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.
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
In my mind, the song is inextricably tied to hot, heady Manila summers (maybe because of the Marie Jamora music video), but Gabby Alipe explains that he actually wrote the song about watching Cebu City light up at sunset from Mountain View Nature’s Park. Imperial Manila strikes again!
Party size, thin crust. IYKYK.
I try also to imagine want outside of capital. So much of my wanting is directed towards things, but that’s a topic for another essay.
Not to alarm anyone! I don’t intend to die anytime soon. Some of us just… have exit plans ready. IYKYK!