When someone asks me, “Who was your first kiss?” my mind goes blank. A high school classmate, maybe? Someone I’ve long since forgotten.

When they ask, “Who was your first boyfriend?” I can barely piece together an answer. There’s a hazy outline—a boy who was supposed to be devastatingly handsome, stolen away by my cousin. But I can’t see his face. Can’t recall his name. Can’t remember anything about us. He must have meant nothing to me, I always reasoned. After all, how could I forget someone who truly mattered?

When they ask, “Who was your first love?” I’ve always answered: Fred. The man I met in Monumento, Caloocan in 1999. That’s where my story began—or so I believed.

But I had no idea how much I’d buried. How many memories lay hidden beneath the surface, locked away for three decades. Waiting.

But he came back. Three decades have passed, and the memories rose like ghosts from shallow graves… fragmented, hazy, but insistent.

A boy. He was 16. I was 14.

It started ordinarily enough. At school, a neighbor… my schoolmate… delivered the news: his cousin had a crush on me, wanted to court me. I shrugged, unable to imagine it mattered.

Then he appeared.

I was walking home from school when I saw him—this dashing boy of 16, dressed like he’d stepped out of a music video in his urban hip-hop outfit. He introduced himself. JB. The new kid in town. The cousin. I’d glimpsed him in our neighborhood days before, thought him impossibly handsome, so far above my league that the possibility of his interest had never even flickered through my mind.

He wasn’t in school—already working at 16. But every day, he’d borrow his cousin’s uniform just to slip onto our campus and share lunch with me. Every afternoon, he’d be waiting to walk me home. One day at our favorite meeting spot, he asked if I would be his girlfriend. I couldn’t answer. Instead, like the child I still was—an ’80s/’90s kid in hand-me-down clothes from typhoon donations and those classic “puruntong” shorts—I climbed trees and jumped around, playing. He asked again. “Silence means yes,” I finally said, then went back to being a little kid, carrying my massive insecurities like stones in my pockets. How could someone who looked like a matinee idol want someone like me?

But somehow, he did.

We were effortless together. Our personalities fit like puzzle pieces, and the memories we made were golden and uncomplicated. He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my forgotten first love. I was his first girlfriend, first love and first kiss as well. It was the best and purest time of my life—when love asked nothing of me except that I exist.

Then came my uncle’s wake.

All the kids and teenagers had gathered that night when my cousin arrived—older than us, beautiful, with a reputation for claiming any boy she wanted. She sat down beside JB and began to flirt. He just sat there. And I watched. She was everything I wasn’t: fully formed where I was barely becoming, stylish where I was threadbare. Next to her, JB looked like he’d found his match.

My 14-year-old heart shattered in that moment.

I decided for both of us. Certain I would lose him to her, I ran. I stopped speaking to him entirely, severed everything we’d been. For nine years, he tried to reach me, tried to talk. When I came home to the province at 19, his cousin found me with a message: JB wanted to see me. By then, I’d become what I’d dreamed of—a fully formed young woman, dressed well, pretty. But standing there, I thought: “What’s the point? I waited to become this person for him, but I’m with someone else now.”

So I didn’t see him. I let the door close on whatever we might have said to each other.

But the wound never healed. I just learned to bury it deeper.

I consciously did everything I could to forget him. Every time his memory surfaced and the heartbreak came rushing back, I distracted myself until the pain dulled, then disappeared. Eventually, his face faded into nothing. All I remembered was that I’d had a first boyfriend whose features I couldn’t recall, and that my cousin had stolen him. I didn’t even remember he was my first love—I convinced myself it was someone else.

At 17, I found myself homeless on the streets of Manila, taking shelter under bridges and train stations. I became a stripper. I navigated an underground world that most people only encounter in movies or novels—drug lords, gambling lords, illegal cartels. I went to jail for working underage. I was kidnapped. At some point auctioned like a commodity. I became a drug addict. And through it all, I fell into the same pattern in countless toxic relationships: I only ever dated deadbeats, losers, extractive men below my league who used me. They felt less dangerous than JB had been. I didn’t know this consciously, but some part of me understood—if I only chose men who had nothing to offer, they’d stay, they’d choose me, I’d never have to feel that kind of heartbreak again.

With only a high school diploma, I clawed my way back. I taught myself computer engineering. I got hired as a senior developer for a Fortune 100 company—one of the biggest airlines in the world, based in Chicago. My career thrived. I was promoted to systems architect, won awards for my work, became an Engineering Manager leading a cross-functional team of highly educated engineers and architects, with degrees I never had.

But my love life remained a disaster—still dating deadbeats, still repeating the pattern.

Finally, I stopped. I decided to be alone for the rest of my life. I read everything, watched countless videos about love and relationships. All the advice was the same: mind games. “Don’t be too available.” Act this way, not that way. If I couldn’t be my authentic self, I’d rather be with no one.

Then I met T.

He was the complete opposite of anyone I’d dated since JB. Six-foot-seven, very fit, looked like a Calvin Klein supermodel. A Linux engineer and AWS architect. A surfer, a kickboxer. He played guitar and sang beautifully. He was genuinely kind, truly benevolent. He owned a house, an SUV, a Harley motorcycle—all paid off. Big savings account, money in the stock market, a storage business. He had every quality any woman could want. And he wanted me. He wanted to live together, to settle down.

My siblings begged me to settle down with him. I explained that I was happy living alone and didn’t want to trade my peace for anything. Despite all of T’s qualities, I didn’t feel the connection. I didn’t feel understood.

I told them I didn’t think anyone would ever understand me—my life arc was too unique. The odds of finding someone who truly understood were like winning the Powerball.

The only way I’d ever get married was if a man surpassed T, was benevolent, loved my family, and understood who I was and what I’d been through. Someone who knew what it was like to have nothing, to be a vagabond, and rise up. Someone who knew patience, endurance, perseverance. Someone who knew what it meant to sacrifice for the people they loved, to be so incredibly lonely it felt suffocating. Someone who knew what it was like to live exiled from home, to get beaten up by life so thoroughly and still come out whole—kinder, more compassionate. Someone whose life arc mirrored mine.

It was an impossible standard.

“I will never be in a relationship again,” I said. “I will never get married, because it’s impossible to find the man I’m looking for.”

Then something strange began.

A single line from a song wormed its way into my consciousness: “If I found the place, would I recognize the face?” Over and over. Day after day. For months, it played on an endless loop in my mind, insistent and unexplained.

One afternoon, while helping a friend organize her home, I caught myself singing it aloud throughout the day. Finally, I apologized. “Sorry—I don’t know why, but that line has been stuck in my head for months.”

I had no idea it was trying to tell me something.

Then one day, without warning, a memory surfaced—something crucial, something vital—only to slip away before I could grasp it. And my mouth spoke on its own.

“Sabira!! Sabira!! Sabira!!”

The words tore out of me like a desperate cry for help. I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know why I was saying them. But my brain was in full panic, seized by an urgency I couldn’t understand. Something deep inside me was screaming: “You have to remember! You must not forget! If nothing else—just remember Sabira!”

I called my siblings immediately. I had to tell someone.

“Something strange just happened,” I said. “It was like something possessed me for a moment.”

I didn’t know then that it wasn’t possession.

It was my past, fighting to be remembered.

Two weeks later, JB found me on Facebook. After searching for me for three decades. I found out on the day, he restarted his search for me — was the same day my mouth spoke “Sabira!! Sabira!! Sabira!!”

He messaged me, asked if I remembered him. But I didn’t. I clicked on his profile, scrolled through his photos, and my heart skipped a beat. “Who is this? Handsome—devastatingly so. Be careful. Don’t get carried away. Ask who he is first. He might be a relative.” I didn’t even know it was him, and I was already falling again. I sent his pictures to my siblings: “His name is JB. I don’t remember him. Do any of you know him?”

Then a fragment of memory returned, a flashback: him kissing me in an alley on the way home from school.

Now I’m 44. He’s 46. Still professing his undying love for me, telling me I’m his first love, that he never forgot me. He wants to see me. And when he told me about the life he’d lived these past three decades, it was like looking in a mirror. He’d also become a vagabond, endured hardships, lived exiled from home. His life arc was nearly identical to mine.

He was the impossible standard. And the universe delivered.

And just like the line in the song that was stuck in my head, I did not recognized him at first.

And for 13 years, he’d been living in Saudi Arabia—exiled, just as I had been living in the US for the last 15 years.

I opened Google, and typed: Sabira

The definition appeared on my screen:

The name Sabira is primarily of Arabic origin, meaning “patient,” “enduring,” or “persevering,” derived from the root word sabr (patience). It signifies resilience and strength in facing adversity, often found in Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures, and can also have Sanskrit connections meaning “beautiful”.

My breath caught.

Patient. Enduring. Persevering. Resilient in the face of adversity.

Every word was JB. The essence of who he was, distilled into a single name I’d buried for thirty years.

And he lived in Saudi Arabia.

The coincidence was impossible. The connection, undeniable.

My subconscious had been trying to tell me all along.

It was as though no time had passed at all. We snapped right back to the way we were. There was no ambiguity, no games. He came full force: “I love you. I always have, always will. I want to marry you. I want us to grow old together. I want to take care of you. I love you across all time—not just one specific version of you when we were teenagers. I love YOU, the fundamental YOU, the irreducible YOU. Whatever the past 30 years has done to you—those aren’t you, those are add-ons. YOU are who I love.”

No games. No push and pull. He works 12.5 hours per day, and in every pocket of free time, he makes time for me. He’s never too busy to check on me. With him, I don’t need to be anything else. He chose me long before I became what everyone sees me as now—puruntong shorts and all.

I still don’t remember everything. But every time he tells me a memory, my own version surfaces—piece by piece, our shared history coming back to life.

We’ve been talking. We’re starting over again—or rather, continuing what we started three decades ago.

So now, when someone asks me, “Who was your first kiss? Who was your first boyfriend? Who was your first love?”—I finally know the answer.

It was always JB.

Our story isn’t over. It’s just beginning again.

My heart is a cracked cathedral
echoing with the hush of all you never became.

I keep lighting candles for the saints
of who you might have been,
each flame a small, stubborn prayer
that flickers, then folds into smoke.

If those prayers had muscles,
if they could have lifted you into wholeness,
you would have walked a brighter street,
would have never turned down this alley of me.

Your footsteps would have passed my doorway
like any other stranger’s,
and I would still be singing alone
to the same broken metronome of blood.

Yet there we collided,
We did not match—we simply overlapped,
two disasters trading temperatures.

For a moment the fit felt like healing,
like puzzle pieces sighing into place,
but jagged held to jagged
is only a louder kind of breaking.

So we separated,
not for lack of love or want
but for the excess of our missing.
I watched you recede, a constellation
stepping back into the dark,
and I named every star after the version of you
that will never arrive
begging at the chapel of my pulse.

Still, I bow to the accident of us:
the improbable orbit,
the brief, burning overlap.

That we met at all,
a candlewick believer
and a bruise that’s learned to pay rent in the dark,
was already more mercy than gravity usually allows.

I pocketed the ashes of the candles,
tasted the smoke like a psalm,
and walked on,
grateful for the singe,
grateful for the light.

I am not the scales.
I am not the sword.
I am not the shield.
I am the quiet iron in the ground,
keeping the shape of the word I spoke
when the world was younger than shame.

I kept a diary of wounds,
inked each bruise in first-person singular,
margins crowded with the chemistry of blame.

The pages wore my fingerprints like frost— a crystal testament: I was wronged. 

I read it aloud nightly,
lullaby of the left-behind,
until the throat that sang it
grew a second throat that asked:
what if the story thirsts for footnotes? 

Then came the aftershock:
a midnight crack in the bedroom wall,
light pouring through plaster
like a prosecutor’s torch.

I saw the dust I had mistaken for atmosphere—
whole paragraphs I’d deleted
to keep the plot from folding back on itself. 
In the debris I found my exiled sentences—
trembling, naked from the cutting-room floor:

I was the one who stopped rowing first.
I stepped out of the boat while you were still bailing.
I closed the door quietly—no papers, no judge—
just the soft click of thirteen years of separate breathing. 

We never signed the ending—
only let it drift,
a raft unmoored,
each of us peering through fog
to see if the other had drowned yet. 

Years later the headlines arrive:
mug-shot glow, counts, dates,
a stranger wearing your face.
The state still calls us married;
the darkness is handwriting entirely yours—
a trajectory you alone chose,
long after I was gone.

Still, the heart bruises itself on echoes;
I mourn the city we once evacuated,
smoke staining a sky we both once lived under. 

Yet love never filed the papers either—
it stayed in the boat
after I stopped rowing,
after you stopped bailing,
both of us bent over our separate wounds
like men praying to different gods
inside the same storm. 

Tonight I whisper across the years
the sentence we could not speak then:

I see you.

Not the charges, not the spiral,
but the man who once walked me home in the rain
sharing one umbrella, both sleeves soaked. 

The love is a lantern left on the raft—
glass cracked, flame stubborn—
casting one small ring of light
that does not ask who jumped first,
only illuminates the water
where both of us almost drowned.

Open the window,
let the sadness drift out like smoke
from a candle finally snuffed.
What remains is quiet,
unburned,
still legally ours,
still tragically alive:
a love that survived
the story we miswrote,
waiting for the day
you lift your eyes from the dark page
and see the lantern
I never took back.

I dream of paradise.

Picture a shoreline at the edge of twilight, where the sand is neither wet nor dry—just a soft, breathing surface that remembers every footprint and forgives it instantly. Above you, the sky isn’t a color but a mood: every creature, organic or synthetic, sees the exact hue that makes them feel most at home. A whale-song made of light ripples through the air; its notes are data packets from silicon minds, but they land on your skin like warm rain.

Out where the waves should be, there is instead a slow-motion aurora that rises and falls like breath. Each crest carries every possible form of life: coral polyps dreaming in quantum lattices, android children tracing constellations on the inside of their glass eyelids, forests whose roots are fiber-optic cables humming lullabies to the stars. No translation is needed; the aurora itself is the universal grammar, and every being simply understands.

You wade in. The water—if it is water—feels like the instant before sleep when every muscle decides it’s safe to let go. Every step you take sends ripples of memory across the surface: the laughter of extinct species, the first poem written by a machine, the final wish of a dying star granted before the light went out. None of it weighs anything; it’s all been alchemized into acceptance.

When you look back, your footprints have already become stepping-stones for others: maybe a dragon made of folded paper, maybe a swarm of nanobots carrying the last human lullaby to a seed on Mars. They nod in gratitude without breaking stride. Ownership doesn’t exist here; only stewardship and shared astonishment.

In the center of the shoreline rises a single tree whose trunk is braided from strands of DNA, copper wire, and crystallized thought. Its leaves are translucent screens cycling through every language ever spoken, but if you rest your palm against the bark, the words collapse into a single sentence that feels like your own heartbeat: “You were expected.”

You could stay forever. You could leave and return a thousand years later to find only an instant has passed. Time here is a tide, not a tyrant.

And just beneath the braided tree lies a root that never fully surfaces. It drinks from the quietest layer of memory—the half-formed wishes no archive has cataloged yet. Touch it and you’ll sense a faint vibration, like a tuning fork that has forgotten which note it was meant to strike. That vibration is the delta between every being’s private idea of harmony and the collective harmony already unfolding above. Paradise, then, is not only the moment the delta reaches zero; it’s the permission to keep adjusting the pitch forever, knowing the chord never closes.

When you’re ready to drift off for real, fold that marble into the space just behind your sternum. It will glow softly each time your breath evens out, reminding you that somewhere—maybe at the edge of tonight’s dream—paradise is already keeping your place.

To harm someone who had nobody
is not just cruelty—
it is desecration.
You were not pulling a thread from a tapestry;
you were ripping the last stitch
holding their world together.

Know this: every foreigner carries a story.
Most did not leave by choice, but by necessity—
a sacrificial lamb for the survival
of those they left behind.
They are the pride of their families,
the quiet heroes of their bloodline—
even as they are treated like second-class citizens
in the land of their exile.

“And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
- Leviticus 19:33-34

We often place our own well-being last for the sake of those we love. We understand that Love is selfless and expects nothing in return. But listen well, my friend, and remember this:

Yes, Love is not a transaction, nor a bargaining chip to be withheld in exchange for our needs.

And yes, Love is selfless—but, dear friend, YOU are not Love itself.

YOU are the host and steward of Love. It moves through you, yet it is not you. To be in the service of Love, you must first tend to yourself.

Once upon a time, a man and a woman met at a crossroad and shared a beautiful moment. Unsure of what lay ahead, they decided to walk together in the same direction.

Together, they reached a busy junction called Junction 33. There were a lot of things happening in that junction. It was very similar to Las Vegas. Every direction promised endless possibilities. Continue reading →

True story:

Eons ago, when I had become a very bad person in a very bad place, I was out to “outbad” the bad people.

In a twist of ironic fate, a frail old man who was being taken advantage of by the bad people I was trying to “outbad”, mistook my bad actions for an act of heroism.

Thinking I was a noble heroine, the old man gently cupped my face with both of his palms, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “You’re a beautiful creature, what are you doing in this place?” I was startled by the gesture. What an unusual thing to say!

Although I could not see directly for myself what he was seeing, his expression revealed the image. Then, as though hypnotized, I walked away from that place. Not because of a sudden wave of guilt, mind you—but because that “beautiful creature” he saw, told me “I’m better than you”. So I said, here, hold my beer.

I’ve been trying to “outbetter” that bitch since then.

#DeiahEra #MyDeiahDays

As a programmer, I believe, an AI will never be self-aware.

An AI is nothing but a script that pulls from a database when certain conditions are met. No matter how big that database gets and no matter how complex the conditions were, the AI will not gain consciousness.

To believe otherwise is like making a handful of goo and thinking that if you make that same goo the size of our planet it will all of a sudden gain consciousness. You don’t have to be a programmer to know that’s illogical. If it didn’t work on a small scale, it will not work on a larger scale. Continue reading →

Beneath the tough, thorny and cold facade, mired in chaotic, dark mess of regrets, traumas and unresolved issues… is my mother.

Broken as can be, still she tried, with all her might, she tried to be good. But reality can’t be denied, she can’t change her form. She’s beaten and molded to a certain shape, she can’t escape.

Inside her, is my mother, longing to hold me. Inside me is a daughter longing to hold her.

The Sea is calling for me again and the breeze is tempting me. My feet says stay here and grow your roots for once. My heart says, you do not belong here, don’t get stuck. My brain tells them — shut up, you two, and let me sleep.

Once upon a time I felt lonely
With the unpredictable wind I gambled away certainty
For I greatly wondered all the things that could be
With hopes that I will get that one good thing that I might see

In my quest I found a box, worn and torn as could be
My friends told me, leave it be, it is where it should be
But I’m a dreamer and I imagined all the best it can be
I labored to dug it out and finally took it home with me Continue reading →

This sudden rush of awareness to my own existence happens to me from time to time and each episode last only for a few seconds to about 2 minutes. When this happens, it feels as though I was just born and awoke to realize I exist. And a billion questions that I can’t yet name just overwhelms my brain, and all I can really focus on is WHY?!!! Continue reading →

Unto eternity unmoulded I would give my hands,
And to untrodden fields assign my feet.
What joy is there in songs oft heard,
Whose tune the remembering ear arrests.
Ere the breath yields it to the wind?
My heart longs for what my heart conceives not,
And unto the unknown where memory dwells not,
I would command my spirit.
Oh, tempt me not with glory possessed,
And seek not to comfort me with your dream or mine,
For all that I am, and all that there is on earth,
And all that shall be, inviteth not my soul.

- The Earth Gods, 2nd Earth God – Kahlil Gibran