Dear you,

So much has changed since we last spoke. I’m writing to you from my little New York apartment. For a long time, I’ve meant to tell you about moving here but I haven’t found the words for it. Maybe I won’t for a long time. It’s interesting to me that I’ve stopped feeling the urge to flash-freeze my emotional state in a way that’s cohesive and presentable to the public realm. It’s giving maturity! Or something like it.

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I’ve come to find it more useful to keep kinds of diaries. Most of mine are on my phone and none of them would be comprehensible to any prying eyes. One note for stray thoughts on every project I’m working on. One note for stray scenes I see in my head or catch in the world around me. One note for lines I’ll give a character someday. One note per dream, groggily typed up in bed. A folder of videos of birds circling. A lot of this is sort of just aggregating in silence; classified documents of an inner world.

We were assigned a self-portrait film in our directing class1 and it was a surprisingly tender exercise in the ways people saw themselves. One shot a straightforward documentary about her work as a filmmaker. Another made a grotesque faux luxury commercial. A few went for surreal narratives declassifying something of themselves. One combined laptop screen recordings and mini-DV tapes from her childhood so her past and her present could commune with one another.

As for me, I had kisses on my mind. The kiss is this intimate emotional transference2. You kiss someone because you love them. You kiss someone hello or goodbye. You kiss someone you miss. You kiss someone you want. You blow kisses halfway around the world. You kiss animals because it’s the language you share. You close the circuit and give yourself a kiss.

I shot a diary of kisses for a month and called it “Kinikisskiss.”3 I knew I wanted to shoot on my phone, but the visual language of the piece was elusive for a while. Of course the most obvious answer was the correct one: it just needed to be selfies. Anything staged felt so obviously staged; all I needed to do was record and kiss. I kissed my friends and family. I shot kisses everywhere I went, even if I was alone. I shot my favorite kisses from movies. I shot things I wasn’t sure were kisses (some of them turned out to be).

Editing was a nightmare. While I’d given myself over a week to do the work and organized the hour of footage as best as I could, there was no real guide or script I could make for it. All I could do was tinker towards the emotional rhythm of this amorphous thing. Dear reader, there was a night I lay distraught on the floor of the editing suite and said, “I made a nothing sandwich.” So I took two days off, went to Bushwick, partied on Halloween weekend and shot even more kisses. The next day, things started falling into place. The final piece turned out to be old videos on my phone: kisses from Manila.

When I presented it for critique a few days later, what I found most fascinating was the suggestions to end it differently: end with Tita Pepper because it’s the most emotional, end with sunlight kissing the water because it’s the most abstract. I ended with me kissing me and I couldn’t really explain why. Now I realize it’s because (to me, at least) a kiss isn’t any one thing. Perhaps I needed it to stay in motion so it could be anything and everything, so it could elude these semantic traps.

I was going to end this with a litany of things I kiss and “kiss” but after what I’ve just said, that feels all the more reductive. I’ll let the kisses fly free and leave you with some tunes. Go kiss someone today.

Kiss them for me; I may find myself delayed,
Apa

Dear you,

Hope the sun is hitting nicely where you are. Since I last wrote, a lot of little things have happened in my life. As crazy as it’s been, it isn’t enough for one big essay1, so here are three things written about this year so far. Thinking of all of y’all all of the time.

Flowers for the runt

Back in January, my babies had babies. Sherlock and Nala tied the knot sometime in November and one Saturday afternoon two months later, Nala’s water broke and she gave birth to three little pups: Zendaya, Kovu and Sasha.

In the weeks leading up to the birth, I’d read everything I could about caring for puppies: What emergencies were most likely, the mortality rate within the first week or two, how to revive a fading puppy. At the time I came to see love as a form of knowledge: If you know how to care for that which you love, it will survive. This was naive.

Kovu always ate less than his sisters. We tried to give him a little boost and bottle-fed him but he was too weak. Two days after he was born, he started to fade. My sister lay on the floor rubbing his frail body to try to revive him. I breathed into his mouth to resuscitate him. After about half an hour, his fading heart stopped beating altogether and we had to give it up. We were told to leave his body with Nala so she could understand what had happened. She sat by the body in silence for a few minutes then left the room. The next day, we prepared a simple funeral in the garden. On my morning walk with Sherlock, I foraged2 some flowers from nearby houses to make Kovu a little bouquet to be buried with.

But our troubles weren’t over. A few days later, Zendaya started to bloat and wouldn’t poop. What we’d initially suspected to be very bad constipation turned out to be ascites. A puncture in her intestines was leaking milk into her stomach cavity. Because she was only a week old, the only thing the vet could do was aspirate the milk and hope the intestines would heal on their own. They told us her chances for survival were very, very low.

After they’d gotten home from the vet, we all wept. I held Zendaya on my chest, trying to cherish these last moments with her. I went foraging flowers again and kept a bouquet for her, too, thinking we’d need to bury her next to her brother. Every day, we were ready for her to pass, but she… just kept living. To this day, she feels like some miracle. Zendaya and Sasha are three and a half months old as of this writing and they’re as joyful and demonic as you’d expect. I’m happy they’re here.

When all of this began, I’d believed that, by the very power of love, I could gain access to the powers of a healer, of someone who could breathe creatures back to life. If love were enough, the world would be a very different place.

Having a pet means to constantly grapple with mortality. I am always thinking of Sherlock and the little white beard growing under his chin. This year he is seven. If the life expectancy of Labradors is to be trusted, I only have three years left, five if I’m very lucky. Dogs reach an age when all we have left is borrowed time. I want him to have every comfort available in these final years. I want him to leave knowing he has been loved all his life.

At a routine visit to the vet in February, I was waiting outside for Sherlock to finish his checkup. An elderly couple walked out of the clinic and sat across from me. The woman pulled out her phone and played a song; the man took her hand and they sat there sobbing. There are moments you see so clearly into the life of a stranger, when you have no key to its many minute secrets but become keenly aware of its shape. All I could see was years and years of love. After a few minutes, they stood up and walked back into the clinic for one final moment.

I started to cry, too, because I understood. Because one day I will be the stranger crying outside a veterinary clinic. I will play a song, wipe away my tears then walk back in for a goodbye.

Airplane diary - 03/18/22

Why am I writing elegies for this trip before it’s even begun?

Someday I will have a proper vacation, but my mind is on all the work I left behind in Manila. Things that require me to correspond across a 12-hour time difference, things pulling me out of the suspended disbelief of a holiday. This is not a new feeling; I enjoy a wall-to-wall schedule. Once when I had Monday and Friday engagements for work, I flew out Tuesday night and was back in Manila before dawn on Friday. The immigration officer looked at me funny but ended up having to let me through. I had promised myself a trip this year where I would not have work on my mind, but unfortunately this is not the time.

The last trip I took before the pandemic hit was to New York. It was just a little over a week in March 2020, but it is painted in my heart as a fresco of the world as we knew it. A world that, for once, felt potent, felt rich with possibility. Then very suddenly, every door that had opened shut with a catastrophic urgency. Today I am on a plane back to New York. When people ask me what this trip is for, I have no answer, really. The city drew me back.

I have hidden many things from myself, but one of them is my fear of denouement: the moment an ending becomes final. I am afraid to knock on doors to find they’ve closed for good—to acknowledge that some things are magic because they happen once and never again.

Three hours into the flight and I’ve fallen asleep and drooled into my mask twice. Do I even deserve to be on this trip? How do I get them to turn the plane around?

I distract myself with a bad movie, and the monologues suddenly become my own. I begin to write what I would say to you if I could tell you everything. But telling people everything is the stuff of bad movies. Some secrets of the heart should never be revealed.

My favorite art installations are the ones that ask you to leave something of yourself. Once in Jakarta, a piece by Lee Mingwei asked that I write a letter to someone, so I wrote to a boy I loved and left it there in a little envelope—then I forgot it. Who knows what I said? It’s lost to the universe, or the hands of some stranger collecting envelopes and secrets.

I wish I had written you a letter, too. Maybe this trip I will. Maybe I will unravel before you, like a sweater you can unspool from its seams into a single string of yarn.

Funeral parade with birds of paradise

When we started going to parties again, I was suddenly tireder than ever.

Here was the old social schedule, just the way I’d longed for it to be. Here was the spontaneity of a 9:00 PM text message that had you out of the house 30 minutes later, and it felt like a little too much. What happened to the little world I’d built myself in isolation? What of the certainty I’d be in bed by 11:00, be up by 6:00, then do it all again the next day?

I convinced myself that it was just muscle memory. I could relearn squeezing through a crowd of strangers kissing on a crowded dancefloor, start talking all day and all night with friends old and new, begin working in smaller and smaller windows between benders. All of this is so exhausting; I can’t get enough of it.

I can’t help but think I’m mourning all the time; there is always something to be crying about. My life is blossoming in a million new ways, but I can’t help sing a little song for the self I found in isolation. It was a cruel time; I will never say I want to return to it. But who are we after surviving it? I refuse to think of it as wasted time.

The world is blossoming; the world is dying. As am I. As are you. So let’s sing a song.

No more dirges, only carnival songs,
Apa

Dear you,

Mosquitoes always find their way to me. They periodically enter the house I live in. When I’m in any outdoor space with my ankles bare, they sink their tiny teeth into them.

Googling “why do mosquitoes prefer some people” and watching all the explainers has told me that, according to some studies, mosquitoes prefer people with type O blood. Others suggest a genetic predisposition to secrete an odor irresistible to mosquitoes. I suppose I ticked both boxes because the bugs can’t get enough of me. In a room of six people, I am always the first to be sniffed out. My siblings and parents sit in the garden, protected by nothing but an electric fan for their legs, and the bugs leave them alone.

When I see a mosquito, my kill instinct sets in immediately. I will drop everything to get them. Sometimes it is as easy as grabbing them in one hand and crushing them to death. Other times, it is too dark or they fly too fast and I must employ something more tactical. I pull my shorts up and take my socks off to expose my bare thighs and feet. I sit absolutely still. In less than a minute, we will have found one another. After they’ve landed, I wait two beats before landing a decisive blow. A mosquito is easiest to kill after it’s drawn a little blood. And I am the Niccolo Machiavelli of entomological warfare.

Since school went remote, my boyfriend’s flat in Malate has remained, for the most part, unoccupied. Sometimes I ask to stay for a few days or a few weeks. It’s closer to most of the studios and locations we shoot at and it’s practical to isolate from my family, whether for their safety or my sanity1. In exchange, I keep the place clean. I vacuum, I dust, I make sure the appliances don’t fall into disuse. That’s where I started cooking dishes that took hours upon hours. What’s the rush? The only person waiting is me.

When I had my accident, I couldn’t go to the flat for more than two months. By the time I finally returned, there was a cockroach problem. I bought enough poison to leave in every corner of the apartment. I found maybe 20 that had scurried in between the weaves of a rattan basket and promptly threw the basket into the sink to drown them under the tap. Every day for a week, I’d see one or two emerging from the cracks in the walls and smash them with my fist. There were spiders, too, but the home is an ecosystem. I spared the spiders because I knew they’d catch roaches and eat them. I saw the fruits of this often, webs in corners with one or two exoskeletons tangled in them.

A month later, the cockroaches had pretty much been exterminated, but I realized the spiders had multiplied. They caused me no harm but the cobwebs covered all the nooks and crannies of the flat. Was it time to eradicate them after they’d served what I’d determined to be their purpose?

I am the caretaker of places I’m allowed to live but will never own2. My parents’ house; my boyfriend’s flat; my body. I wash the dishes; I vacuum the cobwebs; I feed a thousand little hungers that may or may not contribute to my survival. I am here for the maintenance of all that lives here, even the creepy crawlies.

Some days my head is swarming with bees. Yesterday, in the middle of a panic attack, my dad walked past and I started hyperventilating louder. I took a sharp inhale and started to cry, but by then he was far out of earshot. You are such a narcissist, I said. You need your pain witnessed. And here I am again now, making you a witness to whatever new suffering I’ve discovered.

Writing this is part of the housekeeping, a ritual of extermination. For much of the last year, I have grown more prone to these attacks, insects buzzing under my skin for hours. I’ve tried every trick in the book to rid myself of them. Every morning, I write down my dreams. I do half an hour of yoga. I walk the dogs twice or thrice3. I try to watch a movie or work through my reading list. I take an afternoon nap, no shorter than 20 minutes and no longer than an hour. This is the minutiae of my survival, and it is hardly enough.

I can bare my thighs, my feet and every inch of my body and every secret in my heart, but the bugs keep creeping out—they’re part of the ecosystem. I am the caretaker of places I’m allowed to live but will never own.

Catching more flies,
Apa

Dear you,

Some big news. My short film “We kept warm” premieres at the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival this week. You can buy tickets to PAAFF’s Are We Alone? shorts program here and watch anytime between November 4 (7PM EST / 7AM the next day PHT) and November 14 (11:59PM EST / 12:59PM the next day PHT).

You can also watch me talk about the film with the other filmmakers in the same shorts program at the live Q&A on November 6 (11AM EST / 11PM PHT).

I feel like I usually know how to talk about my work, but a satisfactory explanation for “We kept warm” has been elusive. It was a film that shapeshifted at every stage of production, that took me to the point of madness several times over. And now that people can see it, I’ve been struggling to find the words to tell you how I made it, figuring out what parts of this messy, overwhelming process are pertinent to someone viewing the work it produced.

In the film, you will meet Nemo, a woman who whiles away the hours alone in her apartment. She cooks her meals, she does her laundry, she knits and knits and knits a sweater. As she does all this, she staves off what feels like the world collapsing outside her four walls.

Perhaps it’s worth saying that “We kept warm” began because I wanted to write a bad poem. The form that had once felt so natural to me had long become a foreign language I knew enough of to decipher if someone else was speaking it, but, on my own, could only form stilted, broken phrases in.

So I thought, what if this character only had these awkward phrases and trite rhymes to reveal this emotional weight, this interior world of mourning. The poem was the backbone of the early versions of the script and, while the words never made it to the film itself, I think the poem’s spirit lingers in it. Which is to say that grief is a language we are struggling to learn. Which is to say that sometimes surviving grief means breaking and remaking our language for it—means making minutiae a vehicle towards the true.

I was so profoundly affected by the isolation, the stillness and the doom from the first several months of lockdown and I wanted to work towards a visual lexicon for its strangeness—to unravel this grief by learning to play games with it. I was also drawn to the idea of knitting: its patterns of repetition, the way that you can knit a sweater that never ends, the way a sweater insulates you but also makes you more flammable.

Somehow we got to cast Cindy, whose work in Tanghalang Ateneo plays like Sintang Dalisay I had found so spellbinding. Somehow we pulled together a team of people willing to shoot a film in two days in lockdown and bear with a director who felt insane the entire time, who sat with me through Zoom calls about what this film was at all.

For two days, we holed up in Vince’s apartment to shoot the film, and I think everyone came in with new ideas and elements to build Nemo’s emotional world. Cindy and I learned how to knit1 and had long conversations about the feeling of disappearing. I told Sasha I wanted to shoot on just phones and webcams to capture the visual quality2 of how we saw our worlds in lockdown. Whammy did his magic and pulled together this entire world of knits and color. He even found a ceramic cat tangled in yarn. Her name is Bernadette and she stays with me to this day.

Slo had this clear vision of what Nemo’s makeup looked like: sparkling, bright and melancholy3. Meanwhile, in between running logistics and putting out fires4 and asking me very hard questions about the shape of this film, Tony basically held me together for the entire period of making “We kept warm” and I could not have done it without her.

I did a first cut in a couple of days and Paolo came in to refine my very raw edit and turn it into what it is now. We added music from BP and Jorge before AA filled out the film’s sonic spaces with sound design. Miko colored the film and Augie worked on the trippy visual effects.

Making “We kept warm” was, itself, a game that I had to learn to play, whose rules I had to abide by, whose caprices I had to open myself up to, and I’m so glad to have made it through all of that to this new part of the film’s journey.

But even now, this film continues to elude me. I’m certain I’m not done talking or thinking about this same sorrow; I am mourning something new at any given moment. But I hope the film helps chip away at all we still carry from the last year and a half. I hope it feels warm and strange and becomes a way for you, too, to play a little game with grief.

We kept warm in a hopeless place,
Apa

Tickets to "We kept warm"

Dear you,

I don’t know how else to start this, but around 11PM on August 1, I fell asleep while walking up the stairs at home and fell all the way down.

My dreams have not been the same since. REM sleep has always felt like cerebral housekeeping—the work of weaving all the stray threads from my conscious world into narrative simulacra. All my dreams after the accident have felt like my brain trying to navigate around demolished hallways in its architecture. Each plays out until it hits a wall—my phone stops working, a companion turns into someone else, a path runs out of road—and then it begins again in the same place with a new story. The record starts to skip, then the song starts again. Ad infinitum until I wake up.

I woke up a couple of hours after the accident as I was being wheeled around the hospital on a gurney. This part felt the most out-of-body, like the nightmares you try to force yourself awake from. I was soon horrified to realize I was awake as they took x-rays and CT scans of my whole body in search of broken bones and head trauma.

By later that morning, I was hooked to an IV and a vital signs monitor and my neurologist gave me an inventory of the damage. It feels odd reading the reports again now, just matter-of-fact observations on the insides of my head after a traumatic brain injury. In sum: a skull fracture and a subdural hematoma behind my left ear and another subdural hematoma somewhere in my right frontal lobe. Plus I temporarily lost hearing in my left ear, aaaand the midline of my brain shifted to the left by about 6mm.

Reader, it sounds like a lot (and it is) but the first day, I honestly believed I’d only need two days in the hospital to recover. I even found an email I drafted that day with the subject line “FYI - Minor Emergency,” trying to inform one of my producers that my script submissions would be delayed by a few days. The neurologist’s estimate was two weeks in the hospital. In the end, it would be eight days.

My body’s recovery has refused to be linear in the month and a half since. It would make sense to tell you that the first day was the most painful, but that day flew by without much trouble. The worst was maybe the third day, which I spent shaking and sleepless with a headache grinding through my brain, despite my round-the-clock pain medication. By the next day, it felt manageable to tell a few friends about the accident with this picture:

I spent that week in and out of sleep in my hospital bed with my sirang plaka dreams. Whenever I was awake, the head pain kept me moody and unable to keep food down. I learned quickly how a hospital room becomes a revolving door of medical professionals, each there to wake the patient up again for some new requirement. There were the neurology fellows who came in a few times a day just to ask how I was, the ENT who wanted to conduct a hearing test on my bad ear, the nurses who checked in to keep me clean and comfy and the medtechs who drew a little blood every day to make sure I was responding well to treatment. And because it was the hospital where my mother worked, folks would just drop by to talk to her.

My brain couldn’t tune anything out so every conversation in the room happened in sharp focus. A couple of days into my confinement, they talked about how the hospital was approaching full capacity with COVID cases. Another day: the story of a doctor who died a few weeks before from a fall similar to mine. Every day: another version of the story of how I fell.

On the fifth day, I got a new CT scan showing enough improvement for them to let me leave the hospital by the eighth day. The car ride home was surreal. I guess after spending a week bedridden, hurtling forward through space at 30-50kph fucks with you.

The strangest part about coming home was how everyone treated me like a newly fragile person (which I was). I refused the wheelchair they’d borrowed for me but I waddled around for two whole days before my legs remembered how to walk properly again. I spent two weeks holed up in my sisters’ room because they were scared to have me going up and down stairs.

At this point, if I turned my head the wrong way, I’d get hit with some bad vertigo (possibly BPPV). I’d get knocked off balance and the world would spin until I tilted my head back to center.

I woke up every night between 2:00 and 4:00 AM with my head throbbing, forcing me to get out of bed to pop a paracetamol and hang around the kitchen for an hour before trying to sleep again. It was strange to be up in these hours, like it was this liminal space between dreams where I had to sit with the pain by myself.

The first thing I learned in a grade school art appreciation class was you had to stare at a painting or sculpture until it spoke to you. Can you do the same with pain?

By the third week, many of the physical side effects had subsided. Fewer headaches meant going off 24/7 pain medication. The hearing slowly returned to my left ear. I went back to walking Sherlock twice a day. I began slow and steady yoga classes (with Belle, an icon) twice a week because I wasn’t allowed any strenuous activities.

And I’ve been trying to write this essay for weeks but it’s been a bit of a struggle telling this story. Am I still too close to the event to process it, or is my brain literally still broken? I have had to accept that there will be some fracturedness in the telling. The healing has been neither coherent nor linear, so why should the story tie up neatly?

I still wake up in the middle of the night. Whoever is writing my dreams is leaping over all these broken synapses, running into walls. I have tried many ways of articulating what’s it’s like thinking through a traumatic brain injury, but maybe the simplest is to say I am never as awake as I’d like to be, that I am constantly staring at pain, waiting for it to speak to me.

My biggest hurdle has perhaps been reckoning with survival itself. There were many ways to die from a fall down a flight of stairs. There were many ways to have been hurt worse than I was, but by some twist of luck, I am emerging from this brain fog mostly the same person—just now afraid of falls, slower on stairs and worried about twisting my neck the wrong way. (I don’t trust myself to survive something twice.)

(And I don’t know what I survived for.) In the face of a pandemic, of a climate crisis, of my own myriad miniature despairs, I’m not all that sure what good is left in survival, and yet I cling to it so instinctively.

I have had to divest myself of the notion that survival means something, that is the final step before a tumble towards a great epiphany. Must it mean? Or am I just supposed to vibe with it?

Shrugging through the struggling,
Apa

Dear you,

Sorry for the long silence. I had been writing a Pride month essay (about grief, lol) for this Substack but I’ll be shelving that a bit longer in light of a more immediate loss. A week ago, Anton’s 11-year-old cat Freud died suddenly and violently, and it’s left us both pretty heartbroken.

Now that I’m writing about it, it must sound silly how devastated I am over the death of someone else’s cat, but the grief has not left me. I’ve cried at least once a day, sometimes unprompted, sometimes after scrolling past a stranger’s tabby photos on Twitter or seeing a picture of Freud’s mother Rufie hanging around Anton’s house by herself. I feel the need to carve out some space for this grief, to fresco these feelings while the hurt is fresh, to share some stories about a friend.

You and I were old friends when we first met. I knew not to fuss over you at our first few encounters and you granted me your trust, like you figured I was the kind of person who’d give you just enough attention then sit with you in silence after, as you napped, groomed yourself or glared at me with your big green eyes.

When there were too many people in the house, you would find somewhere to hide, but when it was just me and Anton, you were always just hanging around, bumping your head against me to demand affection or sitting above me on the sofa trying to groom me. On mornings when I’d hole up in Goldie’s room to work, I’d let you and Rufie up on the bed with me (even if you weren’t allowed!!!) and we’d just hang out. It was in these many small silences that our friendship unfolded.

So much of knowing a cat is acquainting yourself with magic. Cats set the terms of their relationships with us—how much time, how much touch, when to disappear and where to reappear. So much of knowing a cat is forming a secret language, is being present in the ways they want you to be.

You had the habit of spending long nights wandering the neighborhood, sometimes disappearing for over a day before returning, complaining loudly till you were fed. No one really knew what you were up to when you were gone—an entire secret life you had without us.

Anthropomorphism is unavoidable, I guess, in any attempt to relate to someone we cannot communicate with in the ways humans do. This is true even in mourning. Sometimes I imagine you as this swashbuckling rogue, just off on some quest you must leave us behind for. Part of me thinks you’ll just saunter back into the house, years after being thought dead, your eyes filled with stories of adventure.

But to remember you as anything but a cat would be unfair to you, would not be the true story of the life you lived and the parts you allowed me into these past three years. I’ll still walk into Anton’s house expecting to see you lounging in sunlight, meowing out to greet me. Thank you for the quiet hours, the language we shared in silence. I wish I’d told you more often that I loved you, even if I know you would have hated it.

I don’t know if that’s all I have to say, or if that’s all the grief I can form words for at the moment. But I made you a playlist and the songs have been a great comfort because for every hurt I don’t have the words for, they do. So if I missed something, it’s here somewhere in the music.

Love u for a long time,
Apa

Howdy,

Let me start by saying that I hope you are safe and healthy. It’s no exaggeration that the COVID-19 situation in the Philippines is the worst it’s ever been and there seems to be no end in sight. Stay safe, and if you’re able to, please donate to your local community pantry (you can find the one closest to you here).

I promised myself I’d write at least once a month, which honestly feels like the most I’m willing to intrude on people’s inboxes. If you enjoy this letter and haven’t subscribed yet, please come aboard this ride for the mentally unwell.

Subscribe now

And some quick personal news! Nude Floor invited me to give a class next month and I decided to talk about film grammar in music videos. Trying to design it so you can glean some insight into music video production whether or not you have any filmmaking experience.

The class is on May 2 at 2PM Manila time and you can sign up here. I’ll be donating (and matching) my percentage of class fees to the community pantries in Brgy. Loyola Heights.

This heartfelt leap (I surrender)

Hot take: There’s something about Manila in the summer. I try to tell anyone who’s never been here how the balmy, nauseous days melt into nights so golden you feel like you’re on fire. I tell them, too, how so much of living in this city is a negotiation with decay, is dancing around the funeral pyre.

How is one meant to carve out a life in a place perennially on the verge of collapse? I still don’t know the answer and it feels like we’re running out of time.

And yet the summers keep rolling in. Flies swarm around fallen fruit, making do with the short breath between ripeness and rot. Every summer, like clockwork, I remember the Urbandub song that feels younger and more earnest than it has any right to. Few songs capture that longing for escape from an inescapable city1, that summer love feeling careening into the heart of a dying star. Anywhere with you.

Summers bring me back to how I used to treat myself with such recklessness, used to hurl myself into hurt like a rag doll, used to whisper secrets into the mouths of lovers until I had none left to clothe me. Maybe it is because I did not fear any kind of death. Maybe it is because everything has always been ending.

How strange that just when the threat of death became most urgent, I chickened out of wanting to die. How strange to insulate myself—against the better judgment of all my past selves—from that which once electrified me. How strange to shelter from the summer sun, as if there is anywhere here to hide. Our song plays on.

We all have a hunger

I can trace my memory from childhood in want. Between the ages of 3 and 5, I would beg for anything red because of Raphael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When I was 8, I crossed days off a calendar till the release of Britney Spears’s sophomore album. In my early teens, I began a lifelong obsession with Shakey’s Pepperoni Crunch2. At 16, I was so desperate to be kissed that I gave in to the first boy who asked.

I want until I get or until I forget. If I make it to forgetting, I am freed briefly from want until I remember the thing I never got. It’s my stupid little hamster wheel of desire—returning to a shirt I spent days adding to and removing from my cart; reaching for substances that let me sublimate into the fabric of the universe for a few hours; fixating on the memory of a lover’s mouth to imagine myself wandering back into it.

There’s something to be said about the minute tortures of this process, stoking the embers of many little fires to self-immolate from within. I try to imagine myself outside of want3 but there is so little to do these days but to want, to toy with improbable futures where our desires are within reach.

I put together a few songs for this specific longing and, while looking for cover art, found a picture I took two years ago in Yangon of contemporary Indonesian artist FX Harsono’s “What would you do if these crackers were real pistols?” Initially conceived in 1977 under the Suharto regime, Harsono’s installation is made of piles of pink crackers formed in the shape of guns. Visitors are asked to write their answers to the titular question on sheets of paper.

It isn’t lost on me how Harsono compels us to imagine sustenance and violence, hunger and harm in the same vehicle. He asks: If this snack were a weapon, what would you take aim at? Whom would you kill?

Armed with the power to make your desires real, what would you do? What would satiate you? How long can you feed on hunger itself before it kills you?

Am I the main character yet?

(Trigger warning: mentions of suicide)

Among the last few myths of individualism I cling to is the delusion that I’m the main character of my own little story. The pandemic has been such a forceful rebuke of individualism, not just because of its deep communal impacts, but more urgently, because any way out of this moment hinges on collective care.

So much for our little stories, no? Everyone I know has had a personal dream thwarted by the pandemic and the compounding government failures that have kept us here. Everyone I know is slogging through what feels like endless grief.

Lately, I’ve been mulling over Virginia Woolf. A few weeks back was the 80th anniversary of the day she walked from her house in Rodmell into the River Ouse with her pockets full of stones. I’ve had her final letter to her husband open for a couple of weeks and have tried to think of where she was when she was writing it: In the middle of an undiagnosed mental health crisis just as the Second World War had gone into full swing.

Frankly, I hesitate to draw conclusions from this. I don’t think someone’s death—all the more someone’s suicide—ought to be framed as instructive for the living. All it is, really, is something else to mourn 80 years on.

I have wanted more than once in the last year to disappear from the face of the Earth. A few years back, I formed an exit plan4: Fly to some remote location then walk off into the wilderness to a place no one will find my bones. All I can say to my past self now is: Good luck flying out!

Yesterday, I had to write my sister’s yearbook writeup and it had me thinking about coming-of-age and its relationship with mortality. Is there really a finite window for us to come of age or do we spend our whole lives adolescing, breaking and remaking like bone? Maybe all that will pull me through this alive is the delusion that I have a couple more character arcs to tie up, a few more bones to break.

I don’t have a neat ending for this letter, really. As I mentioned in my last one, it has been hard enough to write with the feeling of nothing happening. This is just an attempt to document a handful of things I’ve had on my mind. Looking forward to hearing what’s been on yours.

It’s the titular role,
Apa

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*Melania voice* Hello?

Hope you’ve been well. If you’re receiving this e-mail, it means you were previously subscribed to the TinyLetter I started in 2015 and stopped writing in 2020 (R.I.P.). It was honestly such a buggy platform that I migrated to Substack several months ago and didn’t tell anybody. I’m only just getting to the very basic housekeeping of this newsletter, including finally choosing a name (borrowed from my favorite Sleater-Kinney song).

Moving forward, I am hoping to write at least once a month about whatever fascinates me at the moment, hopefully accompanied each time with a playlist. Stick around if you’d like and e-mail me back if something tickles your fancy. Love you all.

So here goes:

How often have I sprinted from the thing happening to me to perceive it from afar, building critical distance to excuse myself from feeling something fully? That has felt impossible in the last several months, in a time where there is no distance to run to, no future self beyond grief to meet atop the hill. There is only life in this cloistered intimacy with ourselves, simmering, simmering in grief.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot more time in the kitchen. A year ago, I was too busy to ever imagine myself taking three to four hours to cook one dish to feed one person. My new favorite thing to make is caramelized onions, partly because this radical transformation of form and flavor is so simple1 and yet so slow. Also because watching the heat sweat out the onions’ water content2 and break the disaccharides down to smaller sugar molecules tickles the brain in the exact way a grade school science experiment does.

So for a couple of hours, I stand over a pot of onions watching them shrink and brown and sweeten. I play music; I pour myself some Chardonnay; I take pictures to remind myself what the onions looked like five minutes ago, to remind myself not nothing is happening.

For how straightforward it is to caramelize onions, there is this richness and complexity to the end product—crisp fresh onions turning sticky and syrupy, their sharpness surrendering to a burnt sweetness.

Cooking is perhaps how I pray now, turning and stirring a thing so I can place myself however briefly within grace. I think about the last year, about the selves I will never meet, about the self I am transforming into3. And when it’s done, I eat my meal, wash the dishes and make my way back into my life.

I’ve been nursing a pet theory that music in 2021 is moving into lusher, warmer sonic worlds—guitars that glitter like sunlight, synths that envelop you, bass that cradles your body towards joy, lyrics that ache for intimacy. In a way, these songs imagine a sensual world for us to move towards, a place of unbridled desire beyond this forced asceticism. Embedded below is ‘21 Lush, a working playlist exploring this thesis. I will likely be adding, subtracting and rearranging songs here over time.

The opening track “Hard Drive” caught me off guard when I first heard it—Cassandra Jenkins stringing together these encounters with strangers over sumptuous saxophone lines. The final one is a woman named Perry telling her, “Oh, dear, I can see you've had a rough few months, but this year, it's gonna be a good one. I'll count to three and tap your shoulder. We're gonna put your heart back together.”

That’s it from me for now. Hope you are dreaming of some indeterminable sweetness waiting for us.

Be sweet to me, baby,
Apa