Selfish ba sila Bong dahil nilihim nila ang HIV status niya sa kanyang pamilya?

Selfish rin ba ang nanay dahil ang nararamdaman lang niya ang pinapairal — yung pakiramdam na may ginawa sa kanya na hindi patas?

Tapos na ang Cinemalaya. Pag-usapan natin, dahil halos pareho ang kwento ko. Isang “best friend” lang sa lamay ng mahal niya.

Kaya noong pinanood ko si Bong sa screen, malakas ang kutob na alam ko na kung saan ito patungo. Pamilyar ang kirot. Pero mas malakas yung isa pang nararamdaman ko sa buong pelikula: ang sutil ni Bong.

Eh kung tutuusin ang swerte nga nila ni Neil dahil tanggap at kilala sila sa parehong panig.

Pero ito siya habang pinapagaling. Ayaw niyang sumunod. Hindi niya gustong bumalik sa bahay ng magulang niya. Kahit na wala namang ibang mag-aalaga sa kaniya dahil may trabaho si Neil.

Ayaw din niyang magpa-HIV test at treatment. Ang gusto niya lang ay mamatay na at iwanan na siya ng kasintahan. Habang nanunuod, may bahagi sa akin ang nag-iisip — ganito rin ba ang magiging reaksyon ko? Bakit ganito na lang ang self-abandonment ng mga taong tulad ni Bong?

Ang totoo: kapag nasa bingit ka na ng kamatayan, tunnel vision na lang. Ang dulo na lang ang nasa harap mo. Kitang-kita mo kahit pumikit ka pa. At kapag ang kailangan mong isuko ay ang kontrol sa sariling katawan — ang kakayahang pumili kung paano ka aalagaan, kung sino ang makakakita sa iyo sa pinaka-mahirap mong sandali — iyon na lang ang natira sa iyo: ang kapangyarihang magpasya.

Hindi ito pagiging sutil. Ito ay pagprotekta ng huling piraso ng dignidad mong nararamdaman.

Isipin mo na lang yung mga lolo’t lola natin na ayaw paawat sa kain, sa yosi, sa inumin. Mahirap silang sisihin. In their mind, mamamatay na nga sila — aalisin mo pa ba ang kanilang kakayahan at kaligayahan?

Kaya rin siguro ganoon ang kagustuhan ni Bong na si Neil lang at hindi nanay niya ang mag-alaga sa kaniya. Na makita siyang nagsusuka, nadudumihan ang sarili, at lupaypay na. Natural lang sa magulang na hindi ka itatwa sa ganoong sitwasyon, pero ang boyfriend kaya? Pipiliin ka pa rin kahit parang dusta ka na? Well, sinagot ito ni Neil nang buong buo ang pagmamahal at pang-unawa sa pelikula.

May matapang na tanong ang pelikula pero hindi nito nasagot nang malinaw: kani-kanino lang ba ang hinagpis?

Sa isang relasyon na hindi kinikilala ng lipunan, sino ang may karapatang magdalamhati nang bukas? Si Neil? Ang mga magulang? Ang lahat — pero paano pagsamahin iyon sa isang silid na hindi ginawa para sa kanilang kapwa?

May sense ang pelikula sa tanong na ito. Pero hindi siya maingat sa sagot. Mabilis ang mga transition — okay na yata ang nanay, tas biglang si Neil, tas biglang yung tatay. Hindi ito masamang pagkakamali; marahil ito ay statement ng pelikula mismo. Ganito talaga ang kalungkutan — hindi sequential, hindi fair sa oras, hindi kailanman nareresolba sa isang eksena.

Pero mayroong mga inconsistent na sandali na medyo nakakaabala. Sa isang eksena, para bang nayakap na ng nanay ang realidad — si Neil, ang relasyon, ang pagtatago. Tas sa susunod, sisisihin niya na naman si Neil. Hindi ako sigurado kung ito ay nuanced characterization o hindi malinaw na screenwriting. Sa isang pelikula na nagpapahayag sa disenfranchised grief, mahalaga ang pagkakaiba ng dalawa.

Ang tatay ni Bong, though? Consistent sa buong pelikula. Walang malaking pahayag, basta nandoon lang. Iyon din ang grief ng mga lalaking hindi tinuturuan magsalita nito.

Ang pinakamakapangyarihang eksena…

Nang iabot ng nanay ang abo ni Bong kay Neil — doon.

Hindi ko ito mabibigyan ng mas magandang pangungusap kaysa sa nangyari sa eksena mismo. Ang moment na iyon — yung pag-abot — ay naglalaman ng lahat ng kumplikasyon ng pelikula. Ang pananakit, ang pagkilala, ang hindi mabibigkas na pagpapahintulot. Nagawa ng nanay ang isang bagay na hindi kaya ng lipunan natin at ng batas: nagbigay siya ng espasyo.

Ng puwang sa pagmamahalan ng dalawang lalaki sa gitna ng kamatayan kahit hindi niya pa rin ito lubos na maunawaan.

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Kung bumalik tayo sa panimulang tanong: Selfish ba si Bong? Selfish ba ang nanay?

Wala akong kasagutan para doon.

Kung may kasalanan man dito, hindi si Neil. Hindi rin kay Bong. Hindi ito sa nanay na patuloy na naniningil ng sakit dahil nagmamahal.

Mas gusto kong sisihin ang lipunan. Sa isang lipunang tinanggal ang opsyon nilang magdalamhati nang malaya. Ang nagpilit sa kanila na magtago. Ang naghawi ng pagmamahal nila sa mga sulok na walang pangalan, walang karapatang maglupasay sa lamay.

Ganyan kalupit ang kaisipan ng iilan, ang tradisyon ng mga sarado ang pag-iisip, mga nakagawian ng may kontrol at kapangyarihan. Kaya kang saktan nang walang dahas. Marahas kahit hindi nakikita. Manapakit kahit wala kang sala.

Ano bang kasalanan nina Neil at Bong?

Nagmahal lang naman sila. Kami.

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Work has been pushing on me the lesson of letting go. None of the preparations went as planned—the highest office of the land suddenly pulled back and at the very last minute, the banggaan at harangan fiasco in the Senate also sent our program in Leganes into disarray. Things I had no control over, dismantling things I’d spent weeks building.

These all had to be let go. No one’s dying. Everything was manufactured urgency.

So that’s how my body kept showing up to places. But I’m not sure the rest of me did. I was in that state when I landed in Iloilo for the second time, first was with friends for leisure, this time now for work.

I decided to explore the city to not waste the evenings — on foot, and as a way to cancel out all the seafood calories from Breakthrough and whatever the hotel was calling food.

The roads and Esplanade at night are wide and generous in a way that Manila roads aren’t — designated lanes for joggers, cyclists, families doing nothing in particular. I walked through them slowly, which felt almost transgressive. Everyone else had a purpose: a lap to complete, a pace to maintain, some groups were doing actual HIIT complete with weights in the open spaces. I was just there, watching the fitness people do their fitness things, the river doing its river thing beside us.

A text came in a few minutes: Sir, join daw po kayo sa bar with some friends from other agencies. No. This is way better and cheaper even though I eventually ended the night buying a big box of Bongbong pasalubong in the mall.

Then I found my way to Molo Mansion for a flash poetry session after stopping by to admire the Molo Plaza and the church at night. One prompt for two poets: second time in Iloilo, fragile friendships, city revealing itself.

I thought about whether instant poetry is poetry at all, the way fast food is definitely not a product of devotion and care like homecooked meals. But I guess there’s something poetic when someone makes language out of the exact things you’re feeling, that reminds you you’re still capable of being moved.

The city was already starting to work on me.

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The next day I squeezed in ILOMOCA (Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art) before my flight, which I almost didn’t do, and the almost would have been a mistake.

Two paintings stayed with me. One was composed entirely of wooden strips, not actually painted but built—thin, precise, repeating—and the effect was less like looking at a painting and more like watching a thought organize itself. Order made visible. Each strip doing almost nothing alone, doing everything together.

Another piece: threads stitched onto canvas in gradients so controlled they looked like they’d been computed. So careful they looked inevitable, as if the artist had simply located where one shade ended and another began, rather than decided it.

I realized I’d forgotten how to do this. Look at something without rushing through it. Let the eyes go soft and stay. I stood in front of the paintings longer than I had time for.

A museum this good, this walkable, this close to everything — and Ilonggos can get here in the time it takes Manileños to cross EDSA. They should be insufferably proud about this. I say this with no jealousy whatsoever.

Earlier the day I had pushed through a side trip to Miagao — about ninety minutes each way, for a church that is, admittedly, the only reason tourists go there. I’d been trying to talk myself out of it since I booked the trip. The inconvenience seemed disproportionate to the payoff.

But here’s what I’m learning, slowly, about inconvenience: it is sometimes the point.

Everyone I mentioned it to, even the locals, had the same reaction: just for the church? Yes. Just for the church only, not that Garin Farm. Miagao Church, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and around it: a small town that doesn’t particularly need me to visit it. I knew this. I went anyway.

On the e-jeep, I left my earphones in my bag. Deliberately. The noise inside was the particular noise of provincial transit — overlapping conversations in Hiligaynon, a radio station nobody agreed to, the sound of road quality changing under the wheels. I kept my window seat and watched the scenery pass without adding a soundtrack. It felt like a small act of aggression against my own habits.

This is harder than it sounds. I’ve gotten very good at installing a buffer between myself and where I am. Music, a podcast, the group chat — anything to make the in-between feel less of an in-between. But the in-between was what I came for. The provincial scenery sliding past my window.

Miagao Church is exactly what it is: old, enormous, carved in coralline limestone that’s turned gold-brown with time. The facade is busy with local imagery — coconut trees, papaya, saints. But the facade is also so specific it almost looks satirical — saints and local vegetation carved together like someone was making an argument about where the sacred actually lives. I stood outside it for a while not photographing anything.

I walked out to another street towards UP Miagao, I was meaning to check out the beach in the only UP campus with one. But the heat was unforgiving and the guard told me it’s a considerable walk. I needed to rush back for my hotel check-out. So, another ninety minutes of return after a quick photo with Oble. Still no earphones.

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In the nicest cafe at the Iloilo airport I ordered a rice bowl without thinking about it, the way you order things you’ve had a hundred times. And then I actually chewed. The garlic surprised me — not just flavor but texture, a little resistance before it softens.

A buzz from the Galaxy watch on my wrist also made me caught myself: “Stress Level High”. My legs were crossed in unconscious kuyakoy, jaw tight, shoulders up near my ears. The moment I noticed, I stopped. Unclenched. Let the shoulders drop. And then I heard the OPM playing — it had probably been playing the whole time. Savoring is uncomfortable. I keep wanting to say it isn’t, but it is.

It requires you to slow down inside your own experience instead of processing it from outside. And slowing down means you actually feel things, all the turmoil you carry inside.

I think the stress of my trentahin days had been amputating something in me. Some innate faculty — the capacity to wonder, to lean toward a good possibility instead of bracing for the worst one. I’d been borrowing anxiety from the future so aggressively I had nothing left for the present. And the present, it turns out, had been trying to offer me things: a gradient of threads on a canvas, the noise of a provincial road trip, garlic.

Here's what I think is actually happening when we can't sit still with discomfort: we reach for whatever immediate sensory satisfaction. The phone. The scroll. Whatever keeps us from having to be in the room we're actually in. I also think this lack of capacity directly correlates with modern-day sins: doomscrolling, situationships, anything that numbs the moment without resolving it, so gooning for example. We're not bad at presence because we're lazy. We're bad at presence because we've been training ourselves out of it, one distraction at a time.

There’s a version of me that would have gotten through Iloilo the same way I got through those two weeks before it: technically present, actually elsewhere, returning home with nothing much to show for the time.

I don’t know why it went differently. Maybe the city. Maybe I was just tired enough that the armor was loose.

Relief, it turned out, was not waiting at the end of something. It was where my feet are. It was already there, on the other side of paying attention.

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@leoniddyfjrTrentahin Tales Pt.9 📍 iloilo made it easy to be present. wide roads, third spaces, art you can easily access and walk to. now i'm back in manila wondering who gets to have a body that rests. --- this is an excerpt of my Substack essay. link in bio if you're interested ☺️♥️ #iloilo #present #trentahin #slowliving #trentahintales

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Small, Hungry, and Alive

From K-Pop Stan to K-Means Clustering: A Policy Conference Trip to Seoul

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Small, Hungry, and Alive

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9 months ago · 4 likes · Niddy Frago Jr.

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it...

...I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that I was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.” — Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

It was early morning with pleasant bird tweets from outside the window, some songbirds I couldn’t yet identify made their nest on my AC unit, and I was lounging in my sofa trying to absorb the soft sunlight over the green flood park of our condo complex.

This has been my usual waking routine, trying to insist on and claim slow mornings as a protest against my hyper-productive tendencies. This is how a breakthrough came to me on where I am at this trentahin era, a few more years before reaching the dreaded 30s.

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Give it a few blinks and I’ll turn 29 this year. Suddenly, I have this strong urge to burn everything to the ground.

I’m not afraid to say that I’m not proud of the life I’ve led so far. One time, I visited my family in Makati and as usual I try to not come empty-handed. My main intent is to dote on my younger nephews and nieces, so inevitably, I would show up to the door carrying some assortment of sweets, and empanada or lumpia for the elderlies. That one time, the boxes of doughnuts weighed heavily in my hands. Hanggang dito lang ba ang kaya kong ibigay sa kanila? Are these everything of their dreams and aspirations for me?

I imagined I should be able to treat them to foreign trips by now, or at least a fancy buffet or dinner where I sometimes go with friends. But I don’t even own my own car or house yet. And after an untimely and ugly job dispute in 2025 I am only starting to rebuild a career now. Then the most important question arrived: does my own family even know me?

I have long been a different person after leaving home and started living independently at 22. I think the best thing I could, or should, offer them is my honest self.

They still don’t know that I am a widower nor that at 21 I lost my Master’s program in China for a completely disastrous misadventure. It’s not really the press release I told then, that I just didn’t like pursuing it anymore. So my 20s, basically, have been in perpetual crisis mode.

I remember the first time I said ‘I love you’ over Viber to mama, crying and hiding in the toilet cubicle of my previous work office in North Ave, the phrase was grief-induced being just 3 weeks or so from J’s passing. The whiplash of the grief was intense. I had to say it back when she said it after I wired some pocket money, the best I could do at that time, before she flies to the US for an experimental treatment of her cancer remission.

Now, guilt hovers over me like an overcast sky. I feel the most guilty of failing my own potential and sabotaging my own plans. There were definitely moments where I could have been disciplined, focused on what I want, and not chasing the wrong things so the right things could have had a chance to catch up to me.

Somewhere along the way, a big chunk of my whimsy and sense of wonder withered away. I learned to hedge, be careful, and calculate costs and losses before just trying, shooting. I do not take action from a curious and imaginative state of mind, rather, out of fear. And that fear is in the shape of grief.

I hedge because what if failure arrived just like J’s death again? Unannounced, gutting, and final? I can’t bear to go through that again.

So I punish myself for trying to rest. For trying to stop and just feel like I’ve finally arrived somewhere, like the effort was worth it, like I belong in the life I’m living. Not more striving. Just at peace with where I’m at.

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Because how corny it is to anchor your whole life to a person. Aren’t we supposed to live a rich life where someone can come in as an addition to an already satisfying existence?

But my life at 25 was disrupted. A life supposedly for two ruptured into a scramble for coherence. I have become many things at once but still the lonely me with no one to go home to. It was only recently, about 4 years after J’s passing that I realized I still sleep on only one side of the bed. For some unknown psycho-physical reason I couldn’t occupy the bed in the center and my body has been hardwired to stay that way, as if always waiting for J to climb up to me after his night shift work.

Words fail me. My actions are not derived from devotion. Unmoored. There are so many expectations. To be a good son, a present friend, an efficient worker, a kind and devoted lover, a socially conscious government worker, a future-proof professional.

I want to step out of this body, be nameless, experience the world and feel all sensations without the anchor and complication of an identity. Without goals, plans, calculations, time-bound tasks. Without baggage, history, without roots and network and place in this world. I want to inhabit a place, experience everything it has to offer, and move to the next one as winds shift in organized chaos.

I have three different Affine workspaces for my Master’s application, TikTok content creation management, volunteer work for a food justice, security, and land rights advocacy.

My day job responsibility ebbs and flows like a great river and at the end of the day government work feels like toiling just to nudge your master into doing a tiny bit of difference out there. I am embedded enough to move some things but not with real authority to actually effect good policies and outcomes. In the end, it feels like I've only amounted to making my master excel but not exactly doing public service. And all these side quests are discrete planes of performances —it’s costing me my sense of self.

I have been so adept at charting my paths, plotting decision points and critical forks in the road. I can articulate what I want to become. Except make the jump. The one thing that will turn the gears in motion.

Because if you claim it — you have to jump. And jumping is terrifying when the ground is shaky, when you don’t have generational wealth nor safety net.

When you’ve already survived losing everything once.

If I think really deeply about the life I want — the life that happens every day: I want the freedom to move and explore the bits and bites this world has to offer.

Go to the market in the morning smelling and pre-selecting breakfast options from little stalls when they open, sit on the sidewalk with a chosen kakainin and a freshly made drink, talk to my friends as we have brunch, attend meetings for a cause in the afternoon, and host dinners at night.

Such middle class aspiration. But my work says no. My UP education says it’s an indulgence. And my involvement in collective care work says there’s a better world to be built and perhaps it’s not our place to live in it now, because it doesn’t exist yet. I remind myself that care is a political act especially when the system is actively making us numb, making our suffering only personal, privatizing suffering, and nipping the instinct to care for each other.

I want to move through life as a political act.

The gap between who I am now, what I’m capable of, and where I’m at — and the good life which screams from the depths of my being — is frankly untenable.

There’s one thing that has crystallized firmly: no one is coming to save me. If I want something I must work hard to achieve it. And I already have a sense of what I want. If I look out into my future, I can see not a coherent whole but a stained glass.

I just want to be. But I am tired. Immensely and profusely tired. As if my bones are infused with fatigue and my head is hollowed out from lack of sleep. Fatigue fills me like an invasive family member rushing to my house, settles itself in my living room uninvited, and hangs around like thick smog.

It has been 8 months since I took on what I told myself was a “bridging job” after the untimely unemployment last year. Overtime, I have deluded myself into thinking that the lull of this new job is something to be grateful for, although I never once felt that this is a secure livelihood. Then, reality is quick to remind me of my deficiencies.

I was sick for almost three weeks last June, a simple cough that wouldn’t go away. The thought of buying cough meds and getting checked only occurred to me at the late stage — partly out of self-belief that I have taken better care of my body for disorders like this to go away on their own, and most majorly because I don’t want to spend my one-off prepaid premium HMO card for such a paltry health episode. But I mean, I’ve been a middle manager for the better part of the decade and here I am getting stingy over a doctor’s appointment.

Sucks when you’re alone, single, and sick. No one to nag you about self-care or even offer a comforting hug.

No bebe, no lambing.

A video essay version of this can be found on TikTok.

@leoniddyfjrTrentahin Tales Part 8. A love letter to my late 20s. This trentahin era is intense, iba rin. Never have I encountered so much doubt, fears, and anxiety for the future 😅 I am documenting everything now in the hopes I can look back to this time with much kinder eyes and abundant heart...✨🙏🏾 -- This is a video excerpt of my essay on Substack, No Bebe, No Lambing: Parodying a Normal Life in Grief. Link in bio of you'd like to check it out! 🥰 #trentahin #trentahintales #adulting #late20s #grief

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I got scammed twice in Cambodia. When I posted about it on TikTok, someone commented: Bakit pa kasi pumunta dun? Eh third world country lang naman.

That comment bothered me more than the scam did. Not only because it was cruel, but also because it was so confidently wrong. It assumed a country’s worth could be read off its GDP. It offended a personal lofty desire to make my hard-earned travels actually count for something. It also missed, entirely, what Cambodia is actually doing with its history, how the whole experience felt too precious — I know a simple IG photo dump wouldn’t do it justice. Most of all, it ignores what that has to say about a country like ours, still arguing over whether our own dictatorship happened the way the history books say it did and why we’re in the shithole we are in right now, 54 years since Martial Law.

Let me start with what the comment made me almost miss out on.

Lucky

Our tuk-tuk driver for three days in Siem Reap. He got named that way by his English teacher and didn’t even know what it meant, according to him. Generous, always had cold water and wet wipes ready for no extra charge. Given the scorching sun even at just 9:00 AM amidst ancient temple ruins, that quality of service alone drew us to him.

One afternoon while driving and in broken English, he pointed at a site from the handlebars. There was a slight nervousness in his voice. “That’s where my parents are killed.”

He meant the Killing Fields (Wat Thmey)—now a genocide memorial in the city center, where nearly 900 bodies were exhumed from mass graves. Lucky grew up in an orphanage with hundreds of other children whose parents didn’t survive the regime. His government inflicted that grief on its own people, overnight.

When we visited Wat Thmey, I didn’t even feel particularly driven to enter because my friend who made our itinerary (which I didn’t really check until the last minute, not-so-Virgo of me) just included it from a cursory online search.

I immediately thought it was just a run-down compound of an old Buddhist temple. The sun was high up and from the entrance gate there was only a random stray dog besides us in the site. Where are the visitors? We chose not to rent a voice-over listening device for an English tour of the place. I just Gemini’d a history crash course of the place.

But lingering on my mind was Lucky, and what struck me wasn’t just his story. It was what Cambodia has chosen to do with stories like his — build museums out of them, put them on the tourism map, and let the whole world walk through the evidence. I wanted to understand why a country would do that, and whether the Philippines could ever do the same. What I found, researching this, was more complicated and more interesting than the clean redemption story I originally wanted to tell on video.

Question one: was Cambodia’s memorialization a conscious national policy choice?

Not at first.

The best case study to answer this is Tuol Sleng — the S-21, a former high school turned prison. We visited it in Phnom Penh on our very last day, a very short walk from our hotel. There was something unsettling walking along the corridors while you hear the city buzz around you. Smacked right in the center of houses and business districts was this grim site, a still-open scar, in Cambodia’s national memory.

S-21 wasn’t turned into a museum by a nation processing its own grief in some pure, organic way. It was established by the Vietnamese Communist Party, which had just invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge, and which needed to justify that invasion to a skeptical international community. The project was overseen by Colonel Mai Lam, a Vietnamese officer who’d built a similar war-crimes exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City. Tours for foreign visitors began as early as March 1979 — within weeks of the prison’s discovery. Tuol Sleng was, from the very start, as much a piece of political messaging as it was an act of collective mourning.

That doesn’t make it dishonest. The atrocity was real, the evidence was real, and the museum has since carried genuine weight for Cambodians processing what happened to their families. But the origin of the choice to memorialize wasn’t some pristine moral clarity — it was politics, wrapped around trauma, wrapped around genuine grief. All three things can be true at once. And from my experience, it worked, I could attest to how easy it was to reach with a short walk from our accommodations. It was also heartening seeing foreigners (lots of wypipo) and Cambodian students in droves visiting the site, I guess as their school excursion.

@leoniddyfjr @leoniddyfjr ♬ Somber - Misterz

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Back to the political history of the place, I found out that what eventually gave the memory international legitimacy wasn’t the museum itself — it was a tribunal.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a UN-backed hybrid court, took nearly a decade of negotiation just to get off the ground, formally starting work in 2006. And even then, the results were thin: after sixteen years of proceedings, the ECCC secured convictions against only three people. Its final case in 2022 closed with what legal observers called a mixed legacy — commentators noted that Cambodia’s own prime minister, Hun Sen, a former mid-level Khmer Rouge cadre himself, actively worked to keep the tribunal’s scope narrow. Only Khieu Samphân was ever convicted of genocide, and that conviction covered the killing of ethnic Vietnamese and Cham Muslims — not the estimated 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians who died overall.

My initial impression of Cambodia’s “clean” moral narrative has real edges of ambiguity in it. The tribunal was late, limited, and politically managed by a government led in part by people who had once been part of the machine. What’s different is that the ambiguity didn’t stop the memorialization — it ran in parallel with it. The museums opened decades before the trials concluded. Cambodia didn’t wait for perfect justice to start telling the story.

In 2025, Tuol Sleng and its associated genocide sites were formally inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage sites — a marker of just how deliberately these places have moved, over forty-five years, from wartime propaganda tool to internationally recognized cultural memory.

One particular curation in the museum, which stunned me, was the section on children who unfortunately found their way into the prison. I don’t remember the international and local organizations that collaborated to mount it. But it centered on the children who faced untimely violence during the mass rounding up and emptying off of the city when it plunged to its darkest era. As it turned out, Khmer Rouge soldiers who took Phnom Penh were only teenagers — uneducated, hardened by war, loaded with weapons.

Only 7 people survived the torture chambers of Tuol Sleng. 17,000 were imprisoned during the Khmer Rouge’s rule. And If I recall correctly, four of the survivors were children, they were rescued by the Vietnamese when they stumbled upon the high school. I still can’t forget the portraits of the young ones on the walls and the other young and old men and women. They stare back at you with their barren-looking eyes, as if resigned already to their impending death.

Question two: where does the Philippines actually stand?

I wanted an honest comparison between the two countries and how both reckoned with an almost-identical historical moment.

The Philippines does have a legal mandate to build something equivalent. Republic Act No. 10368, the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act, was signed into law in 2013. It created the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission and mandated the construction of a Freedom Memorial Museum inside the UP Diliman campus — its design, called “Fall of Brutal,” shapes the building’s façade into a clenched fist. From my reading, it’s a genuine government commitment, funded, designed, legislated.

But alas the timeline tells its own story. The museum was first proposed and its design competition held in 2019. Construction was delayed for years by “arduous bureaucratic processes,” a change in presidential administration, and disputes with UP over transferring the actual land. Groundbreaking didn’t happen until December 2024 — eleven years after the law that mandated it was signed, and nearly five decades after Martial Law was declared. In the meantime, the Commission opened a smaller interim gallery on Panay Avenue, because it couldn’t build the real thing yet.

Compare that to Cambodia, where a shattered, impoverished country — genuinely one of the poorest on earth in 1979, in the middle of ongoing civil war — had tour groups walking through Tuol Sleng within weeks of its discovery.

Before the government museum existed at all, private citizens filled the gap (like always in this NGO-ified country). Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a monument, wall of remembrance, and small museum in Quezon City, was founded in the years after the 1986 EDSA Revolution, entirely through private and civil society effort — not government mandate. It has since inscribed over 300 names of Martial Law martyrs and heroes on its Wall of Remembrance. It’s real, it’s moving, and it’s also been criticized as ideologically narrow, honoring resistance figures aligned mostly with the left while making no space for anyone who served on the other side. It has done, essentially alone, work that in Cambodia’s case was eventually backed by state museums, an international tribunal, and UNESCO recognition.

Where the two histories genuinely diverge

It would be too easy (or simplistic) to just say “Cambodia remembers, the Philippines doesn’t.” The more useful question is why the shapes of memory turned out so differently.

The judicial reckoning was different in kind, not just degree. Even an imperfect, delayed, politically hemmed-in tribunal like the ECCC still produced sworn testimony, formal verdicts, and a legal record establishing that genocide and crimes against humanity occurred. Unfortunately for us, the Philippines never had an equivalent.

The Presidential Commission on Good Government, created in 1986, was built to recover stolen wealth, not to try human rights crimes. Civil suits in Hawaii secured a class-action judgment for torture victims, but there was never a Manila-based tribunal that put a name to each crime and each perpetrator with the weight of international law behind it (so much for Uncle Sam’s liberal order and world police parody).

Without that, as Jocelyn Martin, a Filipino memory-studies scholar put it, the door stayed open for historical revisionism to compete on equal footing with the historical record — a battle taking place, quite literally, in the comments section of Facebook posts.

“Genocide” leaves less room for a split narrative than “authoritarian dictatorship” does. The Khmer Rouge tried to abolish the family, money, and private life itself, and killed roughly a quarter of the population in less than four years. There is no faction of Cambodian society nostalgic for 1975–1979 — the trauma was too total, too universal. Even Hun Sen, who ruled Cambodia for decades afterward, was himself a Khmer Rouge defector who fled the regime he’d once served. The Philippines’ Martial Law years, by brutal contrast and whatever backhanded reason, ran alongside actual infrastructure spending, and for people who weren’t activists, journalists, families and friends of those caught by the state’s violent machinery, the period could pass, in memory, as merely “orderly.” That gap between the desaparecido and the Heart Center/Lung Center/CCP being built at the same time is exactly the space in which the “Golden Age” myth has lived for fifty years.

Cambodia had no perverse political comeback story for the perpetrators — the Philippines did. Consider the closest thing Cambodia has to a Marcos-shaped figure: Lon Nol, the U.S.-backed general who ousted Prince Sihanouk in 1970, promising order, and instead delivered corruption so severe it helped fuel the Khmer Rouge’s rise. Lon Nol never got a second act. He fled into exile and died in the United States in 1985, a footnote to the catastrophe he helped enable. There was no democratic system left standing in Cambodia that could ever hand him power again. The Philippines’ 1986 transition, ironically, succeeded well enough to restore arguably democratic institutions — the same institutions that, thirty-six years later, allowed the Marcos family to return to Malacañang through the ballot box. Democracy’s very success created the legal path back to power for the family it had ousted.

A parallel timeline

Two countries, roughly the same decades, radically different endings:

Standing at a memorial like Wat Thmey in Siem Reap, it’s hard not to feel that the Philippines found its way to a comparatively fast, peaceful exit in 1986 — while Cambodia had to survive another twenty years of landmines and low-grade war just to reach a similar starting line. It makes our own transition feel a little more fragile than we usually give it credit for — and a lot more worth defending against revision.

The land itself, still being cleared

There’s one more piece of this that has nothing to do with courts or museums, and everything to do with what’s still buried in the ground.

Decades of war left Cambodia with one of the highest rates of landmine amputees per capita in the world — a legacy in part of unexploded ordnance from American bombing during the Vietnam War era. In 2015, a Belgian nonprofit called APOPO began operating in Siem Reap, training African giant pouched rats to sniff out landmines by scent. The rats are too light to trigger a mine, and they ignore scrap metal that sends human deminers on wasted searches — since less than three percent of suspected land actually contains explosives. One trained rat can clear an area the size of a tennis court in about thirty minutes. A human team with metal detectors takes up to four days for the same plot. Since 2014, the program has helped clear dozens of square kilometers of Cambodian land.

There’s a visitor center for this now, right in Siem Reap, where you can watch a rat locate a buried explosive in a demonstration sandbox and then hold one afterward. Call me stingy but I recall the entrance fee being steep. Although, the design of the experience and space of the center is a masterclass in the power of harnessing tourist sentiment for donation drives to a meaningful cause.

Standing there, right after the Killing Fields, gives you a strange kind of before-and-after: the same soil that was once used to bury the dead is now, acre by acre, being handed back to the living, with a small animal doing the work no one else can do fast enough.

That, maybe, is the most honest way to describe what Cambodia is actually doing. Not a country that has “healed,” in any tidy sense. A country still, quite literally, clearing its own minefields — and inviting you to experience it.

What this means for us, and for travel

I don’t think the answer is that the Philippines should copy Cambodia’s model wholesale — the histories are too different in scale and shape for that. But there are real, specific things worth carrying home.

Push for the Freedom Memorial Museum to actually finish. It has a law, a design, and funding behind it. What it’s lacked, for over a decade, is institutional urgency. That’s a fixable problem, and it’s one the public can apply pressure on.

Support the institutions already doing this work without government backing. Bantayog ng mga Bayani has been carrying this weight since the late 1980s with almost no state support. It deserves visibility, funding, and school field trips — not just activists’ pilgrimages.

Resist the “Golden Age” framing whenever it surfaces, including in casual conversation. Cambodia’s history shows what happens when a trauma is total enough that no one can spin it into nostalgia. Ours wasn’t total in that same way — which means the myth-making has to be actively, continuously resisted, not just assumed to be self-evidently false.

And travel like it matters. Not to consume a country’s suffering as content, but because standing in a place where history actually happened does something that reading about it never quite can. It’s the difference between knowing that 11,000 Filipinos were, by government count, recognized as human rights violation victims of Martial Law, and standing next to someone whose parents didn’t come home.

We travel not just to see prettier ‘first world’ things. We travel to be changed — and to realize, uncomfortably, that far-off places carry similar stories, that history isn’t a closed book sitting in some other country’s museum. For Lucky and many generations of Cambodians, genocide is a living, breathing, daily reality. How incredible it would be if only we had the same disposition towards Martial Law today?

History is actively being written all around us if we are conscious enough to participate in it. It’s in the fights over a name on a wall, in a groundbreaking ceremony eleven years late, in a comment section that thinks a country’s worth is measured by its GDP.

It’s in the stones you touch. And in a tuk-tuk driver, pointing quietly at a field.

This essay is an offshoot and a more comprehensive articulation of my video about it here.

References

• Killing Fields. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields

• “Emotion and ambiguity in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.” Asia Dialogue, 2019. https://theasiadialogue.com/2019/01/08/emotion-and-ambiguity-in-the-tuol-sleng-genocide-museum/

• “Promoting Archives Preservation and Digitization at Tuol Sleng.” UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/promoting-archives-preservation-and-digitization-tuol-sleng-genocide-museum

• “Wat Thmey Pagoda: Siem Reap’s Killing Fields.” Leighton Travels, 2022. https://leightontravels.com/2022/06/22/wat-thmey-pagoda-siem-reaps-killing-fields/

• “The Cambodian War Museum and Killing Fields, Siem Reap.” Rachel’s Ruminations, 2024. https://rachelsruminations.com/cambodian-war-museum-killing-fields-siem-reap/

• “The ECCC Begins Winding Down: In Cambodia, a Hybrid Tribunal’s Hybrid Legacy.” Just Security, 2026. https://www.justsecurity.org/83316/eccc-winding-down-in-cambodia-hybrid-tribunals-hybrid-legacy/

• “The Khmer Rouge Tribunal is Closing its Doors.” Just Security, 2026. https://www.justsecurity.org/84350/the-khmer-rouge-tribunal-is-closing-its-doors-heres-what-to-know-about-its-final-case/

• “Construction of museum honoring Martial Law victims to start December.” GMA News Online, 2024. https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/nation/920771/

• “The Freedom Memorial Museum Gallery stands in the battle for memory.” Lifestyle.INQ, 2025. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/516609/freedom-memorial-museum-gallery/

• Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission. EverybodyWiki. https://en.everybodywiki.com/Human_Rights_Violations_Victims’_Memorial_Commission

• “Why HeroRATs.” APOPO. https://apopo.org/herorats/why-herorats/

• “Magawa Statue Cambodia.” APOPO. https://apopo.org/magawa-statue-cambodia-apopo-landmine-clearance/

• “APOPO Hero Rats! And the Work they do in Cambodia.” Phare Circus. https://pharecircus.org/apopo-rats-and-the-work-they-do-in-cambodia/

“Wala na po si Kuya JP.”

The blood drained from me. Cold liquid pulled from my skin. I held onto the table so my knees wouldn’t give. I don’t recall much after that. I remember getting up from my seat, not excusing myself and just dashing out to the elevator. The tears were already welling before the doors closed, and I didn’t want anyone to see.

The night before, I had prayed. For the first time in a long while. Ibigay nyo na sakin to. I wanted him to get better. I’m not much for believing in God. Haven't been ever since I moved out of home. But perhaps it’s human frailty — my own fragility — to need something to hold onto. Anything against the finality of death staring at me right now.

No answer. Or maybe this was the answer?

I called my friends crying heavily. My chosen family, because my own had no idea about JP — and even less about this side of me. The biggest side. The side that, in its entirety, was anchored on the man I loved. That I loved a man.

I don’t recall how much I screamed anymore. What I remember is grabbing a pillow and pouring everything into it — the sound, the shaking, whatever was coming out of me. Something primal. The kind that starts in the stomach and has nowhere to go. I wanted to remember afterward if my throat hurt, if my eyes were swollen. Those sensations didn’t register. Only the pillow. Only the muffled dark inside it.

I phoned Y in the US. She cried with me. I called our Sapul GC, our Archi GC. This has been my life: embroiling my friends into my love issues and life miseries because I had no others to talk to. Our relationship, apart from the two of us, existed only with those who knew us both. He died. And so slowly, our history among our friends would too.

I still stayed for the conference. I wanted to finish it. My defenses kicked in convincing me: his death is final but your life is still pending. Maybe I was half-deluding myself. Maybe I truly was. I checked airfare prices home for that night — almost thirty thousand pesos. So I had to make a cost-benefit analysis. Steep money just to face the inevitable pain, or wait for the free ticket at the end of the conference? We'll, I wouldn’t see him anyway. He was already cremated.

I half-begged his family to let me see him. That night, his brother finally gave in. Through a video call, I saw a clump of something wrapped in white. Some thing. Not JP. JP was tall and big and had hugged me — held me like he meant it — just the week before my flight. This had barely any form. Elongated. Maybe four feet at most. But this period was still the tail-end of COVID-19 — so protocol required it. He had to be cremated quickly. Not even his parents and younger sister were able to hold him.

I had no last words.

I wasn’t there when it happened. He was in an isolated unit with only their youngest brother. No one else was allowed. What I knew, I knew in pieces, fed to me through phone calls and messages: that he had to be tied to the hospital bed because he kept waking up disoriented, not knowing where he was. That he once looked for his Nintendo Switch, and that he said there were things crawling on him.

Before this, he’d had an amnesiac episode — didn’t know how he’d gotten back to Bulacan, didn’t remember what our fight was about. We had fought. I came home from work to a condo with his closet empty. No messages. Nothing. And then weeks later, the hospital again.

I don’t know what he said in those last hours, or if he said anything. I don’t know if he looked for me. I don’t know if he called for me in whatever state he was in at the end. Until now, I’m still asking: did he think of me? Did he call for me at all?

I will never know.

I never performed the ritual of a partner recounting the details at a funeral — simply because I had no details to recount. No one called with updates. For his family, I was still a stranger that time. Now at three years later, I’m still weaving together fragments I couldn’t face then, or that my subconscious had buried to protect itself.

Until now, I’m still forming the grief into a shape I can hold.

I hauled my luggage into the funeral home. There were so many flower stands. I saw the urn in front and averted my eyes. That is not JP anyway. A sensory anomaly. How come my beloved is now only a thing when he was just embracing me days ago?

There was a room at the back of the long hall after many rows of chairs. There I hugged his mom. His sister hugged me — our first meeting, though days before we had been chatting, me suggesting they move him to his doctors at St. Luke’s E. Rod. Because his initial doctors who knew his treatment plan were there. But his family had to make a quick decision to the nearest hospital when he lost consciousness in their living room after an apparent brain aneurysm.

In the funeral hall, many relatives gathered day and night. So many colleagues and friends filing in and out, faces I recognized from our conversations, from the stories JP had told me across three years of a life together.

I was in the corner.

Craning my neck. Listening for glimpses of who he was in other people’s stories, so I could know him again but this time in a different light. I enjoyed listening to their stories. There were eulogies. There were people who stood and spoke about the good son, the strict and doing eldest brother, the badass manager who had promoted so many at work.

I typed some words in my note app just in case I got called to the front but alas. There was no eulogy for the lover.

When his relatives asked who I was, his family replied: best friend. There I was. The best friend. In the corner of the room where the man I loved was being mourned by everyone except me — or rather, where I was mourning him and no one in that room was required to see it.

It’s like experiencing J’s second death.

Back at the condo, I would bury my face into his clothes. Into his underwear and boxers. Trying to catch his scent, his musk, if there was still any left. I needed him ingested into my system so that a part of him might stay — in my nasal cavity, my bloodstream, some corner of my organs and the cracks in my bones.

A knock. A noise in the dark. And I would feel myself getting up to greet him. Finally, my bb is back! Where has he gone? May buko milk ba siyang dala, milk tea, or maybe donuts na pasalubong this time? Many nights were for reaching out into the dark and landing on his cold empty side of the bed.

I catch myself. Silly me. He’s dead.

There is a word for what I was living inside, though I didn’t have it back then.

Disenfranchised grief. The grief that gets no room — no ritual, no language, no public acknowledgment. The grief that exists because a love existed but not designated its own place in the world. It doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates: in the corner of a funeral home, in a video call of something wrapped in white, in a condo that keeps waiting for a knock that isn’t coming.

Our love was hidden when he was still alive. Grief was the price I paid in silence.

Someone during a TikTok live asked me once — why do you make his death your personality? As if grief were an aesthetic choice. As if I had somewhere else to put it. I have no eulogy, no ritual that named me as the one who lost the most. I have his clothes and the ghost of his scent. I have a corner of a wake where I craned my neck to hear stories about a man I already knew better than anyone in that room.

Here. This is the price of love. I paid in grief the act of knowing, loving, and losing someone.

He belonged to me too. He wasn’t only a good son, a strict eldest brother, a badass manager. He was also a lover — and that part of him was only accessible, only beholden, to me. And I to him.

That part of him died without a name in any room but this one.

We considered ours to be a successful Tinder story. I remember sitting across the table in People Palace on our second date, listing all the reasons we wouldn’t work — he was almost a decade older, lived far away, our career trajectories were worlds apart. He still said yes when I asked him to be my boyfriend.

Three years. Three years too short, for people like us — people who face twice the difficulty of finding someone to love. In October 2022, during one of his many hospitalizations, he introduced me to his mom unplanned. For I showed up to the hospital room with a bag of clothes and toiletries and we took turns taking care of him. Come December of the same year I celebrated Christmas with his family. Then New Year.

I was finally getting comfortable with his big words: we’ll stay forever. Only you in my lifetime.

I always hated that about him. The grand pronouncements. In (trauma) response, I just defaulted to caution.

After New Year’s day, before I left their house for my flight to Vietnam, I scolded him for not taking his diet seriously. His face had obviously bloated and he wanted to eat all the sweets he could get his hands on. He also complained of pain in his legs every night. I told him what if things happen while I was away. I rubbed his back with baby powder before I walked out the door.

Buti nagbati pa tayo nung bago ako umalis sa bahay nyo. Pinalitan ko pa t-shirt mo saka pinulbusan ka. Sana niyakap pa kita nang mas mahigpit, mas matagal — yung sasapat para hindi ganito kasakit.

Had I known we were living on borrowed time.

Then his passing.

Grief, I was learning, has a geography. And mine had no address.

His family posted his obituary on his Facebook wall. Another finality. The post flooded with condolences, people shocked at how young he was. His photo was a selfie from the time he was awarded at work in New York — one of his best. Clean-shaven, sharp jaw, nice brown skin, closed lips smiling and with his classic & infamous nerdy specs.

I don’t recall when his face stopped showing up in my timeline.

I look for him in the beautiful things this world still has to offer — sunsets, warm meals, our friends’ laughter, his mother’s smile. Because he loved life. And the world is so vast it still holds even his absence.

I understand he's gone now.

Pero yung pagtanggap — siguro sa susunod na lang.

This first quarter alone, tatlong lamay na ang napuntahan ko. It’s a strange, sobering shift when you approach your thirties. The usual weekend catch-ups morph from spontaneous dinners to sitting under the harsh fluorescent lights of a funeral chapel. Parang ito na yata ang madalas na catch-up ng mga trentahin—kung hindi sa kasal o binyag, sa burol tayo nagkikita-kita.

Last night, at the wake of my high school friend’s dad, I was reminded again of the bitterness of not passing on your own terms. I asked my friend whether or not they were okay with his dad before the untimely passing. They’re not. I had to remind him that the first two years of chronic grief could be consumed by that. The guilt of ‘should have been said or done’ and he must brace for it.

I recently watched the play Lamay in Malaya, and it sat heavily with me. It brilliantly portrayed the different textures of coping, holding up a mirror to how we face the reality-bending devastation of losing someone. It’s messy, it’s non-linear, and it’s profoundly human.

But stepping out of that theater and opening my phone gave me an immediate kind of whiplash.

Right now, we are bombarded with images of glitz and absolute seamlessness on social media. Mas madalas pa tayong makakita ng posts about success: ang bagong kotse, ang bagong bahay, the aesthetic new purchase, the perfectly curated aesthetic IG travel destination. We are conditioned to document our ascents and hide our freefalls.

Of course, we can—and should—celebrate all those big and little wins. But my grief coach and I have discussed this reality at length: we are far more guaranteed to encounter loss in this life than we are to succeed. Ang manalo ng milyon sa lotto is a gamble. But losing the people we love—and our own eventual exit—is the only absolute certainty.

Behind every glowing milestone are stories of extreme perseverance and sacrifice. But behind them are also the quiet funerals we hold for the versions of ourselves that didn’t make the cut. Behind the discipline of a heavy workout, or navigating the daily grind of public service, there are dreams we had to gently put down to make room for reality.

Pwede tayong iwan ng mahal sa buhay in a split second. We can lose our pets, our carefully laid plans, or our sense of self just as fast. I know firsthand how loud the silence of Year Three can be—when the world expects you to have “moved on,” but you realize the grief hasn’t shrunk; you’ve just had to grow a larger life around it.

And yet, despite loss being the most universal human experience, we don’t know the vocabulary for it. We stumble over our words, unsure of how to articulate the void or say the right things to soothe a grieving heart.

We chase too much. We constantly move the goalposts of our careers and life stages, optimizing every hour of our day, but we remain completely incapable of befriending loss or building a working relationship with grief.

If we don’t learn how to sit with the endings, we will never truly know how to honor the things that stay. We have to start choosing the friction of feeling the heavy things over the convenience of scrolling past them.

And in grief, as a country you go into or a language you learn slowly, you’re bound to get lost if you don’t confront how it splits your life into before and after.

The new and final ruling on the ‘unconstitutiobality’ of VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment appreciated verified facts on the House’s actions on the 4 impeachment complaints. But the ruling still led to the same conclusion, despite also the criticism on the ruling’s mistaken reliance on media reports regarding the conduct of a plenary session.

The ruling also laid down an entire array of rules to guide interpretation of the House, the constitutionally-mandated branch to handle impeachments. That is overreach.

The SC relied on their constituent power to protect due process, declaring all stages of the impeach as subject to it. This can't be helped. But how so convenient for the Court to have the awesome powers to clothe something as suis generis. They are insisting that even if the House is the only body to promulgate impeachment rules, BUT the Court can always step in if the rules are against the Constitution.

There lies the contention: the SC’s reading of the provision against one-year ban amounts to judicial legislation. They are effectively legislating their interpretation as the rule to be obeyed. Former Justice Azcuna provided the plainest and clearest interpretation here.

There's wisdom in plainly reading the law: we want it to be the equalising arbiter of our relations, with each other & with institutions. That's the most basic promise of the ‘Rule of Law.’

AND YET, the courts cannot settle political questions of the day. If justices want to do legislative work, then they should be delegated powers for such by the People first. Here's an initial comprehensive breakdown of how this ruling effectively encroaches on and supervises the conduct of the House by Dean Mel Sta Maria.

Maybe it's time then to make them answerable to the Commission on Appointments and not through the purely legal body of the Judicial and Bar Council drafting up a list for the President’s selection and appointment. This makes them not entirely unelected, their insulation from politics be damned. We need to make the Gods of Faura touch some grass.

And for SAJ Leonen, his closing note is bombastic as usual. But this ruling and his others to follow would just ring hollow. To entertain a malicious idea: perhaps he's the one with a calculated move for the Chief Justice post should the political fate favor the disruptors post-2028?

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The space was dimly lit and small. Intimate for sure and oppressively so, with modern furnishings and kitchen concept. Our table was the first prep station so you can see all the action: setting the plates, plating the main dishes, garnishing the dish, etc. I went solo and was seated with other solo diners. Unfortunately, my seatmate wasn’t too talkative despite my advances. Fine, I tried. I would’ve loved someone to yap with the whole night.

Snacks. Not mind-blowing at first, or so I thought. Quiet on entry, clever in the afterthought. Raw beef didn’t taste raw but as if cooked sous vide with flavors packed inside. Buchi with bisque: a flavor-bomb that coated my entire mouth with rich, hearty broth. So good I wondered if three snacks was the whole meal.

A lull after the third snack. I wished the pacing were tighter.

Foie gras smelled... funky. (Was I supposed to enjoy a dish I fundamentally didn’t understand?)

There’s an intimate almost rhythmic dance between the chefs. It’s mesmerizing. The trust, proximity, and intimacy were palpable (I watched a male chef casually slip a knife into his colleague’s pocket and realized I was already romanticizing too much.)

Tuna, coconut, radicchio. Joy-evoking, bright punchy flavors on top of the tuna, with citrusy bitterness of radicchio to balance.

[Here’s comes the awkward performance of (some) junior chefs: reciting (or rehearsing) their script to introduce the dish and the techniques that supposedly made it incredible. In hindsight, I would have appreciated a single chef in our table and not these roving recitals where one was more natural, unnatural, genuinely enjoying or looking for the next word from the script.]

Chawanmushi, octopus, spirulina. Oh my god...heavenly comfort from these seaweed cucumber chicharron. I need a whole sack to bring home. The sweet shimeji mushrooms were almost meat-like. Blue spirulina foam? I’m on the fence but okay blue for the theme. But yes, I DIDN’T WANT IT TO END. I would’ve dived my face into the bowl if allowed.

Coho salmon with carrot crackers, taba ng talangka, coffee oil, etc. I didn’t get it. The coffee sauce, which started as magic, completely lost its flavor arc.

I am suddenly miserable, fighting a crushing heaviness in my chest. Am I getting a fever? Or is this it?

The waft of the dishes being prepared on the next table as they moved along built much anticipation, how excruciating. This is a test of self-regulation. Breathe in and breath the fuck out. Mahal bayad dito.

Brioche and sourdough with three types of butter. I though at first: is this cheating? Two pieces of bread will be so heavy for me. And it was, I had it packed to go. But the brioche was splendid, almost croissant-like with buttery layers and crispy exterior. My fingers were all oily, that spicy olive oil that came with the butter was a revelation. How can an olive oil taste to so complex and herby? Spread the chicharron butter to the brioche and it’s like eating a hunk of meat. Every unique combination of the bread and butter offered something else each time.

Patagonian tooth fish, dill, and chili. The sauce was Thai-like, courtesy of the kafir leaves that Chef Josh supposedly grew himself. I shouldn’t have done this alone. I’m much of a yearner and yapper. At this point, I was dreading the time. When is the main dish coming?? Second from here on pa raw.

At this point, I’m just powering through. Took sips of sparkling water to pull me through from wallowing in the dread.

Ang tapang ng langaw na to, pesky pota. I was swatting this fearless langaw that refused to acknowledge my authority. The candles I requested lit didn’t scare it either. Symbolic?

This is too much…

Plump quail! Lorde, pakasarap. The chocolate mole was a sweet-savory accompaniment to fried quail leg. I thought the combination would be too rich but it surprisingly worked.

I am so close to giving up. Why the fuck did I eat here in the middle of a breakup? (If you can call it that even.)

A5 wagyu from Miyagi prefecture accompanied by various beetroot formulations (layers, foam, pickles). I am much too overwhelmed to appreciate this. Sorry, Helm and Chef Josh. I know that the way these dishes were placed is supposed to build into something but I just didn’t taste it fully. Whatever deliberate design choices intended were lost only as my senses were dulled by the anxiety.

They’re preparing the desserts back on our table again. Relief is peeking through. But it’s undeniable: I am overwhelmed.

I should be kinder to myself and my nervous system after this.

Dessert course is next. I asked for the bill so I could jet out of here immediately right after. POS arrived with the receipt: 450 pesos for still water, 250 for sparkling. I should’ve asked for the bottle of that acqua panna because honestly wtf? Nahimasmasan ako.

The first dessert was passion fruit diplomat, mango shards, sorbet, saffron etc. Tangina, nakakahappy. Dapat lang. Ubos. Simot.

Cleared my head a little bit. Enough to ask, why did I inflict this gastronomic misery to myself?

The last dessert came as petit fours with brewed Sumatra coffee. Apart from the flower-shaped cracker, nothing else was brilliant. The palitaw was standard, chocolate cube too intense, and the caramel ice cream was well an a cold dessert.

I hurriedly left to call my friend while sprawled across the bench at a park nearby because I was, in all honesty, slowly descending toward panic attack. And I wanted to do something stupid again that night but was fortunately talked out of it. All because of wanting an answer that was already given, latching on to something that wasn’t there anymore, and waiting for clarity when I just ignored the absence and incapacity screaming at my face for a while now.

Too bad. The 2-star Michelin dinner was memorable for an entirely different reason. Helm’s curation was definitely stellar. The brilliance shot through during some moments even with my untrained tongue and the usual tension between looking for bombastic flavors when techniques and restraint are the centerstage.

Besides, I’m just a guy who loves food and insists on special food experiences like this to have a taste and glimpse of where the frontier of culinary arts in our country is at already. Michelin star or not, validated by foreigners or not.

But that night? It felt more like another expensive poor life choice. A badly executed exposure therapy more than foine dining. Haha. We’re all sensorial beings after all, experiencing reality through our nervous systems. But my senses and consciousness during the dinner had to be pulled back from the oblivion out of sheer will, holding on for dear life.

Otherwise, I would’ve been sobbing all over the kitchen island.

This is my first time participating as a research panelist. Second time in Kintex as the venue for a conference (went there back in 2015 for a Model UN when it was still a pretentious hip thing to do). Third time in South Korea overall. My very first was in high school for a homestay exchange program ← that trip contained my very first memory of ‘joy’ and what it actually means in the best sense of the word (for next time na lang).

I have never really explored my penchant for Korean culture. It just came naturally and logically given all these histories. 2018-era Kpop or 2nd gen stan marked my high school days, back when you can get bullied for listening to it. Frankly though, South Korea has become personally and increasingly exasperating in recent years. One of the only two OECD countries in Asia and evidently an advanced economy and physical infra in all respects. Yet, it’s deeply and culturally regressive. The sociopolitics is weird as it gets: shamans, right wingers, anti-feminism, cosmetic obsession, lookism, racism, you name it.

Nevertheless, this trip came right when I needed some personal validation and professional win the most. I even dreaded about not making it because #1) the severe bureaucracy in applying for travel authority as a government worker, #2) I was barely 2 months into my new job, and #3) I had to let go of another conference in Vietnam to make the case for this with my boss.

At the risk of sounding an ingrate, the order of speakers could have been better so I didn’t feel so small and my presentation too trifling during the conference. I was the last presenter on a panel of heavy hitters. My topic, which I initially thought was pretty clever, suddenly felt like a school project: applying unsupervised clustering technique (k-means) to analyze local plans in Metro Manila which yielded insights on how to group cities according to natural attributes. This simple insight could spells out targeted, localized, and customized basis for interventions of supervising agencies which directly address the Seal of Good Local Governance indicators for Local Government Units in Metro Manila.

Meanwhile, the rest of the panel: first to go was the Director of Goyang Industry Promotion Agency (GIPA) who spoke about their urban AI projects such as city-wide and centrally controlled mosquito killers and drones for disaster response. The next was the Innovation Commissioner of Swiss Business Hub who expounded on Swiss innovation and the participatory and precision culture of the nation as the basis why their democracy leads to innovation e.g. the Swiss vote about anything even the kind of material that should be used in their train seats. (But let’s be honest it’s the huge capital surplus from Swiss banking that primarily allows them to innovate). The third speaker prior to me is the former ADB Philippines VP and the first Governor of Nusantara, the new planned capital of Indonesia. Whew. Then there’s a lowly researcher (me) who has to reframe his presentation on the spot to how to utilize AI cheaply and simply to gain critical insights on local planning eme eme.

To be fair, the Philippines has around a dozen ‘smart’ cities and around 25 ‘digital’ cities (the definitions vary per agency/framework) which have their own AI innovation for showcasing too. But joining the panel up there on the stage demonstrably showed how we trail behind. When the floor was opened for questions I was actually the first to raise my hand, despite being a panelist myself: How do you innovate under resource-constraint? Because we know that everything you’ve presented here are capital-intensive.

Their answers further clarifies that we lack in governing: starting small, scalable, and manageable pilots with human-centered focus and design. The community sandbox program in Goyang is actually promising: they have urban parks where locals gather to discuss community issues and solutions and they get funnelled to the city hall. Sounds sensible, basic and standard enough, right? But when you see how irrational, illogical, ill-planned, and short-sighted innovation planning, data-driven governance, and the overall way we do things in this god-forsaken country…

Case examples: poorly designed obstructive sidewalks, overpasses that either require hiking or stupidly constructed in a 5-meter road, a national ID system we still haven’t perfected when Hong Kong or Taiwan already had theirs since the 1950s, environmental agencies who use invasive species in their tree planting and conversation programs, COA commissioners who themselves are contractors, celebrities as lawmakers, elections as regular family affairs, the list go on. In my short, six years working in the government I honestly don’t know anymore.

What I do know is doing better starts with the right leaders, we should be building real and reliable expertise per core functions of the agencies, middle managers should be more serious and greater than contractual staff, managing performance and planning for outcomes should be the norm, trimming down the bloated bureaucracy and expelling the deadweight are urgently in order, cabinets should have dedicated innovation, agility, and adaptability units whose sole job is to cajole, criticize, and compel underperforming government employees, we must reprogram efficiency in government through planned abandonment: free up resources and shift policy priorities as soon as systems are outdated and not wait for any laws to say so, we should stop designing rules for compliance or choking innovations under fear of accounting and liquidation violations.

These are incremental bureaucratic wish lists and do not address the insidious rotten decay obviously. But I don’t want to delve on that because if you chase the arguments to the apex, the historical and logical solution could very well be what the Leftist tradition has been advocating all along: rooting out the rot and planting new seed of common sense. Yes, we lacked the foundational things so much that common sense in Philippine government is already revolutionary.

I’m just happy that my first research conference was an actual, grounded governance project. It took two years to bring it to a knowledge-sharing platform and not even a peer-reviewed journal, a practice which has its own knowledge gatekeeping issues in itself. I get how many researchers and academics need to hustle and participate in the grind to just pursue conferences wherever and whenever, but it may not be for me as an independent researcher and civil servant.

The collective work for a better world/country/self is big and endless. But at least for this time, a small insight applied to real-world governance is enough.

It doesn’t help that my skillset is generalist by default, not specialized in any niche work. It’s what I get for trying to carve my own career path. Perhaps that is the curse. To toil for universal relatability and sacrificing specificity and rootedness (I may be talking about an entirely different thing here, not just job search).

Meanwhile, numbers say that unemployment rate right now is at 3.9% and that is slightly higher than the 1st quarter of 2025 but the same from same period last year. The number is overall positive and “signifies a continued strong labor market with sustained job creation.” I don’t feel it though. That’s what most online job forums also say. Or maybe this is just confirmation bias or pareidolia on my part.

So far, I think I have sent over a hundred job applications. Two of which I really liked and reached up to end-stage interviews then no further news afterwards. There’s another couple of government positions that are only pending final decisions. But BBM’s recent reshuffling of rolodex of administrators compounded by the election fuss means I still need to hold out for three more months. There were also a couple who ultimately withheld job offers even though I was willing to take a pay cut (given that I wanted to transition to a more corp and digital work). “The role is too small for you”, “It’s a risk on our end”. Anuna?

For the most part, I think that I still know what I really like/want as a career: public policy, regulatory compliance, technical training and assistance, and multi-stakeholdership. But even that is vague! I have been trying to claim some particular space in the field of data analytics and digital literacy. Yet a pull towards environmental assessment, impact evaluation, corporate administration, even Artificial Intelligence, and food sovereignty have been equally present. And just like any late 20s under the weight of anxiety over the future I also thinking about getting a Master’s (again, since I didn’t finish my first).

The thing with self-awareness is it’s also hypocritical. You may know what you really need or want but that’s not assurance you will stick with them. If I say to an HR manager or interviewer I am looking for a team with open channel for feedback and criticism, a manager that actually manages people and not just work, and leadership which builds more leaders after them, surely I should just throw any hope of getting the job. And so we backpedal, just settle for less. For what choice do we have?

This is my fatigue stuck in choiceless awareness speaking, and powerlessness more poignantly. Powerless at the thought of a sudden sickness devouring all my savings and the general precarity of unemployment. Three months into job hunting is also a search for meaning. Which is really pathetic. Wtf. Does that mean I have no other identity besides work? Or my self-worth was so conditional to productive performance? Deep inside, yes, I know it is. Which is not a reason to self-flagellate because we are under capitalism after all. Writer, doctor, project manager, engineer, etc. They are productive tags as much as they are existential masks.

Anyway, my career mantra has always been “bloom wherever you’re planted.” It has served me well until you meet villainy hags who would not only not water you but would also gladly poison the ground. So at some point I need to choose a plot of land to cultivate, thrive there, and specialize.

During these in-between moments my mind wrangles all the possibilities yet deflates when it’s time to finally choose. I attribute it to my inherent lack of strong desire. I just cannot want something (or someone) too intensely. A trauma response? Maybe. I have tried wanting and not receiving any, of not exactly wanting yet not empty-handed, and of not wanting at all but still gaining some no matter how unwanted. And the result has always been, more or less, the same: getting disappointed, surprised, burned, or indifferent. Never satisfied nor convincingly satiated.

So right now I am a great floater amidst a sea of options. I’d rather the waves lull me themselves to some particular shore, or just a hint at a slight orientation towards somewhere, only then will I move. This is an exercise of patience and delayed gratification. If for some consolation, I think of this extended idle period as a time for reinvention and discovery. That’s why I’m able to discipline myself enough to write this and create something.

To course through, I must convince myself that I am being prepared for something great #GenZDelulusions. Like an arrow, pulled back strongly, so it will be launched farther upon release. I don’t care where, just land somewhere.

I have an endless quest whenever I move to a new residence. Because I have to usually choose to live in a condo, for practicality and proximity to work reasons, looking for the nearest talipapa or hole in the wall food stalls is my priority.

My new place due to my new work is situated along an absurd corner of EDSA in Quezon City. In my morning walks to the office, I am greeted by cement and traffic. There are patches of greenery alright. Some convenient and nicely paved jogging pathways too. But this is not the street culture I yearn for.

The streets are an extension of the Filipino household. Children play and run around, marites gather there together. Car-centrism led us to abhor this very Filipino phenomenon and governments are the usual culprit in erasing these sites of culture and community (recall: Manila’s Dangwa clearing operations).

And so I insist on my usual serving of cheap food and loud, boisterous street merriments. Turns out the nearest to me is Sitio San Roque, an urban “informal” settlement where a continuing struggle between corporate-led “development” and reclaiming of space and rights from the peripheries still forges on. I found an article about a countermapping effort for this community here, which lovely enough, was actually done by some of my Geography friends in UP.

Here’s my breakfast after a quick jog to San Roque, not shown: fresh eggs, siomai for lunch/dinner, and. Everything totaled to just around Php 380? Imagine that. I was so enticed by the tahong and variety of fishes so I know now what I’ll be cooking in the coming weeks.

I’ve been living in high-rises for the past 5 years or so now. Apart from the usual cockroach infestation and occasional debacle with the admin office for whatever monetary and bureaucratic issues, the inherent anomie in living in condominiums is palpable.

This is not by any means a novel personal insight. Sociologists define anomie as the breakdown of social bonds due to reduced community engagement, leading to uprooting of the individual from the social or community norms. The social impacts of living in high-rise buildings are documented. The physical separation measured in square meters like hamsters in cage boxes lead to highly impersonal, depersonalized, transactional, and and alienated way of living.

You’d be lucky if the usual faces in the lobby and elevator are cheery enough to greet you good morning. But worse, you encounter a medical emergency alone, or morbid as it sounds, you die alone (!) But that’s already happening. It’s not surprising to hear news of sudden discovery of rotting bodies and even suicide stories from condo residents. And as quickly as the body is removed from promises, these stories are buried in the name of protecting property values. Unceremonious, anonymous, unfaced, and unnamed as much possible.

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It’s both childhood nostalgia and faint dissatisfaction of this recent (life) move that I write this. Growing up in Sorsogon (Bicol), I still have recollection of exchanging ulam with neighbors (yes, that Reply 1988 scene in Ssangmundong). And perhaps my favorite memory: 5 or 6 of us neighborhood kids who would gather at a friend’s house because they have a TV and spend siesta sprawled in their living room after lunch when our parents and grandparents are out to play bingo or tongits in the next door.

Come the afternoon, freshly baked breads, Tang orange juice, and kwek-kwek were shared among us, courtesy of the winning parent/player of that day’s gambling. The shared ritual well extends to the night, from watching Flame of Recca/Naruto, briefly punctuated by playing in the streetgames during the news cast, and then going back inside for Kokey/Marina/Dyosa after dinner. Lordt. Nakaka-miss.

This is the Filipino community lodged in my mind. A time when I still felt that childhood is cared for by the village. For what is a community if not allowance to inconvenience and be inconvenienced in return?

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Of hosting monthly dinners for friends that were lifeline rituals as much as economical ways to reach out during jobless months. Of selfies in the elevator lobby. Of fit checks by the window.

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Of trying to hold on to and bring some order to dear life for 6 months of tremendous growth and uncertainty. Of the corners where I had to confront and sharpen my values to proceed with a legal battle.

Of starting a podcast in my couch. Of how big the condo was considering the price. Of gymfies where I became my fittest.

Of the very few redeeming genuine joys in living in a pet-and-poop friendly, midly decadent, severely uninspired community in Eastwood: regular weekly yoga with HS friends/neighbors and the street food and local bakeries in "Backwood" which I will terribly miss.

Of buying affordable carinderia meals in Intrepid with my lunchbox and tupperware in tow to the glee of stall owners. Of the cityscapes. Of discovering genuine friends from the most unlikely encounters.

Of discarding such that no longer serves us and making space to the better things that will come. Of moving out around in the same period I moved in last year with heavy unseen baggage, but this time around with much more resilience and self-trust.

To all those requesting for housewarming gathering in the new (alheit smaller) place and wanting to catch and those I had to reschedule meet-ups with after such big items on my place, see you soon. I'm just prepping to bounce back and start winning at life again 💫🫶🏾

Turns out Manong wasn’t shouting at the void, naglalako lang pala ng kutsinta. 😅 But I found it it apt. Suddenly shouting towards the void. For the immediate, temporarily ease that comes with the release. Honestly, I get him and I need exactly the same.

My 20s thus far have been a blur of adventures and misadventures. Six months unemployed pero never talaga nakapagpahinga. And...suing your own boss? Ibang klaseng adulting experience mehn.

Always something. Always moving, always reaching. Sometimes asking: What's the point? Big visions, meaningful work, doing good in systems so deep in rot. What's the value of excellence when connections outweigh it? Who takes your place when you step aside-someone better, or worse?

Right now, there's a raging debate inside me. On one hand, I know we're supposed to do great things in this short stop on earth. But on the other: this is just a little life. So, I'm trying to be better at reminding myself of own my insignificance. That's more feasible and palatable than always trying to infuse meaning and draw out grand visions everytime.

And yet—life.

Tamang trip sa Sagada. Unplanned mambabatok tattoo. A quiet part of me that just wants an unceremonious life. But I know this isn't the time to stay safe or small.

A friend of mine joked, “lumagay ka na sa tahimik.” Lagi ko sinasabi I’m so tired. Na one day this should stop. But here I am. Still here. Nakikipagmatigasan pa rin az a #GenZ.

What I do know is this: I trust myself more now than I ever did. One day, I realized I’ve I've built enough systems around me to be resilient, found people who will catch me when I fall, and learned how to rise and fight to the teeth when it matters.

It's uncomfortable to choose differently, to go against the odds, to keep going despite the assured calculus of loss. But my conclusion, for now, is this: we find more when we give more. Maybe the point of this little life is to offer it away, however imperfectly.

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I stopped asking “Do I deserve this?” before doing anything remotely comforting, relaxing, or gratifying for myself. It is how we usually self-rationalize before any personal gratification. But it always entails a cost, in grief as it is in life.

Mainly because the the idea of being worth “it” necessarily implies having to earn it in the first place. Sure, we must reward ourselves for hard work and diligence, “you worked hard for it!” after all.

But attaching the need to perform something first before earning it means that at some point you will eventually reach a limit. What if you’re out of commission and can’t perform well anymore?

This is especially true in my case, going three months now into unemployment. The hardest part: countless and sleepless nights of crushing self-doubt. Questioning one’s ability, competency, all the choices so far that have led to this. Attaching even just a tiny measure of self-worth to productivity proved to be disastrous. It felt both hollow and helpless and having very little purchasing power currently, it’s quite easy to succumb to helplessness in this society with little to no safety net. The precarity is real. It doesn’t help that we built our society around money and ability to earn. So even rest and personal pleasure must be earned and paid for.

Instead I ask, “Is it kind for myself?” because kindness is unconditional as it is boundless. It’s the same when you relate with others, but more so with yourself. Being kind is also about gentle self-reminders that your inherent qualities and inner self-work you’ve achieved this far do not leave you once you lost your job. Your intelligence, grace, character, all these things are not dictated by your income potential.

Lastly, operating by kindness first affords us a chance to pause and recognize that little you inside—hurting, doubting, grieving.

Fresh from grief with J’s passing, I was at a crossroads and faced two choices. I was torn between focusing on the good: the beautiful relationships and community that sprouted out of shared grief and love; or surrendering to this endless pit of grief, to let it devastate my life in one big, complete swoop.

I chose to be kind to myself. To let grief pass through me each time. Sometimes in drips but most often in deluge. My favorite analogy is that grief is like the weather. It could be sunny, rainy, or pouring hails outside. We have no control over it, except to bring an umbrella or stay put at home. Sometimes it also doesn’t hurt to be drenched, under the pouring rain or seated in the shower.

This mantra of self-kindness became most important when deciding which coping mechanisms I should pursue or discontinue. Just because we’re undergoing something traumatic or life-shattering we could be predisposed to think that we have a free pass to just deal and cope however we want. I myself thought about drowning in alcohol or dealing with the pain through substances just to finally feel light, absent any numbing weight over me.

The most difficult to handle was widow’s fire. My body burned with an all-consuming desire to be touched and regarded in a certain way. I entered a hoe phase, scrambling to look for J’s love in every person I met. ‘Three times a day for weeks' is not an exaggeration to spare you the details. It was futile because the hole in J’s shape in my heart will never be filled. But was all that kind to myself?

Well, that’s how I at least rationalized it in me then.

So what healthy, and kind, coping mechanisms can be practiced? I realized that loss is largely the same for both death and unemployment. Grief is so universal it colors so much of our lives and in my case, grief was about absence and loneliness.

For these two, I needed also a duality: creation and community.

[To be continued in Part 2]

I'll admit something: to deliver this speech, I had to run for the Batch President position because somehow our Paralegal batch in UP Law Center decided it to be so.

When the candidates and several interested participants were starting to manifest, with some even volunteering their friends and groupmates, I thought to myself, “Ang bibibo naman nito. ‘Di ba kayo busy sa work?!”

Lo and behold, I was the one who won. I ran because there was nothing better to do, being a bummer and job hunting for 2 months into unemployment last April.

Also, the final push came from the Secretariat’s announcement that apparently my group and I won the 3rd Place in the temp check and I was the Best Speaker.

I needed that win and I wanted to win more, languishing at my joblessness and feeling the need for some sense of achievement. The stage opened up for me when I had to say something and I needed to say something because there was turmoil of thoughts and knots in my mind throughout the whole ordeal (my lack of work and the way I lost it).

I’d be writing more about my “mini career break” and “micro-retirement” but for now just watch the rest of my UP Paralegal Training experience in the video.

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“Good morning everyone, to our mentors, lecturers, my fellow participants, our families and friends!

Standing before you here today is not someone who was the most excellent nor the most diligent student during the training. Actually, I’m here today kasi marami po akong time. I happen to be in a mini career break or “micro-retirement” as the Gen Z calls it. That’s just a fancy way of saying I’m jobless! Now that we’re graduating, hello po sating mga mentors, beke nemen, yung mga law firms nyo kailangan ng paralegal.

Kidding aside, I’m here with a simple message of the bigger things that this Paralegal Training represented to me and likely to you as well. Apart from giving me a weekly structure to look forward to in my funemployment, this training also equipped me with skills and confidence when I recently found myself in a position to have to defend my rights and my competence. In many moments of doubt, I needed the lessons from this training to really sharpen my values. To push me to realize that after working in the public sector and in development work for six years and running now, I cannot claim to advocate for the rights and interest of others if I myself can’t defend my own.

Surely, many of you have your own valid reasons for joining this training. Maybe it was to enrich your current roles or to get a ticket for career advancement. Who knows, someone out there has been waiting for this as their big break. But as mentioned, I want to talk about being reminded that nothing meaningful is ever easy, and meaning often comes from the bigger things than the rest of us. So let’s go through each of them.

1. The PTP provided me with an opportunity to reckon with history and locate myself in the defining moments of our nation. Just by reading the cases alone. Napansin nyo ba na yung mga cases natin, they sort of fulfill an important historical archiving function. Like nung naassign samin yung CHR for the temp check. I had to look back, reflect on what happened to the CHR during the pandemic and the war on drugs. And now this is very pertinent with the recent arrest of Mr. Duterte in the ICC. Other examples such as the cases about the scandals of the Arroyo Administration, elementary pa lang ang mga Gen Zs nun. Then the PDAF or pork barrel scam as we entered college. You see, nagbasa ka lang ng cases but you were forced to care about the social debate raging on, to historicize yourself and the way things now came to be. And as a forgetful nation like us, remembering becomes a moral imperative.

2. Now, from a looking back perspective, my second point is more future forward. Surprisingly, it’s the Constitution which made me reflect on where we should be headed to as a country. Perhaps it was in the way our Constitution module was delivered but left such a deep impression on me. I am a political science major but that was the only time I had to seriously engage the text. The Constitution turns out to be a map. It contains our collective aspirations, pointing us which direction to pursue, the directives that our government should follow, and guides us how to relate with the State based on our social contract. In short, I realized, every Filipino must read the Constitution at least once in their life. At baka kaya hindi tayo magkasundo-sundo sa maraming bagay kasi hindi natin siniseryoso kung anong nandyan naman na sa Saligang Batas.

3. But, do we expect a Juan or Juana from the street to appreciate the Constitution and the laws with their technicality? Which brings me to my third point: the PTP, though not a law school experience, has shown us how the law can also be very limited and limiting. Alam kong alam nyo to, bakit? Kasi every IQ&A natin tinatawanan tayo ng mga mentors. Dahil ang dami nating tanong na madalas, labas na sa batas. It can’t be helped, we sensed it, we saw that hmm parang the may kulang dito, hindi sapat, parang may mali. Not least in terms of access. In a deeply unequal society like ours, we also know firsthand that the justice system may give everyone an equal chance but it does not easily reward those who have no purchasing power to defend their truth. Also, I will admit that I don’t see lawyers as particularly special people. At the core of it, lawyers are just those who are licensed to argue. Lisensyadong Mangatuwiran. But anyone can argue well, I can, you can too.

“In a deeply unequal society like ours, we also know firsthand that the justice system may give everyone an equal chance but it does not easily reward those who have no purchasing power to defend their truth.”

4. So here’s the silver lining. Syempre kakabigin ko ho to, mahirap na, nasa College of Law ako. And this my fourth and last point: what makes this profession a vocation, for both lawyers and paralegals alike, is that it’s the primary practice which intimately grapples with the most fundamental of our membership in the community of men…That is our rights. And when we leave these halls, there’s now a reasonable expectation of due diligence on our part that we’re handling somebody’s life, liberty, and property. Whatever we say, write, or do, the amount of work that we put in will determine either someone’s flourishing or total dissolution of rights. And that should feel and fall heavy on our shoulders.

It’s also why I’m very proud and grateful for the UP Paralegal Training Program because it did not shy away from reminding us that the business of the law requires Dangal at Husay. We need to be excellent, yes, but we should know why and for whom we’re doing it (Karangalan). Hindi rin pwede na feel-good at motherhood statements lang tayo lagi, we need to put in the excellent work and analysis (Kahusayan). Implicitly or explicitly at times, our mentors also remind us that, now that we learned about and love the law, then we should make better choices. For ourselves and for others. And what better time to exercise that better choice than on May 12.

But even beyond that day, we are now formally part of the legal community. That means we should be the first promoters of due process, of substantive justice, of having the vocabulary and skills to do legal work or even explain a news of a crime when we hear it. Hindi na pwede yung kwentong barbero o opinion ni manong driver lang. That means practicing Dangal at Husay not only during the silent, contemplative, back-office work of writing drafts, researching, and supporting our supervising lawyer. But also, knowing when to recognize the limits of the law. To participate out there in how the powers and these rules that govern our social lives are made, defined, and employed. Maybe even join the picket line, the point is to collectively resist when necessary. In defending the rule of law, our rights, and this democracy that we enjoy because these were not god-given. They did not fall from the sky. History, and indeed UP, tell us that they had to be achieved and fought for. Especially by those brave people before us. Now we join their ranks and we’re being asked to do the same.

So to my fellow batchmates, join me in thanking our mentors and this program for taking us through not just a simple training session. Rather, an experience with civic mission, imbued with renewed sense of love of country and that business of the law which insists on doing and choosing better. Maraming salamat po at padayon sa atin, UP PTP Batch 32!”

Maybe you’re also like me who just could not help but experience visceral disgust whenever I see posts like this on social media. I won’t blur his name out since this was a public post anyway.

I only continue to be extremely disappointed as days go by with experts and even friends/colleagues (!) in my network who espouse this atrocious logic.

This posturing is more loathsome than DDS narrative, for sure: absolutely strayed leap of logic, cutesy warm-hug micro-anecdotes as if they should have an equal weight compared to long-denied call for justice of EJK victims? BFFR.

It's a mask. They can hide behind "I'm not a DDS, I don't condone killings" but their insidious politics inevitably shows. One innocent life lost to abuse of power is one already too much. No medical degree is required to understand that.

We also don't need any faux redemption for Duterte's acts and rhetoric expected of him as a sitting president i.e. advocating for OFWs' safe return home; populist pretense or not.

We don't need vague, wishy washy gray area fence-sitting right now. What's happening to Duterte is justice; denied by power before, now painfully and painstakingly marching forward. He's not some helpless lolo mo sa kanto who's being unlawfully abused. He was a sovereign who held all organized violence of the state at one point and chose to wield it against the poor and the helpless, not even to actual and powerful drug lords.

If you're learned and fully conscious, then make your stand. Lending your "professional" and "apolitical" voice to the discourse already dominated by well-entrenched DDS propaganda machinery is not a healthy democratic exercise you think it is.

You are propping up and buttressing the same machine of lies that elected a murderous ruler in the first place, enabled the killings, and desensitized this country. It was lethal then, it sure is still deadly and poisonous now.

That is your undeniable moral stand and we can see right through you.

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Can you locate grief? Or do you just carry it around across time and space?

Back in high school, my Humanities professor once remarked that “In literature, you’ll find that many stories set in trains are usually about death or dying,” or something along those lines. It stuck with me through the years. But it only became more poignant when I myself began my own journey of grief after losing J, my partner of 3 years, back in January 2023.

One year after, a particular entry on my OneNote journal would read as follows:

“Jan 22, 2024 | KL Sentral

One moment I am travelling by myself to Penang and TikTok would pop up a message saying “It’s been a while, say hi” from “J” then everything would come crashing down again. It could not be any clearer and more certain that I am alone now…I am still lost, my love. But I will keep moving, an empty husk but in motion.”

Then another:

“Dec 1, 2024 | Port of Dumaguete

Maybe it’s because of today's tiring Apo Island dive tour, or coupled with Levi Patel's Since Last Letters on my earphones, that I was suddenly stricken by what now feels as an all-too-familiar grief…I made friends with it already. This shadowy figure I let in from time to time. We chat, I blather, it doesn't reply back. No need to. I am my own audience to this solitary play.”

Where to locate grief?

Should you get access to my journal, you’ll find more entries of the same tune and mostly written at airports, train stations, bus stops, you get the gist. This got me thinking about the relationship between grief and transitory spaces, places where no one remains and everyone is merely transient.

Perhaps it is because grief is particularly tricky to locate. In my case, as an agnostic Filipino queer, I once had to reconcile where is the place for my grief? Is it at the columbarium where J was interned and where I couldn’t go by myself unless his family was also there with me? How much of that space (and grief!) actually belongs to me when I only met his whole family for the first time during the funeral itself? I didn’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to visit him on my own. But one time, so frustrated for days because I couldn’t find a way to save our Viber chats from our ligaw days and among other problems of the day, I braved the columbarium alone and finally managed to clear my head.

Maybe it’s also something deeper, relating more to disenfranchised grief that (Filipino) queers most especially experience. You see, I still have not memorialized J’s death publicly, only to close and shared friends, and not even to my own family. The closest thing I have is on social media, on Instagram where I have curated a separate Highlights tab and posts dedicated for all the moments my grief was all too consuming.

Loss, Liminality, Memory

Loss, despite the connotation of losing something, is weirdly a burden you always carry. A luggage you can’t just pay to be checked in and stowed away. Experiencing grief and moving around with it becomes more punctuated across transient spaces because, as Yesmine Abida says, it entails “thinking about what was absent, of what was being replaced and the legacies of the specific places I had been in.”

I have found at least in my case that loss is often felt in liminal time and spaces, such as in airports while travelling. It starts as a tiny impulse and wiggles its way out of you, blooms in full, and finally wilts by time you reach your destination. Many times I had to grieve in the in-between moments when my present physical body was in transit but was nevertheless anchored inside the train carriage.

Transiting also creates the perfect conditions of temporariness and fragility for reminiscing. Admittedly, I am beginning to forget J’s exact facial features and how he sounded like. He has never visited me in my dreams, except for one or so instances. I only see him in my mind in blurs and glimpses now. Just like the landscape beheld from my window seat, slipping and sliding but at the same time getting lodged in my distant memory.

But still there’s an insistence of memory, resisting against forgetting, and actively remembering despite the pain that comes with it. Every time I travel, I am accompanied by a nagging feeling of melancholia. It's a funny little thing. That while I don't break down anymore each time I remember J, rather, I would feel a twinge of sadness whenever I am actually happy. That in moments when things are bright, the music is sweet, I am at a new place and a delicious feast is laid out in front of me; it is when I terribly miss J. Because he should’ve been here sharing these with me. From his hospital bed, he planned trips to Japan and Taiwan for us as well as starting a game streaming channel for when he gets better. He did not. Now, these little reminders of a stolen future are what prick & hurt the most.

An unexpected but scanty comfort

There is some comfort, though, in the sense of anonymity and timelessness that transit provides. For a brief time everyone is allowed to remain adrift in an opportunity to confront their worries and sorrows while in motion. No one will judge you should tears just come running down your face (or at least I won’t). It is quite comforting to know that even though we suffer, we are still approaching towards somewhere.

At the end of it all, you’ll eventually hand over the ticket, exit the terminal, and finally reach your destination. In airports or train stations, there are also concrete signs and intentional design that someone is leaving. The departure is announced and in most cases it goes according to plan. There are cordoned limits and dividing and waiting lines.

Grief is not the same. Passing not on his own terms is still the most excruciatingly painful part with J. I was not together with him when it happened, for I was at a conference trip overseas. So I will always wonder if he had something to say to me or if he even looked for me in his last moments. Similarly, there are no timetables for when grief decides to arrive. Most often it is unannounced alongside a scent, a picture, a melody, and you’ve no choice but to just swallow that lump in your throat. Thus, Milan Kundera’s equation on speed and memory became my travel mantra. Now, I always make sure to travel slow so memory and recollection won’t escape me.

Strangers as witnesses

“...memorials signify that a life or the possibility of survival ended here, while you, the traveler, continue onwards beyond the here and now.” - Margaret Gibson, Death and Grief in the Landscape: Private Memorials in Public Space (2011)

My grief is naked, demanding to run through the streets; protesting its existence lest it too suffers another death. In my condo, I keep a small altar for J so I want to memorialize him and this grief in the same way here.

Which now brings me to this Substack. Please consider this as my altar. A private memorial for a life in, through, and forward with grief. Also, I will write about my encounters with food, culture, and politics at least once a month. And surely there will be many more things in between.

So to you, kind stranger, I hope you bear witness to how J and I were once so in love, so happy, and I won’t be the sole proof our love ever happened. And that life, even in grief, can indeed be beautiful again.