Early last year, I was at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport waiting for my flight back to Australia and reading Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments/Ongoingness (2019). She writes: ‘To call a piece of writing a fragment, or to say it’s composed of fragments, is to say that it or its components were once whole but are no longer.’
~
When I first arrived at my grandmother’s house a month and a half ago, there was no space for my things so we had to clear out the bed in the spare room. I folded my clothes neatly and piled them up on the sheets. A pile of shirts, a pile of jeans, a pile of dresses, a pile of loungewear. In the kitchen I had to ask where the knives were. Where to get cold water. The jeepney fare had gone up by eight pesos. I Googled how to take the train. At the train station I asked if I could buy a Beep card. The woman at the service desk said it was sold out. I went to another station. It was the same thing. So I took a Grab (the equivalent of Uber in the Philippines) to my destination.
~
Because I have been using an e-sim, it did some kind of trick on my phone where old messages I’d deleted suddenly appeared in my inbox. I found an old chat thread with an ex-lover, J. I thought this was odd. But it could also be that I didn’t, in fact, delete it. That the messages had just been sitting there for months and months and I had managed to forget about it. It made sense, I thought, given the aftermath of that affair was such a blur that I had to sit in therapy with an empty chair beside mine while the therapist urged me to talk to my ‘numb self’.
I read through our chats. At the time, I had won a writing award and was at the precipice of an exciting opportunity to get published. I’d been having doubts because my draft was downright rough, just ‘fragments’ really, and the 3000-word sample the publisher had read seemed like a fluke I’d managed to stitch together into something that, if you squinted, looked promising. I was not sure about anything from the sound of my messages to J., but I believed in what I had been writing. I’d said to him: ‘All I can really do is trust in the work.’ To which he’d replied: ‘Yes, always trust the work and do what’s best for the writing.’
In the end, I hadn’t signed with the publisher because in my hands was not yet the work I had been envisioning. It would still be a time before it gets there.
~
I Googled: ‘how to be a fun person to hang out with’.
~
At the beach resort with F., B. and A., we gathered around a small table outside our accommodation and talked about our lives. Or, really, I listened to them talk about their lives: A.’s struggles with her husband and young kid; F.’s mother’s hospitalisation; B’s father and their long-standing fights. It occurred to me how these had been my friends for two decades of my life and where before, our concerns revolved around exams and high-school squabbles and hopeless corridor crushes, now we talked about big things, things that had real-life consequences. I thought I was lucky to be going through something that had ‘real-life consequences’. Somehow, it felt like I was not only dipping my foot in, but I was actually ‘living’.
~
There are days, of course, when I wake up and think with weariness, ‘I am awake again.’ And days when I hope I am more ‘normal’ than I am. But what does that mean, to be ‘normal’?
~
A terrible dream. I was heading to the cinematheque with an old friend when we saw another friend, I., across the road. Then suddenly, behind I. was a wave of soil so big that it looked like it was going to swallow her. I called out to her but she had headphones on. The giant tractor was coming up fast behind her, moving the ground, the soil, whatever it was, and it came, and I. was gone. She disappeared under all that rubble. I just watched it all happen. My other friend and I ran towards the building but we couldn’t open the door. The tractor was coming and there were so many people on the run. At home I waited for the news. Everyone in the cinema had died. My whole high-school class, apparently, had died. I survived. My friend I. didn’t, although no-one found her body yet. I cried to my mother. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, at least she was listening to music when it happened. At least she’d found love before she died. Then I woke up and bit the wood of my bed frame. I called my friend I. and she answered right away. ‘Anne?’ she said, sounding worried. ‘Oh, thank god,’ I said. ‘I’m so relieved you’re okay.’ Then we laughed and said goodbye.
~
On the phone with P., she lamented the difficulty of life. She has just moved from the Philippines to Singapore and is working as a general practitioner at a hospital. She sees many patients in an hour, some of her sessions only lasting five minutes. ‘But, you know,’ she told me, ‘I prayed for this.’
I’ve recently read Nancy Mairs’s collection of essays, Carnal Acts (1996). In her essay ‘Doing It the Hard Way’, she narrated her travel to Zaire — now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo — to visit her daughter Anne who lived there after joining the Peace Corps. Anne, who had majored in biochemistry, had left her cushy life in America to bathe with other women in a river in Central Africa, visit local farmers and teach them how to build and make an income from ponds, and expose herself to diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Anne’s decision was a puzzle to Mairs, who was herself living with the effects of multiple sclerosis. She posited that Anne went to have an adventure. She said, reading her daughter’s letters: ‘At last she’s found something hard enough for her.’
It’s not so much masochism, but perhaps there is something in us — at least to people like P. and myself (and Anne and Mairs) —that desires to go beyond ourselves, that is not satisfied with an ‘easy’ life. If I had a choice, what would it be? I dream of a whistling kettle in the morning. Dappled sunlight. I dream of birdcalls and words. I dream of reading and of love. But the journey precedes that dream. Take a look at clean sentences, for example, and you will find that it is so much work to make them look so simple.
~
I downloaded the dating apps, three of them, but eighty-percent of men were foreign people. For some reason, this seemed more sinister than if I were, say, in Australia or America, and most men were Caucasian and only some were Asians. Here in the Philippines, I felt like there was an underlying motive behind these profiles, especially those who had ‘Looking for something casual’ plastered below their pale, smiling faces.
I suppose the discomfort has something to do with geography. Out there in Western countries, I am among them. We are all just under the mercy of the happenstance of ‘place’. Whereas here, it feels like I were an animal in a zoo, and spectators are examining me, comparing me to other animals: which one of them could entertain me best?
I deleted the apps soon after. I find other ways to churn my longing. In L.’s words, ‘Everything is pornographic but nothing is erotic.’
~
My friend I. is in love with a German guy called E. A whirlwind romance, the end of which is nowhere near in sight. On the phone, she tells me that this is it, this is the man. She ruminates on the future. Her move from America to Germany. Or E.’s move from Germany to America. Both of them are so willing, they could even end up in a different country altogether. I. is so happy and so terrified at the same time that she is developing physical symptoms. Once, she sent me multiple photos of her face, baring her teeth. ‘Do they look yellow to you?’ she said. They looked like teeth, I thought. Then, she felt like something in her body was aching, something was surely wrong. And then she had fits of anxiety. I messaged her once, after one of these attacks: ‘I hope,’ I began, ‘that you can bear the pain of being loved.’
~
The former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is arrested and brought to The Hague, Netherlands for his ‘crimes against humanity’. I think, well and good, but a part of me also wonders: why can the International Criminal Court lord their power over a country like the Philippines but not Israel, not the USA? And I think we all know the answer.
~
Someone asked me, ‘Is writing all you do? Can you live off from it?’
In The Illiterate (2004), Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf tells the story of the day she sent out the draft of her first novel, The Notebook, to publishers:
On the day I mail it all out, I announce to my older daughter:
—I’ve finished my novel.
She says:
—Really? And do you think someone will publish it?
I say:
—Yes, certainly.
Indeed, I do not doubt it for a minute. I have the conviction, the certitude that my novel is a good novel, and that it will be published without any difficulty.
I am still afraid to say it out loud: ‘I have the conviction…’ But then if Timothée Chalamet can say, ‘…I’m really in pursuit of greatness… I want to be one of the greats,’ I suppose I can also choke out something similar. In time.
~
In the anime Haikyu!! (2014-2020), a short unskilled high-schooler, Shoyo Hinata, joins the volleyball club at Karasuno High School where he finds out that his rival, the King, Tobio Kageyama, is also a member. Forced to play together in the team, they learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses to enter the most-coveted Spring Nationals. Under a plot so simple such as the linear progression of a high-school volleyball competition, I am reminded of what is possible when you are driven: despite your physical attributes, despite your limitations in skills, despite what other people say, despite self-doubt.
In one scene where Hinata has been limited in jump by the opponent’s setter, Kageyama set the ball up high, so high as to afford Hinata a few more seconds to get to the utmost peak of his jumping height, over the blockers’ fingertips, and smash the ball in the opponent’s court.
There is a way, I am certain, even when you think there is no other way.
~
P. just booked a flight home to Manila for a few days. Sometimes, I speak to my friend I. from Cambridge at night, her morning. I talk to L., mostly towards the end of his work shift. A week ago I sent a postcard to A. in Austin, to I. in Cambridge, to M. in North Carolina. I messaged G. about another book. After her overseas trip, S. called me. V. checks in on me every so often. I feel the uncertainty of my connections these days. They are all hanging on a thread. One wrong move, I think, and I lose them. I have been unwell and I sink in the depressive call of my bed, chugging my cold medicine every six hours. Once I had a breakdown on the phone with L. I insisted he couldn’t understand me. But in truth, I didn’t want to be understood. ‘I see that being a conflict in you,’ he said. ‘It’s like you’re a deer at a pond and you’re with another deer waiting for them to show their back and start drinking before you do.’ When I recounted this to I., she said: ‘There is not much defence between you and the world. It’s beautiful but you also get hurt.’ I walked about in deep thought: There is not much standing between me and the rest of the world. There is not much standing between me and the rest of the world. There is not much standing between me…
~
While writing this, my phone pings with a notification. A message from S.:
Hi I love you
That’s all xoxo
Hi.
I love you.
That is all.
That is all.
A list of things I’ve read and watched these last two months:
Books
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson
Tell Me How It Ends (2017) by Valerie Luiselli
Still Born (2020) by Guadalupe Nettel
Carnal Acts (1996) by Nancy Mairs
The Book of Mother (2021) by Violaine Huisman
Spiral Meander Explode (2019) by Jane Alison
The House of Being (2024) by Natasha Trethewey
The Illiterate (2004) by Ágota Kristóf
A Nervous Breakdown (2016, Penguin Classics) by Anton Chekhov
The Idiot (2017) by Elif Batuman
Films
Roma (2018) by Alfonso Cuarón
Burning (2018) by Lee Chang-dong
Firefly (2023) by Zig Dulay
The Only Living Boy in New York (2017) by Marc Webb
The Report (2017) by Scott Burnz
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) by Mike Newell
Conclave (2024) by Edward Berger
Alien: Romulus (2024) by Fede Alvarez
The Outrun (2024) by Nora Fingscheidt
The Gorge (2025) by Scott Derrickson
Which Brings Me to You (2024) by Peter Hutchings
Licorice Pizza (2021) by Paul Thomas Anderson
Hotel Mumbai (2018) by Anthony Maras
Society of the Snow (2023) by J. A. Bayona
Series
Voltaire High / Mixte (2021) by Alexandra Castagnetti and Edouard Salier
American Primeval (2025) by Peter Berg
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane
Maxton Hall (2024) by Martin Schreier and Tarek Roehlinger
Haikyu!! (2014-2020)