at her elbow startled her; she pushed down a yelp, heart pounding wildly. “Did you know the skull belonged to her dead husband?”

Carmelo looked mortified. Juli, no longer able to play along, frowned. “Jaime, it would not do well to behave such imprudently!”

“Ah, but it is true,” persisted Jaime with great annoyance. Offended, he took Carmelo’s hand and pulled him towards the side of the church, Carmelo eyeing his mother pointedly.

Juli ignored them and went on to the task of wiping the saint—Sta. Rita was the one covered in the most dirt out of all of them. The moss and mud around her feet must have seeped into her encasement from the old walls of the church. Juli finished and realized she had been holding her breath throughout.

Her husband hit her the moment she crossed the threshold of their home.

It was a punch to the face this time, and Juli remembered the last time she had received one such— it had been when Carmelo was three. They had still been in her hometown then. She had left him while he was sleeping to purchase salt for their dinner and she had come home to Carmelo screaming and crying.

She had taken longer than she had planned. He had woken up and her husband had been the one to find their son alone.

Now he punched her because she did not make it in time to prepare supper.

There was blood on her lips; Juli could feel the intense throbbing of her head, her eyes, her nose.

Her vision danced before her, but she could see the outline of Carmelo behind her husband, pale and trembling. He had waited until Carmelo entered the hut before reaching and fisting the front of her shirt with one hand, the other delivering the blow. Carmelo had shouted; now tears escaped him, uncontrollable, and he shaking.

“Carmelo,” Juli moaned, words garbled, mouth already stiffing. “Go to your room.”

Her husband was drunk. She could smell him—the overpowering stench reached her from where she had fallen in a tangle of limbs on the ground. He was red and breathing heavily and it seemed any moment now any movement or any sound could leave him spinning around to strike. The realization forced her to sit upright, jerkily and heart hammering, as frantic, bleary eyes darted to see if her son had listened to her.

But her son remained where he stood behind his father. Her husband saw where she was looking and turned sharply around, staggering, as Carmelo’s eyes widened with fear—and the fear in his eyes was familiar. Carmelo stumbled back a step; before her husband could reach him Juli had already risen to her feet and launched herself at her husband, fingers clawing at his hair, a surprised—outraged—scream caught in her throat.

He swung around forcefully, and she was flung to the floor again, this time with her arm absorbing the impact. He was panting. He looked like he did not know who she was. Carmelo seemed not to know what to do when Juli repeated, through the haze of her pain:

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Intercession • Chaela Tiglao

“Go to your room.”

With a strangled cry Carmelo retreated behind the partition of his room, and this was the last she saw before her husband brought his fist to her face once more.

Juli could not move the following day. Carmelo refused to leave his mother alone. But because she could not move, she would not be able to watch Carmelo around his father, and she could not live with that.

“Go to Doña Corazon and tell her I am ill,” said Juli. “Stay there and come back when it is evening already.”

Carmelo nodded reluctantly. She watched him climb down the bamboo ladder from her seat on the balcony, Carmelo turning around halfway to wave back at her. She forced herself to smile, but it was painful.

Juli was alone for the rest of the day. Her husband had gone off somewhere. Every time she thought of him she would feel the bruise around her eye throb, or see her son’s terrified eyes, achingly familiar to her. She would remember, most of all, the moment she had flung herself at her husband. The fury she had felt then—the heat that had coursed through her chest, the wild pounding of her heart—would accompany the recollection. The more she felt it the more she grew acquainted with it, and though she did not think the emotion would be waning soon, she made sure she kept it at bay.

Juli did not realize she had fallen asleep until she jolted in her seat. She blinked groggily, eyes adjusting to the sinking sun. The sky before her was a conflagration of rose and fiery hues, framed by the canopy of trees, where below fireflies swarmed the branches. A cool breeze ruffled the short hairs on her forehead.

Juli was about to drift off to sleep when she felt the odd sensation of being watched. Sitting straighter, and looking across the balcony and toward the street, she saw a figure standing by one of the molave trees. It was the woman in black mourning attire. Juli still could not see her face because of the distance, but the woman was indeed turned towards her, staring. Juli was more aware now of the bruise around her eye, large and ugly; she raised a hand to greet the woman nevertheless.

The woman only stared.

When Juli woke up the following day, she felt enough of her energy restored to continue with her daily routine. Her bruise no longer throbbed as intensely as the day before. She rose from the mattress to prepare breakfast.

Carmelo took his seat as Juli set the table. When the food was placed before them, they sat, waiting for Carmelo’s father. Already Juli could feel the heat from yesterday returning inside of her.

“Are you feeling better?” Carmelo asked. He was staring at her, a perplexed expression on his face.

“Yes, I am.” Juli offered a proper smile. Noticing her son’s confusion, she frowned slightly. “What is the matter?”

“Your bruise is no longer there, Mother.”

Juli stilled. Her fingers reached up to her eye. The skin felt smooth, even with the other side of her face. Carmelo did not see her hand shaking.

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They waited for another hour for Carmelo’s father. “He must have passed out from whatever he did yesterday,” rationalized Juli calmly, and told her son to eat. Both spared no leftovers. They cleaned the hut afterwards, sunlight washing the floors and walls of cogon. Juli locked the door behind them as they left the house; she told herself it was to prevent thieves from breaking in. But she knew by now there were no thieves here, and she knew, with a sinister giddiness, she had done it to spite her husband.

She arrived in Sta. Maria Church just after dropping Carmelo off at Doña Corazon’s—and Doña Corazon, upon receiving her, had wrapped her arms around the surprised Juli, who caught Carmelo’s resolute chin before he slipped inside the house. Doña Corazon had studied her gravely. “If you should need anything, you will come to me, yes? Yesterday Carmelo would not play with Jaime until I promised him so.”

Her Carmelo, who continued to surprise her. All her life her actions had been for the sake of her son; surely his fierceness did not come from either her or his father. Juli, feeling the sting of tears, had nodded and held the other woman’s hand firmly.

The widows were already sweeping the floor of the church. They dusted each and every corner until the only mark on the interior was the mold, and Juli started the task of wiping the altar and the saints, offering short prayers to the Virgin and her Son.

Juli told herself not to shudder when it was Sta. Rita de Cascia’s turn. There was the moss and mud again, on her feet; she scrubbed rigorously. She used the clean side of the cloth to wipe the saint’s pale face, followed by her chest, then the crucifix on her left hand. Juli wiped the skull as quickly as she could, shuddering now—

She paused. The cloth had stuck on to something. Juli lifted the cloth from the saint’s hand, and saw, to her immense confusion, what seemed to be the likeness of her husband’s rosary tucked beneath the skull, swaying slightly.

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Alie Unson

4 A B LI T ( E NG) , Fe llo w f o r N onfict ion The title of my piece stems from my experiences going on seaside trips with my mother.

Every summer our family makes it a point to visit the beach, usually in the summertime, when my sister and I are free from school, and the sun is hot enough to tan even my mother, whose paleness—ironically enough in this country—make her incredibly insecure. “At last, the ocean” is a phrase I would often say after the stifling 2 or 3 hour car ride, the moment the sea breeze hit my face and my eyes met the blue that would stretch out for miles and miles. My mother too, would sigh deeply. It was simply a fact of her, her love for the sea, a constant in an otherwise inconstant woman. I’ve never been more at ease than when I was near the water.

This tenuous, fragile relationship between my mother and me is one of the things that I attempt to illustrate in my piece. The other was my depression. In January of 2016 I was diagnosed with Severe Major Depressive Disorder, and it had hurt me deeply, this knowledge. Surrounded by traditional ideals during the entirety of my upbringing, I couldn’t help but understand this as a glaring weakness, some sort of deficiency in myself as a person. This, of course, is a terrible way of thinking of mental illness—but at the time I had hated the label, and I was determined to keep my silence about my experiences with it. I would forget to eat, to sleep—some whole days I would spend in complete catatonia. I would head to school on my better days, and when my friends would ask where I had gone off to, I would always have a joke on hand about how I had been so clumsy, how I had missed the train, how I had woken up late, perhaps say how I had been busy attending to other things.

But silence never lasts very long, and “At Last, the Ocean” was written out of a desperation to speak without performing the act of speaking. I had learned in my classes that the essay could be read as an attempt at articulation, and as such, I was determined to attempt. It was also during this time that I had been wanting to visit the ocean. In my mind I had associated it with the sort of peace that I felt could assuage all that I had been feeling, and as such it is this metaphysical presence of the ocean that serves as the matrix of my writing. The lyric quality of the prose and the particularly detached manner in which the persona speaks had been my last attempt to conceal any violent emotions—even in writing I had been loath to be straightforward, to showcase vulnerabilities. However, the subconscious makes itself known despite even one’s best attempts at repression, and despite all my trouble, the outpouring of emotion does seem quite a bit more violent than I had intended. Needless to say, though I sometimes find myself a little embarrassed by the sentimentality that coats my piece, I’m very proud of its outcome, and I’m happy to share it here if only to say: here is a picture of my sadness, and here I am today, having survived it.

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At Last, the Ocean AL I E UNSON

I cling, obstinately, to certainties. Let me speak about one of them: my mother loves the ocean. Every year, when schedules permit, we drive out the tiny gate of our little subdivision and make towards the seaside, any seaside, as long as there is blue for miles and sun enough to warm the skin. It’s only amidst this abundance of water and light that finally, I see the stiffness in her limbs dissipate, laugh at the way her body turns boneless on some ladderback chair on the sand. Once, on a particularly taxing drive up a mountain, our car turned haphazardly on a sharp precipice, and then abruptly: the ocean. When I speak of love I think of this moment, the silver-blue of it, the way it flooded, all at once, into our eyesight, how it stunned us into silence, and how the silence unfurled into my mother’s laughter. When I speak of love I think of the perpetual dips at the corners of my mother’s mouth, and how they raise at the first glimpse of seascape. When I speak of love, I speak of ease. That is to say, the ease of certainties. * I imagine, should I be observed similarly, I would be the same. I’ve stood on empty shores and felt the tides caress the skin of my ankles, conjured in this something loving and tender. There was a time when the loneliness of the city followed me to the shore, and as I slept restlessly in the small room of some secluded beach house, I felt sunlight drape slowly over me, inching into the room like a loved one on tiptoe, the gold of it falling through the window to calm me with the barest of warmth. I woke and watched as the butter-yellow light receded back into the windows, clung to the stillness of the moment, even as it left me. I would hunt for this, back in the city, wake at sunrise if only to watch the light fall in curtains through the treetops, finding rest in not the light, but the constancy. You don’t need to see the sun to know that it rises, a friend had told me, on a day we had gathered to watch the sun rise, and the morning had been gray and overcast. I think, perhaps, he did not know me. I did. I do. * What’s a cure for sadness? Isak Dinesen says, the cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea. Since the sea is not readily available on most occasions, sweat will have to do. Tears are representative of self-pity, and within these walls self-pity is tantamount to sin. How could you be so selfish? There is a radio on in the back of my head, and my mother’s voice sings endlessly on all stations. When my eyes threaten to water, the radio sparks and stops, the antenna waving wildly – don’t be weak plays on a loop, and static warps music into a command, disgusted and angry. Don’t be weak. I lace my running shoes and run circles around my village until breath becomes desperate, my heartbeat lodged in my throat, until my feet ache and trip over themselves and I skin my knees on the asphalt. The pain of it doesn’t bother me. The radio turns itself back to song.

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At Last, the Ocean • Alie Unson

* Fact: when it comes to pain, the brain cannot multitask. A headache is forgotten once a bone has been fractured, the lesser pain rendered into non-existence in the wake of the greater. The body doesn’t distinguish between emotional and physical pain, a psychiatrist had told me, when I’d explained this fact of pain to him, how I’d turned it into a strategy for relief. Endorphins flood the system once a blade has cut through skin, deep enough to glimpse the globules of fat that are nestled into the inner layers before the blood rushes out, plush and bright and vibrant. I wonder what causes this delayed arrival? Perhaps it’s the body’s way of saying, look at what you’ve done, the way it does when it makes wounds heal into scars, sitting like worms on the surface of your skin, hidden beneath sleeves and cotton shirts and denim. Forgive me. Even now I shy away from admittance—what would it do to say that this act was mine? I’d only wanted to feel at ease. Perhaps strategy was the wrong word. Justification would have been better. I can’t begin to explain how sorry I am.

* I ask my mother where we’re heading for vacation, and her eyes light up, the way they always do when we speak of escape. I was thinking Dumaguete, she says, and I picture an explosion of aquamarine, the Manjuyod sandbar, a strip of sand wide enough to hold a handful of nipa huts that wobble on high tide. Instead: I just want to watch the dolphins. And then a confession: I think I’d cry if I saw them. I’ve never seen my mother cry.

It’s a family value: intrinsic to pain is silence. What did Lola do when she was feeling suicidal? She drank vodka from a coffee cup every morning. What did Tita do when her husband died? She started working fourteen hours a day. And you, what did you do, when he left you? I took care of you. I want to tell her how her nails dig little red crescent moons into my skin when she is angry, or compliment her on how expertly she fashions her words into knives. I want to speak of those bitter midnights, with the doors slammed shut and me, beating my fists on the windows, alone on the streets. I want to bring my hurt to life. Instead, I am silent. I climb into bed forgetting to eat, and I wake with a sandwich and a glass of water on my desk. Perhaps intrinsic to love is uncertainty. * My mother taught me how to pray. St. Augustine talks of restlessness, of finding rest at last in God, and that is what I think of when I kneel in quiet chapels, when I press my forehead to my steepled hands and ask for grace. I figure grace to be the smile on the Blessed Mother’s face, some abstract characteristic buried in the hearts of saints, a virtue that led all these holy men past their suffering and straight to God. A few weeks ago I climbed the stairs towards the train station and felt the world turn in on itself. Suddenly my cheek was pressed against the concrete. Later a guard would carry me to the medic station, and a woman would ask me, when was the last time you ate? I don’t remember, I would tell her, before laying my head in my lap to weep. How to assuage this madness? I made my way to the ocean, searching for grace. Wandering the walkway of Manila Bay, I found none, the noise and the trash and the people pressing up on me until despair spilled over the

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At Last, the Ocean • Alie Unson

edges of my body, and I made my way back under a heavy daze of gray. I didn’t want to see my mother when she came home—I pretended to be asleep. But she inched into my room on tiptoe and kissed me gently on the forehead, and I clung to that moment, and thought: grace. * Van Gogh painted the Saintes-Maries series on a weeklong stay in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Meron, a tiny fishing village on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, where he traveled from Arles to recover from his health problems. These are my favorite paintings—not because they contain any particular skill above those of his more famous work, but because I feel them to be his most peaceful paintings. There is something to be said about the saturation of light, the vivid colors of the sailboats, how vibrant they remain in the midst of all the empty, aching blues. I’d like to think that perhaps Van Gogh was happy, in Saintes-Maries, as if he too, found something for himself in the water. I compare these to my feelings of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which Brueghel illustrates apathy by painting Icarus’s death as nothing but an afterthought, the land concerned with itself, the farmer unheeding as Icarus dies in the water. Or Ophelia by John Everett Millais, that depicts the moment before Ophelia’s drowning, her body suspended in water, surrounded by flowers, her mouth open in song. It is harder to find peace in these paintings. I think instead of Icarus in flames, and how the water might have cooled the burns on his back, how he might have welcomed the crash of the waves over his shame. Perhaps Ophelia’s body floated down into the ocean. In my thoughts, she is ethereal, hands crossed over her chest, her body sailing towards the Isles of the Blest. I wouldn’t mind such an ending for myself. I imagine the sea always welcomes us home. * There is a photo that I carry with me. I’ve placed it on the back of my phone, where it is kept in place by clear casing. In the picture, I am sitting alone on a shore, encompassed by blue. There is a dinghy in the distance, small and cheery on the water, and the sky is so full of light that the camera lens can hardly capture it all.

It appears as a streak of white above the horizon. My back is curved, my knees bent to my chest, and I am smiling at something over my shoulder. I feel like the me in the picture is akin to Van Gogh’s sailboat—radiant and alive despite the solitude, the distance. My mother also carries a picture with her. It’s of me as a child, in a rowboat with my cousins. I’m grinning, with my younger cousin’s arms slung around my shoulders, the older one making a face as he handles the oars. I remember this picture vividly because I was terrified—not because of the boat ride, but because my cousin kept dropping the oars in the water, catching them at the very last minute, before they could sink beneath his grasp. Don’t drop the oars, my mother had said, or you’ll never make it back to shore. But what were rules to a twelve year old boy? I saw my mother taking pictures of us at the pier, and though I’d wanted, more than anything, to return to shore, I smiled at the thought of her watching over me. I pointed to the picture once, as she opened her wallet to pay for groceries, told her how I loved it.

You were so cute when you were young, she said. When the smile used to reach your eyes. She said it so flippantly.

As always, I was silent.

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At Last, the Ocean • Alie Unson

* In the context of philosophy, nostalgia doesn’t simply embody wistfulness or a longing for the past. The word comes from the Greek nostos meaning home or the return home, combined with the word algos, meaning pain.

Literally, it is a pain that is associated with the longing for home. The word is linked to Plato’s concept of the psyche, as the soul comes from the world of Ideas, a place that is infinite, atemporal. This is where the soul belongs, and yet, it remains trapped in a world of shadows, chained to the ephemerality of the body. Nostalgia, in this sense, is now the pain of existence, of a yearning that can never be satisfied. The soul seeks for what is infinite, for certainties. Thus, my professor says, we will never be truly happy. We, as humans, will never be fulfilled. * At the start of the year, I made my way back to the ocean. I hadn’t gone with my mother. I’d gone with friends instead, those particular friends in whose presence time is rendered non-existent. The four-hour commute passed as if in a dream, and from my driveway I found myself suddenly at the foot of a mountain, the water stretching out as far as the eye could see. I felt something in me quiet, and yet—I was restless. How to describe the feeling? I lay on the deck and felt the sea breeze raise goosebumps on my skin, watched the starlight glint off the silver fishes that would jump, unbidden, out of the water. I thought: something is always far away. Here it was again, that yearning for constancy. My friends were sprawled around me, chatting, and I wanted to tell them about my heart, how it was grasping for something tender to hold on to. Instead, I was silent. On the bus home I dreamt that the world had flooded. I walked out of my house and into an ocean, and the water stretched out for miles and miles and miles. There is a rowboat, in my dream, and I climb into it and row until my shoulders are sore, until the weight of them are too much for my arms to bear, and I drop them. I don’t bother to catch them, only watch as they sink into the water, out of sight. But there, I’m not afraid. Instead I lie back and feel the sunlight warm on my face, listen to how the wind ripples the surface of the water. I think of this dream constantly, so much so that it feels more like a memory. All that water. All that infinite blue. I think of love and hear my mother’s laughter. I close my eyes and there it is, at last: the ocean.

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Jolo Urquico

3 B S MI S , Fe llo w fo r P o e tr y The poem was originally entitled “Twilight Convergence.” I wrote the poem for Sir DM Reyes’ poetry class, the prompt being about dreams. In the first draft, I wrote it as a collection of my dreams bleeding into reality. I took much from Sir Serrano’s comment that the poem was one unsatisfactory narrative after another and Sir Popa’s advice to disrupt the form and syntax, and “be wilder!” in the revision. I cut the first two narratives of the poem and focused on the last because it was the most compelling one and it had so much potential to expand in length, compared to the dreams in the other narratives which were presented in vignettes. That nightmare actually happened when I was in high school and just stuck with me over the years. Before I started writing poetry, I actually tried to write it as short story, but it didn’t work out because I’m horribly incapable of writing fiction.

To be honest, I was totally convinced that I wasn’t going to be accepted in the workshop after reviewing my portfolio in December. The poems I gave for submission came off to me as sophomoric, unfinished, and full of rookie mistakes. I came into the workshop with fear and anxiety because I felt that my works weren’t good enough and I was expecting the panel and my co-fellows to crucify me.

I learned so much from the workshop and I’m very grateful to the panel and my co-fellows, but at the end of the workshop, up to the finalization of my revision, I got myself into a downward spiral of self-doubt with my writing. Looking back at my entire catalogue, I felt like erasing all the poems that I’ve written before taking poetry classes—I only salvaged 9 out of 70. For a while, I lost my pride as a writer. After finishing the revision, I’m starting to get it back now. Most of the poems in the submitted portfolio were part of a death-obsessed writing streak, written in a year of prolonged toxic self-destruction. Now that I’m better emotionally, I thought I’d eventually lose the gruesome and visceral feel of my works but luckily, I just needed a few Joy Division songs to get the ball rolling with the revision.

My thanks to: Sir Mark, here’s to the rest of the semester. Sir Francia, who thinks my poems aren’t poems, but is the coolest lolo I’ve met. My teachers—Ms. Bengzon, Sir Sollano, Sir DM, I am indebted to all of you. The HEIGHTS team for organizing the workshop and being cool people. My co-fellows, especially Tracey and Wella, for your support and friendship. Writerskill, for being my home and my constant inspiration to keep writing. (Shout-out to Angela, James, Frank, Chris, Jobau and the rest of CB!) Vivienne and all my friends who supported my writing. And finally, to someone who might be reading this right now: Maybe someday, I’ll write you a poem I can be proud of.

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Golgotha J O L O URQUI CO

Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning.

—T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

He made me kill homeless people

on the streets and take their blood out

put it in plastic jugs. It was easy.

All I had to do

was go up to them, look them in the eye, smile, reach for my pocket

pop out the knife he gave to me and

stick it to their necks.

Gathering blood

was the hard part, cutting them up,

slicing through their charred, rotting lungs, tapeworms still alive, slithering in their intestines, down to their assholes. Sometimes I would cut out their faces wear them as masks and recite Shakespearean monologues

just for fun.

There was this meth head who told me how he got so hungry while he was high and ate his dog. It was this cute black pug named Chicken. He didn’t like the taste of Chicken so he gave the leftovers to his wife for dinner and called it Chicken Nuggets. His wife loved the Chicken Nuggets so much that he got jealous, killed his wife and ate her afterwards because he was still hungry. He liked how his wife tasted so he ate his children too. I don’t know how he ended up homeless. I cut up his face

after I killed him

and recited Shylock’s To bait fish withal!

I recited that in freshman year high school for English class. It was bad. I don’t want to remember it right now. I don’t want to remember ANYWAY SO he didn’t tell me why he needed

the blood jugs. He told me to JUST FUCKING DO IT and I said okay because I was desperate

to get out

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Golgotha • Jolo Urquico

of this place. I didn’t know

where I was, I just wanted to get out of there alive

NOTHING had color there. It was all grey and it looked like EDSACubao because it was a metropolis reeking of urban decay and I could only see red when I killed people because that’s the color of blood. * After I finish the job, he told me to go to this bar called Golgotha. It was right next to a gothic cathedral where it had a fresco of a Madonna and Child but the child wasn’t Jesus, it was Satan and he was crying because he was rejected by his father and the Madonna wasn’t the Virgin Mary, it was Sylvia Plath and she was also crying because the baby she was holding would grow up with daddy issues and become a poet.

The other place it was next to was a strip club called Constantinople and no, it wasn’t conquered by the Ottomans or raped by those assholes from the fourth crusade and everybody’s happy because the Roman Empire lives on, even if it gets its money from nasty old white guys who aren’t patient enough to wait for their mail order brides from Amazon, even if there was no shipping fee and import tax.

When I stepped inside Golgotha

there was a neon sign that said THIS IS GOLGOTHA LAND OF THE DEAD WHERE WE ABORTED THE RESURRECTION

OF JESUS

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Golgotha • Jolo Urquico

and Jesus’s rotting corpse was still nailed on the cross, next to the bar counter. I asked the bartender for wine and he said they ran out of wine two millennia ago because Jesus died on the cross without telling anyone how to turn water into wine and I asked him how they managed to abort Jesus’s resurrection and he told me that the owner was a Pharisee who talked God out of it. The Pharisee used to be good friends with God, they smoked weed in the temple every Sabbath day but one time God got so high when he did a bong rip with the OG Kush he got from Buddha on his last birthday party and decided to write a poem about this random Jewish dude named Jesus who was born in a barn, whose mom was virgin and would grow up to crash weddings and get all the bridesmaids drunk with spiked Cabernet Sauvignon and did TED talks on a mountain for a living. He kept hanging out with the wrong crowd so eventually one of his friends, Judas, sold him out to the cops because he had a bounty on his head for doing magic tricks on sick and dead people. Judas needed the money to buy a life-size anime pillow but when he heard Jesus was going to be crucified he decided to kill himself because he couldn’t handle the shame coming from the fact that he sent the savior of humanity to his death because he was a weeaboo. But then again, Jesus really was supposed to die but God was romantic and wanted to resurrect him in the end and give him a happy ending because who doesn’t love a happy ending? BUT THEN the point is that God was so sucked into writing the poem that he forgot about his people, the Jews, and stopped hanging out with the Pharisee and kept all the weed to himself. So, the Pharisee and his friends gave God an intervention and told him that he was just another trying-hard, self-absorbed, self-destructive confessional poet and that bringing some Jewish dude back from the dead was a bad metaphor for trying to rekindle his failed relationship with a girl who dated him for five months, but never actually moved on from even after almost three years. The bartender and I had a good laugh but then I remembered I had to give back the blood jugs and get out of this place so I looked for him and he was drinking alone at a table across where I sat.

When I got to his seat

He stood up and took the blood jugs and said COME WITH ME

so I followed him and he told me that we’re going to the exit where I can finally leave

this nightmare

so when we got there he told me the door was locked but

he took out a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. I opened it and there was nothing but darkness. I didn’t know what portals were supposed to look like so I just stepped inside and

hands grabbed me out of nowhere, pulled me into the room. *

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Golgotha • Jolo Urquico

The lights were on now THE WALLS WERE COVERED IN BLOOD AND RUST HOODED FIGURES DROPPED ME ON A BATHTUB

CUT OPEN MY TORSO WITH THE KNIFE HE GAVE ME POURED ALL THE BLOOD FROM THE JUGS BAPTIZED ME IN THE BLOOD OF ALL THE PEOPLE I’VE KILLED

ONE OF THEM TOOK OFF THEIR HOOD

I SAW THAT IT WAS HIM

HE WAS LOOKING AT ME

HE WAS CHANTING

THEY WERE ALL CHANTING

THERE IS NO ESCAPE

THERE IS NO ESCAPE THERE IS NO ESCAPE

So when I woke up

crying and shivering I ran to

and told her that I didn’t want to die.

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my mother

She told me to stop sleeping so late.

WORKSHOP DIRECTOR Marco Bartolome WORKSHOP DELIBERATION COMMITTEE E NGLISH

Ms. Tina Del Rosario Ms. Carissa Pobre Mr. Cedric Tan FILIP INO

G. Christian Benitez G. Nicko Caluya Bb. Rachel Marra WORKSHOP COMMITTEE Alexandria Tuico [ A S S I S TA NT W ORKS HO P D I R E C T O R ] Karl Estuart, Martina Herras, Anna Marcelo [ L O G I S T I C S T E A M ] Eunice Nicole Arevalo, Justine Daquioag, Dexter Yu [ P R O M O T I O N S Janelle Paris, Mayan Antonio [ ONLI N E T E A M ] FINANCE Meryl Medel DESIGN Anfernee Dy Marco T. Torrijos HEIGHTS MODERATOR Allan Alberto N. Derain

TEAM]

E dit o r ia l B o a r d Editor-in-Chief Associate Editor Managing Editor for External Affairs for Internal Affairs for Finance Art Editor Associate Art Editor Design Editor Associate Design Editor English Editor Associate English Editor Filipino Editor Associate Filipino Editor Production Manager Associate Production Manager Heights Online Editor Associate Heights Online Editor Head Moderator and Moderator for Filipino Moderator for Art Moderator for English Moderator for Design Moderator for Production Moderator for Heights Online

Ida Nicola A. de Jesus [BFA ID 2017] Juan Marco S. Bartolome [AB LIT (ENG) 2017] Anna Nicola M. Blanco [AB COM 2017] Micah Marie F. Naadat [AB COM 2017] Meryl Christine J. Medel [AB LIT (ENG) 2017] Yuri Ysabel G. Tan [BFA ID 2018] Robyn Angeli D. Saquin [BFA ID 2018] Ninna D. Lebrilla [BFA ID 2018] Marco Emmanuel T. Torrijos [BS MGT 2018] Gabrielle Frances R. Leung [BS PS 2019] Michaela Marie G. Tiglao [BS PSY 2019] Reina Krizel J. Adriano [BFA CW 2017] Martina M. Herras [AB LIT (ENG) 2019] Alexandria T. Tuico [BFA AM 2018] Ma. Diana Therese G. Calleja [AB COM 2018] Janella Grace H. Paris [AB COM 2017] Nolan Kristoff P. Sison [BFA ID 2018]

Allan Alberto N. Derain Yael A. Buencamino Martin V. Villanueva Jose Fernando Go-Oco Enrique Jaime S. Soriano Nicko Reginio Caluya

Ac kn ow l e d g m e nt s Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin, SJ and the Office of the President Dr. Ma. Luz C. Vilches and the Office of the Vice President for the Loyola Schools Dr. Roberto Conrado Guevara and the Office of the Associate Dean for Student Formation Dr. Josefina D. HofileĂąa and the Office of the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Dr. Benilda S. Santos and the Office of the Dean, School of Humanities Dr. Isabel Pefianco Martin and the English Department Mr. Martin V. Villanueva and the Department of Fine Arts Dr. Joseph T. Salazar at ang Kagawaran ng Filipino Mr. Allan Popa and the Ateneo Institute of the Literary Arts and Practices (AILAP) Mr. Ralph Jacinto A. Quiblat and the Office of Student Activities Ms. Marie Joy R. Salita and the Office of Associate Dean for the Student and Administrative Services Ms. Liberty Santos and the Central Accounting Office Mr. Regidor Macaraig and the Purchasing Office Dr. Vernon R. Totanes and the Rizal Library Ms. Carina C. Samaniego and the University Archives Ms. Ma. Victoria T. Herrara and the Ateneo Art Gallery The MVP Maintenance and Security Personnel Ms. Frances Christine Sayson and The Guidon Mr. Rambo Talabong and Matanglawin The Sanggunian ng Mag-aaral ng Ateneo de Manila, and the Council of Organizations of the Ateneo And to those who have been keeping literature and art alive in the community by continuously submitting their works and supporting the endeavors of HEIGHTS