You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.

I dont see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute.

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.

When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They're gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.