Between the Empty Sky and the Congregation of Hands

The month arrives like a borrowed dress—bright at first glance, threadbare at the seams. December in the city is a costume party for weather that never learned consistency: heat still clings to skin like an accusation, but the evenings carry a new sharpness, as if the year were holding its breath before folding itself away. People hang lights and string promises on houses that will not survive another storm season unscathed. We collect our souvenirs in pockets and wallets; we press them flat between our palms the way you press petals into books you know you'll never open again. 

Send me your flowers of your December, the Mazzy Star lyric loops in my head, and I open my hands to see what I've been carrying. 

In my city, the flowers are not always flowers. 

Sometimes they are the folded receipts in my wallet that somehow became a map—small paper trails of where I've been, who I called when things collapsed, the transactions that mark the architecture of crisis. Sometimes they are the vendor's unchanged morning call, a kind of punctuation that says: the world is still turning, you are still here. Sometimes they are the bruise on my shin from where the vehicle door caught me last week, a small violence I didn't mention to anyone because articulating minor damage feels like admitting defeat. 

These are the petals I collect: brittle, fragrant in their own way, each carrying a pigment of the year that stained us. 

Candy wine—that impossible sweetness Mazzy Star promises—sits beside these flowers like a glass with a cracked rim. It tastes of celebration and something fermented too long in the dark. We toast with it anyway because ritual is stubborn and survival demands ceremony. In December, the city offers both saccharine and rot without apology: the holiday display costs more than months of wages while outside, children sell flower garlands at stoplights to make pocket money. The duality is not metaphor. It is architecture. One side illuminates; the other feeds on the electricity those lights require. 

This year, my bouquet includes a commute. 

Perhaps there is no truer inventory of a life than the routes you repeat. The early morning transit has become my hymn in a minor key—the engine coughs exhaust like a throat clearing after a long silence, and plastic icons hang from the rearview mirror like punctuation marks in a prayer no one remembers the words to. We lean against one another because the city designed us for proximity whether we wanted it or not, because life has little room for the fiction of personal space. 

I have learned to measure my year by landmarks: the cracked billboard near the university that someone keeps trying to repair, the overpass where a woman sells rice porridge every single morning regardless of weather, the intersection where the vehicle broke down last March and we all stood in traffic together like 

accidental family. The map is full of ironies. Buy Hope, one sign declares. Buy Success, insists another. As if these things come in installments, as if desire could be monetized and packaged.

So when the prompt asks what I planted in January, I think of a seed that germinated in low light: curiosity. 

A child of underfunded education and secondhand books, I fed curiosity with whatever was available— lectures downloaded during borrowed internet access, a telescope aimed at stars that remained magnificently indifferent, a library chair that smelled like someone else's concentration and hope. Curiosity grew into ritual. It became the reason I rose for the early route even when my body begged otherwise, when depression made the ceiling feel oppressive, when my reflection looked wrong in ways I couldn't articulate. 

There is a political economy to our desires. We are taught—softly at first, then with increasing volume— which flowers are marketable and which remain weeds. A degree becomes more valuable than the hands that fed you through childhood. A clean résumé outlives poetry. I once believed that if I collected enough credentials, the city would finally be generous. But the city is not a person. It is a system with preferences. It favors those who already possess light, who already occupy the right addresses, whose families already speak the language of institutional access. 

My January seeds were stubborn anyway: a mixture of reading and audacity, of pressing questions into humid air and watching to see if anyone answered. I asked myself what I actually wanted versus what I was instructed to want. I asked what survival looked like when you stopped performing it for an audience. I asked if there was a version of success that didn't require becoming unrecognizable to the people who raised you. 

By July, those seedlings were taller but the heat had cracked their stems. 

A wave of increases came through the neighborhood like late frost; a relative fell ill and the hospital took what savings we'd managed to scrape together. The healthcare system, undermaintained and overwhelmed, could only do so much. The rest became a calculus of debt, of whose needs came first, of phone calls made at midnight to relatives we'd lost touch with years ago. 

I kept watering my seeds anyway: a stolen hour to read, an essay typed on my phone between shifts, organizing efforts even when I barely had enough for myself. The plants bent toward any small brightness —a teacher's unexpected encouragement, a borrowed book's footnote that named an idea I hadn't known how to articulate, the way a stranger once said thank you with such genuine warmth it felt like absolution. 

The midyear harvest felt like scraping the bottom of a jar: enough to continue, never enough to rest. December asks the same of me but softer now: to make a small altar of what persisted. 

The flowers that survived are not trophies or social media moments. They are the things you wouldn't admit protect you—the neighbor who shares food during power outages, the calloused hands that grip the wheel like scripture, the way a book you read years ago finds you again at a used shop, like a compass recalibrating. These are the petals I press between the pages of memory. 

I include the song lyrics I kept returning to: "I want to believe / Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing." The words became a kind of secular hymn after I stopped being able to pretend faith just to maintain family peace. I must have listened a hundred times during transit, looking for satellites, looking for signs, finding only the same gray sky and the same strangers' faces reflected in windows. But here's what I learned: feeling nothing in the sky doesn't mean feeling nothing on the ground. The divine might be absent, but the person beside you passing coins backward is real. The system might be indifferent, but the small rebellions—the shared passwords, the extra rice given without asking—those are also real. 

There is truth in the rot, too. 

I realized, watching my family negotiate with collectors, that rot is not merely natural decay but something deliberately engineered. The spoiled fruit is not nature's fault—it's produced by a market that requires waste to justify extraction, that needs people drowning to sell them expensive rafts. In December, the rot becomes visible: the public school repurposed for other interests, the children's park that became private development, the promises that evaporated the moment votes were counted. 

We decorate around these losses with lights and expect them to hold the shape of cheer. We are extraordinarily skilled at performing joy while standing in decay. 

The lyric asks: "Send me your dreams of your candy wine." 

My dreams taste like cheap sweet wine with a stick of cinnamon added to simulate luxury. They are counterfeits of a life I was never meant to afford. Still, I imagine them: 

A table long enough to seat every person I have loved and every stranger who once offered me their seat, their bread, their moment of grace. I imagine a city rebuilt with public benches and water fountains that function, with clinics that don't require you to choose between medicine and meals. I imagine a transit system that runs on dignity instead of the fumes of underpaid labor and engines held together by prayer and improvisation. I imagine my mother not needing to calculate the cost of rice against electricity. I imagine myself looking in a mirror and not immediately cataloging flaws, not performing the ritual of self disgust I learned so young it feels like instinct. 

Dreams are not charity or escapism. They are blueprints. They are the seeds we smuggle into pavement cracks and tend when no one is watching, when the system insists nothing will grow there. 

December's sweetness is not the sugar of corporate advertisements but the radical possibility that small plans become policy, that organizing shifts power, that people who were told they don't matter start believing they do. A neighborhood that pools resources to bypass predatory systems is candy wine: fermented necessity, sharp and sweet because people made it themselves, because they refused to wait for permission or salvation. 

I will not pretend the year ends in miracles. 

For many of us, December is a ledger reviewed, closed, then reopened in January with compounding interest. But closure is not the only meaningful act. There is radical tenderness in closing the door on bad news and opening a book instead. There is insurgent hope in sharing food when power fails, in teaching a neighbor's child to read, in showing up to the early morning route even when your brain insists you're too broken to deserve light. 

These are minor revolutions that do not require institutional permission.

So I collect my evidence: the burnt edges of last year's application I couldn't accept because work was necessary; the hospital bracelet I kept from a relative's admission; the note where I scribbled I will not let this city make me smaller and folded into my wallet like a talisman. I gather the songs I listened to on loop —the one about satellites included, but also others, the entire albums playing like secular rosaries. 

I collect moments of accidental grace: the driver who refused my fare when I was visibly breaking, the student who lent me an umbrella and never asked for its return, the friend who texted asking if I was alive at two in the morning and meant it as care not judgment, the stranger who said "keep fighting" when I looked like I was drowning. 

December teaches me to name dualities without faking reconciliation. 

The petals and the rot coexist, each honest in its register. The candy wine reveals its complexity with each sip: the first tastes like celebration, the second reveals the yeast, the third makes you aware of your own teeth. All three facts are true. All three are ours. 

I think about rursus—the Latin root meaning backward, in return, again. The year closes its fist around what we planted, what survived, what died despite our best efforts. And then we open our hands again. We return. Not because we've healed or because the city has changed or because the systems that crush us have suddenly developed a conscience. We return because ritual is resistance, because repetition carves grooves into stone, because showing up is itself a form of faith—not in a sky or a deity, but in the stubborn persistence of small acts compounding over time. 

In the end, I will send my flowers of December not as pristine bouquets but as evidence: lists of people who refused erasure, images of hands passing coins in transit, recordings of songs hummed in darkness during outages, receipts from mutual aid efforts, screenshots of organizing conversations at three in the morning when none of us could sleep. 

I will package my candy wine, too—a recipe scribbled on a receipt, ingredients mixed with cinnamon and the memory of bodies that built this city but will never own it, fermented in the dark with equal parts hope and fury. 

I will mail them to myself, to friends, to strangers who once offered a seat or a word or a moment of recognition. Because testimony is documentation. Because we need proof that we were here, that we tried, that we built something in the cracks they said were unplantable. 

The year closes. I close my hand around petals, around a glass of candy wine I will sip slowly, tasting both the sweet and the fermented rot. 

I do not expect miracles. I expect return. I expect to wake early and take the morning transit again, to pass coins backward, to sit pressed against strangers who are also trying to survive. I expect to keep planting seeds in January even though the soil is cracked and the odds are against germination. I expect to keep looking at the empty sky and then looking down at the ground where the congregation gathers. 

Rursus—again, in return, turned back. 

Send me your flowers, Mazzy Star asks.

I will send mine. You keep yours. We will trade seeds come January, will press them into each other's palms like promises, like contraband, like the beginning of something we don't yet have language to name but recognize by its weight. 

The ritual continues. The candy wine ferments. The flowers—broken, beautiful, stubborn—bloom in December despite everything, because of everything, again.

A Fever in my Veins 

First published in the Thieving Magpie. Republished with permission of the author

I. 

There is a point, just before dawn, when the whole city inhales. Not the clean inhale of a well-rested body, but the shallow, trembling kind a person takes after crying all night. Manila at four-thirty in the morning feels like that—breathing from somewhere bruised, exhausted, and still determined to exist. 

I used to think this hour belonged to bakers and security guards and the occasional heartbroken lover walking home on tired legs, but in the past year, it’s become my hour too. The hour when my obsession wakes before I do, taps insistently against the walls of my skull, and demands to be fed. 

They call it many things—fixation, passion, mania, drive—but the Urdu word I found online at midnight one night fits best: Fitoor. 

An obsession so consuming even the gods are frightened of it. 

Before I learned the word, I only knew the sensation: the feeling of being pulled by the spine toward something I couldn’t name yet, something hot, metallic, relentless. Some people fall in love with another person. I fell in love with the act of creating—words, worlds, narratives that swallowed me whole. 

It started small. Two paragraphs scribbled on the back of a pharmacy receipt between MRT stops. A sentence I couldn’t stop rewriting during class. A metaphor lodged in my throat like a fishbone until I got home to spit it onto paper. 

But the fever grew. 

Fitoor never stays small. 

Soon I was staying up until three a.m. writing. Then four. Then sunrise. I stopped waiting for inspiration like polite artists do. I hunted it down. I cracked my knuckles over keyboards sticky with spilled coffee. I slept with notebooks beside my pillow. I hid drafts in the Notes app like they were secret lovers. I ignored messages, skipped meals, lied to friends and teachers and myself. 

Do you want to live, or do you want to write something that feels alive? 

Fitoor asks the question, and it never accepts silence. 

Eventually I learned to fear the mornings when I woke up with a sentence halfway formed inside my mouth, the way you fear waking with someone’s name on your tongue long after they’ve left. 

It was never just writing. 

It was possession. 

And I was willing. 

II.

I grew up in a house where silence was safer than honesty. Conversations exploded without warning. Love was given out in rationed teaspoons. Words were currency, and I spent mine carefully. 

Maybe that’s where my obsession began—this hunger to create a world where language didn’t wound but illuminated. A world where my voice didn’t ricochet against walls already full of someone else’s anger. A world where I could say what I needed to say without flinching first. 

I didn’t have the language for that kind of longing as a child. All I had were the fragments: a mother counting coins at midnight, a father whose footsteps grew quieter every year, a grandmother whose sighs were longer than her sentences. Fitoor grows very easily in people who learn early that desire is safer on paper than in the mouth. 

But the truth is: obsession is not born from emptiness alone—sometimes it’s born in the moments where you feel something too intensely and have nowhere to put it. 

I remember the first time I realized writing could be a container for feeling. I was twelve, crying in the school bathroom, cheeks burning from embarrassment I couldn’t even articulate. I grabbed a pad of tissue, stole a teacher’s pen, and wrote one line: 

I wish I could unzip my chest and let the hurt walk out. 

It wasn’t a good line. But it gave shape to something I thought was shapeless. And once you learn how to turn pain into language, you stop being satisfied with swallowing it. 

Some kids get addicted to computer games. Some to attention. Some to perfection. I got addicted to articulation. 

To turning ache into architecture. 

That’s the thing with obsession—it doesn’t choose gently. It chooses the person already full of cracks, because cracks let the fever seep through faster. 

III. 

But like all devotions, mine was a double-edged blade. 

There were days I chased metaphors like they were oxygen. I wrote until my fingers cramped, until my eyes burned, until my back ached from leaning over my laptop in the dark. I skipped meals. Forgot appointments. Woke up with paragraphs pressed into my cheek from falling asleep on open notebooks. 

The first time someone asked, “Are you okay?” I said yes. 

The second time, I laughed. 

The third time, I finally heard myself say, “I don’t know how to stop.” 

Because I didn’t.

Because I didn’t want to. 

There is a thrill in obsession that people don’t talk about—how it makes you feel chosen by something larger than yourself. How it makes you feel important in a way ordinary life rarely does. How it convinces you that your suffering is noble, even necessary. 

But obsession, like fire, doesn’t care what fuel it burns. 

My grades slipped. My appetite went missing. My mother stopped knocking before entering my room; the light under my door at 3 AM scared her. My body grew thin in places I didn’t expect. My friends learned not to ask why I cancelled plans last minute—they knew I was “writing,” said with the same tone they’d use for “relapse.” 

But through all that, I kept convincing myself: 

This is devotion. 

This is passion. 

This is what great artists do. 

It sounded romantic at first. A little tragic. A little glamorous. Suffering for art—the world loves that story. 

But I was not Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton or Kafka. I was a teenager with a cracked phone screen, a cheap pen addiction, and the stubborn belief that if I stopped writing, the whole fragile infrastructure inside me would collapse. 

IV. 

The worst part wasn’t the exhaustion or the loneliness or even the declining health. 

The worst part was when I began to lose the ability to tell the difference between writing because I loved it and writing because I was afraid of who I was without it. 

Sometimes I wondered if I had built a god out of my art—one that demanded offerings, sacrifices, sleepless nights. I didn’t believe in religion anymore, but I prayed to my craft the way desperate people pray to saints. I asked it for salvation. I asked it for identity. I asked it for reasons to keep breathing on the days when I felt hollow. 

I didn’t realize Fitoor had teeth until I began waking up with bruised ribs from sleeping in strange positions at my desk. Until my wrists tingled with a numbness I didn’t have words for. Until I found myself staring at the blinking cursor, heartbeat fast, breath thin, whispering: 

Please don’t leave me today. 

Please come back.

Please give me something. 

It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t artistic. 

It was dependence dressed up as genius. 

But obsession rarely reveals its ugliest form until you’ve already handed it your pulse. 

V. 

The turning point came quietly—nothing cinematic, nothing dramatic. 

It was just a rainy afternoon in September. I was at a small café, alone, rewriting the same paragraph for the fifteenth time. I had two hours of sleep, a migraine blooming behind my right eye, and a cup of coffee that had gone cold. 

A little girl at the next table was drawing with a pen that kept skipping. She frowned, swiped the pen against her palm, and when it still didn’t work, she slammed it down with all the fury of a child betrayed by stationery. 

Her mother picked up the pen, clicked it twice, tested it on a napkin, and handed it back. “Try again,” she said gently. 

The little girl drew one line. Two. Three. Then smiled. 

I don’t know why that moment cracked something inside me. Maybe because the simplicity of it—try again—felt like a revelation. Maybe because I hadn’t been gentle with myself in months. Maybe because the little girl reminded me of who I used to be before obsession became scripture. 

I realized then that I had been treating my creativity like a broken machine—forcing it, punishing it, resenting it. I had forgotten how to be patient with my craft the way that mother was patient with her daughter. 

I hadn’t lost writing. I had lost tenderness. 

I walked home through the rain that afternoon without rushing. I let the wetness cling to my clothes, seep into my skin, cool the fever that had been burning for months. 

And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel pulled by something. 

I felt present. 

VI. 

I didn’t stop writing.

I never could. 

But I began to relearn it—slowly, carefully, without violence. 

Now, when I write, I do it with the lights on, not in the choking darkness at two in the morning. I eat before starting. I drink water. I let my friends pull me out of my room. I sleep, sometimes reluctantly, but I sleep. 

And I learned something strange along the way: 

Fitoor doesn’t disappear when you stop feeding it recklessly. 

It evolves. 

Instead of devouring me, it sits beside me. 

Instead of demanding, it waits. 

Instead of burning me from the inside, it warms. 

Obsession becomes devotion. 

Devotion becomes discipline. 

Discipline becomes a kind of love. 

Not the violent, consuming love I once worshipped. 

A steadier one. 

A survivable one. 

VII. 

I used to think passion required self-destruction—that the more I suffered, the more authentic my art became. That everything meaningful had to hurt. That all brilliance came from breaking. 

But obsession is not proof of brilliance. 

Suffering is not the entry fee to meaning. 

And burnout is not a personality trait. 

Now I believe something different: 

What we return to, again and again, even without the fever—that is devotion. 

What grows with us instead of against us—that is passion. 

What we can put down without losing ourselves, and pick up again with tenderness—that is love.

Fitoor is not the flame that consumes. 

It is the spark that stays. 

VIII. 

If I had to define my passion now, I’d say it’s no longer a god demanding sacrifice. It’s a companion—one I treat with care, caution, and reverence. 

I write because it steadies me, not because it saves me. 

Because it helps me understand myself, not erase myself. 

Because it is the one thing in my life that has stayed with me through every version of myself—child, teenager, almost-adult, and whatever comes next. 

I still lose sleep sometimes. I still chase metaphors. I still have nights where I write until the walls feel like they’re tilting. 

But I no longer mistake the fever for the work. 

I no longer worship the burn more than the warmth. 

Some obsessions kill you. 

Some obsessions transform you. 

Some obsessions teach you that the line between the two is razor-thin, and loving something deeply requires learning how not to let it devour you. 

This is my Fitoor. 

Not the violent blaze it once was— 

but the quiet, steady fire I now choose, again and again, to tend. 

IX. 

And still, there are mornings when the city inhales at 4:30 and I wake with a sentence pressing behind my eyes. 

I no longer panic. 

I no longer chase it like prey. 

I sit up slowly, stretch my sore wrists, and write it down—not as offering, not as surrender, but as partnership.

The sun rises. 

The fever settles. 

The world continues. 

And so do I. 

Fitoor, yes. 

But survivable. 

But lived. 

But chosen. 

And in choosing it gently this time, I think— finally— 

I choose myself too.