We were there for Chris Martin. Because Coldplay Manila tickets were slippery unicorns, and because my sister would not have any of my defeatist shrugging, and because we had a good friend in Singapore who was more than willing to play host. So okay, we had the weekend. We knew it wasn’t enough. We knew we wanted some tita time to rest before the concert. What to do? Where to go?
I don’t come from a sexy province. That was my biggest challenge coming into this anthology of love stories set in our hometown Philippine provinces. So okay, I took that and joined it with one of the least sexy holidays to complete my setting, added one Trainman, and out came One Certain Day. By the time I typed The End, it turned out I like this origin story đ View this post on Instagram Alice and Son are teenagers from Hagonoy, Bulacan, neighbors and classmates in the way you can’t help to be when you are born and…
I’d said ‘it’s okay, let it go, it’s not meant to be’ to this night too many times for my sister’s liking. But my sister, half in love with the band and Mr. Martin as she is, wouldn’t have any of it, so she persevered. So we found a way. From the first strains of A Head Full of Dreams, she would have had every right to holler ‘I told you so, I told you so, how dare you’ at my face. Followed by ‘how could you have thought we could miss this.’Â But the music was weaving a spell. The…
Some time ago, my friend and fellow author Anne Plaza asked me if I could find my #StrangeLit feels again for a short story to contribute. This came out and now it’s up on the Philippine Genre Stories website, hurray! Note:Â not a romance though, k? đ *** My lola always told me that if I had bad dreams I shouldnât tell anyone about them. Talking about them meant spreading the seed, sharing the terror. And I wouldnât wish that on any one, would I? That would be just mean. My dreams were vivid things too, especially the bad ones. The…
In Songs to Get Over You, Ana suggests that she and Miki get to know each other better by playing Twenty Questions. Now I don’t know the actual questions you’d find if you get this game, but as Ana said, the rules are pretty simple: 1. You answer all the questions, and 2. The questions don’t have to end at 20. So here I’m sharing with you Miki and Ana’s version of the game. I’ve put down my own answers (feel free to ignore them, haha), and I thought it would be fun if you answer them too. Tag me? Okay,…
I’ve always been afraid to forget. I thought of that constantly, when the wounds were fresh and new, and I could still hear your voice, our last conversation, because it’s only been a day after all. Two days, then three, four. A week, a month. A year. I didn’t want to forget, and I’ve kept that thought and thought it often with the passage of time. At first the hours were slow, excruciatingly so. Other days, time would flow in sharp bursts, when grief would give way to moments of joy and relief and triumph. And grief would return, and…