1

For New Year’s Eve, my family had a party, like they always did. All sorts of people came by, mostly people who wanted to eat for free. I hated it. I hated how people would come by and open my door and say hi and wonder what I did the entire year. This was annoying enough when it was extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins. But this was especially annoying when it was my parents’ friends. I usually say, “I’ve been well,” and leave it at that. Sometimes, they ask specific things: When are you getting married? What do you do for work? Do you still work as a researcher at the university?

I don’t mind sharing things about my life. I’m telling you this story, so obviously I don’t. My problem is I have to do this rather than doing something else that I enjoy; I am essentially taken hostage. And if they wanted to know about me, then they could read my blog. I don’t want to stand there, responding to each and every query they happen to have. Especially when the question is with regard to how they expect someone’s life is supposed to go. For example, they ask: When are you getting married? Because they expect someone my age to already have a wife.

Which doesn’t even apply to me because I am queer.

That New Year’s Eve, I opted to skip the party altogether and accept my friend’s invitation to have an impromptu trip to Tagaytay. My friend Benny had come from New Zealand to visit. He was going to have New Year’s with his family, but he wanted some time with us. Emily suggested, jokingly at first, on a road trip to Tagaytay. Friends in Manila always joke about going to a spontaneous road trip to Tagaytay. But this time it seemed feasible, perhaps even enjoyable, and so we decided to do it.

Coming along were Emily, Juno, Danny, and Joshua. Benny also took his wife Tina.

2

At around 10 AM people were already coming to the house. We had our gates open and our doors open, and people wandered in and spoke to my parents and sisters, and they got food from the spread we had on the kitchen table. I could see them from the second-floor mezzanine. I stood there, looking at them. I despise people so much.

One of the guests my dad was talking to noticed me and pointed me out. My dad turned to see me before I could duck from view. He beckoned me, so I could say something to the guests. But I nodded and turned to go as if I were going down the stairs but actually I went inside my room, the door to which was at the upper landing.

My friends came for me a little before noon. My parents happened to be out on the street greeting new guests when they spotted Emily inside her car. They beckoned everyone out and invited them to eat. They had to refuse because we were about to eat.

My dad said, “Bring him back tomorrow, okay? He spent the entire year in his room. And I’m not kidding. He only left his room to eat, and then up he goes again.”

“We’ll do our best, tito,” Emily said.

Emily had a white Montero. It was one of her prized possessions, and it struck me sometimes how she treated it like a living creature. Then again, despite not being alive, it did serve her well. It was, in a sense, her instrument of freedom. Before this car, she had to use public transportation, and sometimes though she had the money, she was simply too tired to go along the streets and look for a bus and then a jeepney and then a tricycle in whatever order. It took hours, sometimes, and if the whether was bad or it was rush hour, she could suffer that entire time.

With her Montero she had an extension of her home. And she liked to drive. She always had, even when we were kids in high school. She drove even when she was not allowed to drive because of her age.

After exchanging pleasantries, and expressing surprise that we were actually going through with our plans for once, I asked Benny how he had been since I last saw him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Been lying around at home. Cleaning, cooking for Tina.”

“House husband,” Emily said.

“And how about you?” Benny said. “What have you been up to?”

I realized then that I should not have asked because, to be polite, he would have to ask me this question. And I had no good response. I did nothing the entire year. And that’s no exaggeration. My entire year had been totally wasted. It was inevitable, of course, that certain things happen. And things happened, the way things tend to do. Beyond that, I had nothing.

“I’ve decided to become hikkikomori,” I said.

“What’s that?” Benny said.

“I have decided never to leave my room, unless absolutely necessary.”

“Why?”

“Just wanted to.”

And it’s true. I decided in 2024 that I would never leave the house, unless I was compelled to do so by extreme need. I must have left the house less than 5 times, if that. I left to go to the bank once, to my mom’s birthday celebration at a restaurant, and 3 days at the resort during Christmas. That was it.

I have come to feel that there was nothing for me outside. Or in fact this world. That there are few if any things that I could truly see, in the physical sense, that would awe me or make it worth the effort, save for very few things.

3

At Leslie’s, we sat outside, where we could see Taal lake and the volcano that was partly submerged. I’ve seen it a few times now in my life, although the view was always nice. The German idealists, who had their hands in everything, called it “The Sublime”—the feeling of knowing your place as an insignificant part of this infinite thing called nature, the cosmos. The universe. All that is the case.

I don’t really care for nature. I tell people this, and they hate me for it. But I don’t. If people get dirt on their clothes, they try to clean it. But a mountain, which is supposed to be a very, very tall mound of dirt, is supposed to be beautiful. I don’t understand that. Or is it a matter of scale? If it is a tiny smudge, it’s dirt. But if you get enough of the stuff, it becomes a majestic feature of the natural world.

I was telling Emily this.

“How does that work?” I said.

“Well,” she said. “It’s because the mountain isn’t on my shirt, is it?”

I thought about it. And that may be it.

They ordered the bulalo, because they always have that here. I don’t like Spanish stews. I ordered the sisig.

“What did you guys do for the new year?” Benny said.

“Went to a resort,” I said. “Didn’t want to go, but my family forced me.”

“Did you enjoy yourself, at least?”

“No.”

“How about you, Em?”

“Just stayed home,” she said. “We don’t really celebrate the holidays anymore… Just an ordinary night for us. Maybe we cook a special meal or something.”

“And you Juno?”

“Oh god…” Em cooed, knowing what was coming.

“Mom believes that the end of the world is imminent,” Juno said. “She wants us to move into a religious commune in the mountains, so that when the antichrist takes over we won’t be here to suffer the worst of it.”

“Can I come with you?” I said.

“No.”

“Is it because I’m gender queer?”

“You’re gender queer?” Emily said.

“I thought you were just gay,” Benny said. “Wait, are there other things? What’s a lesbian?”

“What is a lesbian?” Danny said.

“I’m still thinking about,” I said.

“We’re not going to the Cordilleras,” Juno said. “We’re going to stage an intervention.”

“I’ve been there before,” Danny said. “I was a baby, then. But I remember, as a baby, falling down a hill.”

“Did you hit your head?” Benny said.

“It’s those reels,” Juno was saying. “She can’t distinguish between real life and AI. She believes everything.”

“I fell off a hill before…” Benny said. “I was a bit older. Nearly broke my foot.”

4

For the great majority of people, seeing Taal volcano surrounded by Taal lake is one of the most wonderful sights in the country. And while I do regard it with some awe, at the same time I see that it is like a toilet. And beneath that rancid pool of shit, piss, and dead fish, there is fire so hot it turns solid rock and stone into a molten ocean. And should circumstances be right, the way it had been several times in the distant past, then this entire place would be destroyed, killing thousands of people. We were standing at the site of a future cataclysm.

Or go further and one inevitably comes across the idea of the end of the world. Why should we think that, if the world heats up and all life dies, means the Earth is destroyed? The Earth is a mote of dust floating across the infinity of space; it is a thing. Billions of years before it was destitute of life; billions of years from now it will be consumed by the sun. All of this is as natural as any other.

I find that people are so selfish that they think if the universe does not have the conditions necessary for life then it must be broken. The idea that we should be the stewards of nature is also such a condescending and egotistical position. The cosmos does not need us or anything.

אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה
Ehyeh asher ehyeh

“Have some.” Danny was standing there and the way he was looking at me it seemed like he had been watching me for a while. “They’re buying treats down at the gift shop.”

He was holding a packet of dried apricots.

“No thank you,” I said. “I hate fruits.”

He shrugged and ate another and looked out over the lake.

“Pretty, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

5

We moved to a Starbucks that was also adjacent to a cliff. We were now looking at Taal lake from a different vantage point. A fog had settled around Tagaytay, and it was cold. There were also many people there, families and friends celebrating the New Year. A big family in particular was arriving in several cars. Several generations clogging up the place. Children running around and shouting as they played, their mothers trying to tell them to shut up although not meaning it. Fathers talking loudly with their arms crossed against their chests.

Some days I felt that things were not alright. And the older I got, the more I felt that. As a young person, I was frequently anxious, depressed, even suicidal—but that was different because there was a reason for me to feel those things. I felt that way because I cared, and the fact that the things I desired so much were not coming to fruition wounded me deeper and deeper. But now, at my age, I felt that things were not alright because I had lost interest in living; I no longer believed in the promises of life.

Danny was a handsome, powerful man. He sat there in front of me vaping and looking out at the lake. Wherever Emily went, Danny came with her. They were cousins, and had been close ever since they were children. Despite this, they grew up under very different circumstances, and while Emily lived an easy life of money, Danny grew up in poverty and abuse. So, Emily grew up impetuous and imperious, though she had always been kind, or tried to be as kind as possible. Danny had learned long ago that survival meant going along with the whims of those who had more than him (the great majority of people) while still trying to make his own way.

That journey was still continuing for him, and so I did not know what it would be like if he had the advantages Emily had. But he was an engineer now, and a hard worker because of the previous circumstances of his life, and I could easily imagine him climbing to the top through grit alone.

I’ve never had any grit. Now, I have more grit than I ever had in my life, and it’s still not much. Many times I wish I did, and people mistake me for having more grit than I actually do. But within me there is consistent turmoil, no matter what the world around me is like. A roiling, bubbling, uncontrollable turmoil that occasionally becomes unbearable, that once in a while, though invisible, pushes out my sorrows like lava from the orifices of my body. Until it fills up the room, and I drown in it, this little lake of sorrows…

I said, “How are you?”

“I feel alright…” He blew a gigantic cloud of vapor while facing the cliff. Then, he looked at me again. “How are you?”

“Good enough…”

He nodded that slow nod people do when there’s nothing more to say. And there wasn’t.

6

I got home at around 5 PM, after going to different places, taking pictures, and having an early dinner. There were still people in the house, but now they were localized at the dining room. They and my parents were eating and laughing loudly and exchanging stupid stories the way old people tend to do. They asked me what we did, and I said nothing, and went upstairs.

After removing my clothes and changing into my house wear, I laid down in bed and rested and couldn’t help but think the whole thing was a massive waste of time. The trip. The day. The celebration. The year. All my life.

Here I am again, here.

What was the point?

I watch people on YouTube how wander the world, discovering things already discovered, meeting people like any other person they’ve ever met. Doing things that have always been done. I would never find pleasure in doing any of those things. Perhaps that says something about me. I have gone to Japan, to Dubai, to Hong Kong—many places, and in all those places, though I did enjoy it, there lingered always the feeling that I’ve been there before, that I’ve done this before. And the dread that this is all that there is, that this is all that is the case.

I should put this on my blog, I thought.