Althea Writes Here

I have always been afraid of endings. I am not sure why I developed a fear of change, especially since much of my life has been lived in longing for something better. This is probably why I often hold on to things too tightly and tend to let go too late. As I live through my thirties, however, I have come face to face with one ending after another, most of them predictable and inevitable, some of them unexpected. I grieved through many of these changes, even the ones I wanted or even caused to happen, knowing that these were the end of some important stages of my life. The endings I grieved the most, naturally, were those of friendships. Before some of those friendships came to an end, I had only known loyalty and grief that flows towards reconciliation. I had had disagreements with friends before, but we had always patched things up to either bring back the old order of things or build something new and stronger. I had never known myself to be one to detach, especially after

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell By Marty McConnell leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtub full of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. you had to have him. and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses. you make him call before he visits. you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you love

I dreamt that my mother, my eight-year-old niece Keona and I had stumbled upon an ABS-CBN tour. It was free, it would take only 30 minutes, and there was a man giving away large packs of butter coconut cookies. I accepted a pack, looked at the ingredients and said it wasn't vegan. But I took the pack with me anyway. As we walked to the start of the line, the guides started calling out to all the tour participants: "Come on, run!" And so we ran, from one dark studio to another, through one dark hallway to another, seeing nothing of interest. "No wonder this is free," I thought to myself. "This is the suckiest tour ever." The tour guides, all long-time ABS-CBN employees currently not working on shows, were tasked to handle tours by management as an effort to bring the station closer to the public. Then they put us on a bus driven by a cameraman. He said we were going to the ABS-CBN village behind the compound. The station had built a village for

I dreamt I was in a UP campus and it had older buildings built in the early 1900s on top of huge boulders. These buildings looked much like the buildings of UP Diliman but were made entirely of polished stone. The stairs in the older buildings were always uneven; sometimes, a step would be too far from the next and would be too small to fit even a child's foot. Sometimes, the handrail had disintegrated so you had only wobbly balustrades, if not their exposed steel bars, to help you. I was working my way down from the fourth floor when I felt the earthquake. It started as a smooth and consistent shaking, and I propped my hands on a wall to avoid getting dizzy. Then the shaking picked up strength, and I just knew it was "the big one." I ran out, then stopped to pray and plan what to do and where to go and how to contact family. I looked up and saw that behind me the facade of the newer buildings had already started crumbling. I turned my head -- then realized that t