A Trip to Tagaytay

(All pictures are my sister's. Because.)

Rooster

There was a chicken crossing the road.

It doesn’t exactly belong to anyone. Your sister, on an earlier visit, chased it around and took pictures of its brood of chicks strutting on pavement.

While your friends made the same jokes, you thought back on the story you once wrote, and snicker a little.

Birds and revolution don’t exactly mesh, do they?

Fog

It is two hours past midnight when you point it out to your best friend, and both of you stand up and look outside.

There’s no one around, not for miles, and the sole streetlamp paints the one neighboring, empty house in a yellow haze.

The smoke makes you both stare for a few seconds. And then your best friend turns away, and leaves you contemplating the chiaroscuro.

In your fertile, overactive imagination, you imagine a stranger emerging from the gloom.


Makahiya

Whenever you see these plants—so named for their shyness—you are compelled to crush them. To see them slowly close up beneath your rubber shoes.

This may or may not be indicative of your inherent violent tendencies.


Ants

Because of the chilled bottles of vodka and mudshake, half-finished packs of chips and biscuits, the uninvited guests come crawling to the living room. Groggily, you pick up the bits and dispose of the visible crumbs, and waddle—inebriated, half-full of alcohol and junk—to your place in the sofa.

You and your friends then proceed to yodel on the microphone.

Ants, you think, are lucky that they can’t hear you.


Flowers

Your mom’s a frustrated interior designer, you tell your friends as you enter the house. They take in the immaculate walls, the artfully placed furniture, wooden curlicues and curios, and agree.

Then they see the photos, and ooh and aah over snaps of vibrant flora.

Oh, we took that, you tell them. Me and my film sister.

You’re quick to add they’re mostly from your film sister. Because honestly, you suck as a photographer.