It took me more than a month after its release before I started watching Heartstopper because I knew it wasn’t going to be light entertainment. In fact, after finally seeing myself represented on screen, I hadn’t quite considered that when this piece of art imitated our complicated lives, it would closely resemble the simple tragedy of being born different.

In 2013, I interned with this middle-aged couple who worked to bring back Filipinos to their hometown after working overseas away from their families. They too had worked abroad for some time, in Italy, although they do not have children who they would have to leave behind. During the course of my internship, me and my two other classmates would drop by their house that was built to withstand weather changes, with vines growing in front of their window. They would cook pasta for us every single time, having brought home an Italian culture of hot pasta dinners. They are vegetarians but when they found out that we were feeding ourselves cereal for most of our stay in Manila, they went out of their way to cook us some pasta with beef.

Let me tell you a story about a young boy who grew up in a small town.

For those of you who haven’t been to a small town, imagine a place that is war-torn, reclusive and conservative. This is of course not entirely true of all small towns, like most loose, inaccurate generalizations about a place that people have not visited. But this boy, having been born and raised so far away from the big city, had felt that some undertones of these misconceptions happen to be true for some facets of his life.

I’ve been writing about pain for most of my life. I’ve written about loving and losing and transitioning between. I’ve written about people who have come and gone, the ones who stay and eventually leave. I’ve stopped writing many years ago because, in retrospect, there was less pain to discuss, driven away by a delusional belief that it was never coming back.

And so I am here, again, because after years of silence, the voices in my head have returned. And I’m afraid they will only get louder, the way the rain begins as patters and drops on the roof, but is the harbinger of thunder and lightning storms.

Coincidence, magical twist of fate, life lesson, the angry Hand of God—whatever your personal belief system tells you, my phone died right exactly when I landed at Changi Airport.

Now the big disappointment is I had prepared down to the last detail: my entire itinerary on my phone, an offline Google map of Singapore, the train system app, camera access, the whole shebang. But what the Fates, in their wretched conniving, failed to remember is that I survived the 90s all the way to Steve Jobs’ death without ever needing the complete convenience of the iPhone. I swore my life to unforeseen circumstances and no incorporeal being was about to halt my trip from the get-go (Cebu Pacific pun partially intended).