Invisible Threads in Ani 42

A few weeks ago I got a message that my creative non-fiction piece, "Invisible Threads," will be published in the 42nd edition of Ani, the literary journal of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. I wrote about my experience of lockdown during COVID pandemic. Here's an excerpt. 

I opened the door to the small balcony of the 28-square meter condo unit to see what was going on. I shared the space with my older brother. He never asked me to contribute to the bills, realizing I had no money. I had just finished my subspecialty training in medical oncology two months ago. I was unemployed. I wanted to go home, but there were no commercial flights to Mindanao. I was locked down, trapped inside our space filled with our dead epidermis; stale air that got recycled each time we opened the windows; fresh, crumpled clothes that needed folding; new and secondhand books; and random academic clutter.

What greeted me outside were half-naked men in shorts, an interracial young couple who looked like TV personalities, mothers and grandmothers in daster, teenagers in basketball jerseys and oversized university t-shirts, and children with unspent energy, cheering, whistling, clanging their kitchen wares. In the subdued afternoon light, as the sun was about to set, I could observe my neighbors with greater clarity. There were human inhabitants to units I thought were empty. A twenty-something year-old man, who looked like a computer programmer, occupied the exact replica of our own place, except that it was in Tower 2. He was living a parallel existence and probably woke up to the same walls and cabinets, the same sliding door and brown sofa bed. Did he, I wondered, also have the washing machine inside the bathroom? I could make out the outlines of those who lived in Tower 1, which was built on the other end of the Olympic-sized pools. I looked for a classmate from med school who owned a place there. But I did not recognize any of the people I saw, did not know them by name, because this was Metro Manila, where neighbors in condominium units were bound to be strangers to one another. But that day, outside our balconies, we were knit together by a common, invisible thread and the realization that we were all in this together. In the act of banging our pots and pans, we were willing ourselves to hope.