We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.

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

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

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?

I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough.

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

Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it