Chapter One: Long Overdue
Chapter One: Long Overdue
I didn't plan on coming home from a book fair wanting to write again. I planned on coming home with books. I did both.
We went to the Manila International Book Fair this year, and somewhere between the crowded aisles, the long lines for signings, and the stacks of books I definitely did not need but bought anyway, something shifted. Meeting author after author, hearing them talk about their work like it was the most natural thing in the world, I felt an old, familiar itch. The one I'd been politely ignoring for years.
The itch to write.
A confession
The last time I wrote regularly was in 2013. That's not a typo. That was more than a decade ago, long enough that some of the things I wrote back then now feel like they were written by a different person. (In fairness, they probably were.)
I used to keep blogs, and I genuinely loved it. Not because anyone was reading, but because writing there felt like breathing room. A blog isn't social media. Nobody is counting likes, nobody is scrolling past in half a second, and there's no pressure to be clever in under 280 characters. It's just a page, and whatever you want to put on it.
Somewhere along the way, life got busy, and I stopped. I kept telling myself I'd go back to it someday. Someday, as it turns out, is very good at staying in the future.
The bookmarks
Here's the other thing: memories don't wait for you. They come and go. A thought shows up at the worst possible time, I tell myself I'll remember it, and then I don't. I've lost more good stories that way than I'd like to admit.
So this blog is my attempt to stop losing them. Every post here is a chapter I folded down at some point and promised to come back to. Some will be memories, some will be thoughts I've been chewing on for years, and some will probably just be me figuring things out as I type.
Why now
I'm at a point in my life where things are starting to settle. Settling down, though, isn't the same as slowing down. I'm not stopping anything. If anything, it feels like the right time to start something I should never have put down in the first place.
Writing again isn't a new beginning so much as a long-overdue return.
So here it is. Chapter one.
Thanks for reading. Pull up a chair. There are a few more bookmarks where this came from.