writings

X sat on the couch, stretched his arms up, and splayed them out. His eye lazily shifted upon his phone that he laid on the table. He heard the doorbell phone rang. It was playing what used to be one of his favorite songs. Then the phone rang, and rang, and rang, and rang, and rang. He scowled with the unpleasant face of a roughly woken sleeper and unwillingly shoved his body up from the couch with his arms. He leaned his arm on the wall and slouched forward as he walked to the doorbell phone and picked it up.



"Free Will? You wanna talk to me about free will? I think free will is a load of shit. I think hell is other people. You're not speaking in your normal voice, is it? And you don't wear these sunglasses because you like it. You intentionally keep your voice deep. You wear these sunglasses so the others can't look straight into your eyes to hide any sign of humanity and weakness, all so you could appear to be cold and detached. You wanna talk about free will? I think everything we do, every time, everywhere is all an act we put on! All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. I think free will only exist in the places when we're all alone when we're not watched and judged by others. And just where and when do you think we won't be watched today? Remember that embarrassing post and photo you put on 5-10 years ago on the Internet? It doesn't go away. It's stored on a server in god-knows-where, and even if the server's wiped it's archived on another server."

The first funeral I attended was when I was 6 years old. My clearest memory of it was beating a highscore on a rhythm dancing game on my mother's old nokia phone, and how long the hearse was that I thought it was one of them fancy limousines. I was too young at the time that I couldn't comprehend the concept of death in actual reality. The monks were hitting the Buddhist wooden blocks and chanting obscure verses and I thought that the monks were performing a special kind of music.

One evening on a dinner my father said that he had some bad news to share, and it was about how my grandmother had passed away. In my memory, all my grandmother signified was her apartment that we lived in, and her Filipino maid who would read books in another language. I couldn't understand either of their language and all I had learned about her I heard from my father.

My great-grandmother was the eldest person I have ever seen. She

My aunt always loved watching TV shows that featured old folk stories


I stood in that place for a while, shocked by the news that arrived. I

All of his memories of him driving, working hard

New to the family, was a dog and a cat. We had never kept pets in this house before


These important persons, are now transformed in the form of a small containers. I staggered. It felt unnatural. It felt sick. I walked out, sat on the stairs, and looked up at the sky for a while.



The cause of death was sudden cardiac arrest. It was the cigarettes that he smoked everyday out of satiation, rather than joy that killed him.

It felt unjust. Out of all of the people in the world fate could have chosen, fate chose at that moment to take away the life of a father, a husband, and an uncle, who took us on trips across the island to beautiful sceneries of oceans and mountains, who toiled wordlessly everyday with his head buried in engineering parts, who

But I also knew it wasn't unwarranted. Even during my short stints

I could always hear my cousin, or his daughter telling him to stop smoking while driving. He tried nicotine patches for a while, and of course it didn't work. He tried cigarette filters, and of course it didn't work either. He relapsed into his habits and we seemed acquiesced as long as he wasn't smoking in front of us, as if the biggest harm he caused was not to himself but to us.

My grief seemed humorous in a cosmic sort of way. I felt like a person asking

The last time I saw him was in a dream. I was sitting in our white car as usual next to my mother on a trip to somewhere. He was in the driver's seat, with a cigarette in his left hand out of the window.

This was who my uncle was, and I decided that it should stay that way in my memory.