Hayley Williams

Reality will break your heart
Survival will not be the hardest part
It’s keeping all your hopes alive
When all the rest of you has died

– 26, Paramore

• Ten years ago, I was in my carpool on the way to school, not quite awake, when CrushCrushCrush came on the radio and changed my life forever. From that moment on, music became one of the few things that offered me an escape, from feeling trapped inside the weighty loneliness+sadness combo that’s always been with me for as long as I can remember.
• I learned to play guitar and I tried to learn how to sing because I wanted to be like Hayley and turn sadness into something beautiful.
• I dyed my hair with red streaks in the summers and finally dyed it fully red in the first week of freshman year at college. It stayed that way the whole time I was in that university.
• I didn’t hear from them for so long. When Paramore came out it sounded so bizarre and somehow mostly meaningless to me that I thought it was all over.
• After years and years, my girlfriend puts their new album on Spotify while we’re making breakfast. “26” comes on, and suddenly I’m the kid again, knocked out of a lonely daydream by a voice saying she gets it, she still gets it.

Snapshots from lives I could have lived

This site is dead now. I find it rather appropriate that it died around the same time that part of my life ended – the part I lived in these places and had the same musings about random pretty girls on the train or stumbling along the avenue with their friends on Friday nights.

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Loneliness (L. Barcia)

It’s not like you imagine yourself / in the arms of every stranger you pass on the street – Just the ones that smile at you

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Missed Connections Manila 

Pink shirt, office attire, shoulder-length hair, tired eyes – w4w – LRT

You boarded at Araneta station, and I only noticed you because you were looking straight at me. Can I just say I’m sorry? I know it’s rude to stare but I couldn’t help it. You were facing me directly and you were looking at me (straight at me, okay, it was pretty unnerving) and half the time you had your mouth open in this sardonic “oh, you sweet summer child” smile. Was it so obvious that it was my first time to ride the train at night? Whenever I made a joke with my friend you would smile too, as if you heard it, as if you understood the inside jokes half the time. Did I amuse you? Your eyes were so tired, but it seemed as if you knew exactly what was going through my mind. I was glad when we both got off at Katipunan and I didn’t see you in the crush of people (also because we wandered like lost sheep for a while). You unnerve me, woman, and I would like to talk to you. Just to see what you would say.

Gift To My Readers: A Rude Printable

download this image, print it out and give it to your favorite pussy-toucher while I figure out which of my many rude and angry pieces to post next.