This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.
The Boy The Girl
The Rat The Rabbit
and the Last Magic Days
Chapbook, 2018
Republic of Carnage:
Three Horror Stories
For the Way We Live Now
Chapbook, 2018
Bamboo Girls:
Stories and Poems
From a Forgotten Life
Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2018
Don't Tell Anyone:
Literary Smut
With Shakira Andrea Sison
Pride Press / Anvil Publishing, 2017
Cupful of Anger,
Bottle Full of Smoke:
The Stories of
Jose V. Montebon Jr.
Silliman Writers Series, 2017
First Sight of Snow
and Other Stories
Encounters Chapbook Series
Et Al Books, 2014
Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop
Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Handulantaw: Celebrating 50 Years of Culture and the Arts in Silliman
Tao Foundation and Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee, 2013
Inday Goes About Her Day
Locsin Books, 2012
Beautiful Accidents: Stories
University of the Philippines Press, 2011
Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror
Anvil, 2011
Old Movies and Other Stories
National Commission for Culture
and the Arts, 2006
FutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures
Sands and Coral, 2003
Nominated for Best Anthology
2004 National Book Awards
8:28 PM |
September of Five Years
I took this photo of you some months ago, in the makeshift studio that was my apartment's small library. Didn't we love that impromptu shoot? And how the pictures seemed to come out so well? The secret, I guess, is to photograph a subject one is intimate with. Look at that face. I've been staring at that face for five years now. There is no end for my fascination, it seems. I can study this face for hours, and find new nuances for every single known expression. Sometimes I also wonder where five years go. Has it been that long? Was there really a time when I didn't know you from Adam, when my days did not begin with an evocation of your name? I still think back to that late afternoon, in September 2003, when we agreed to meet for ice cream. Oh, baby, that was some ice cream indeed. People joke, of course, that five years is actually fifteen in queer years -- which must make us an aberration, an amusement to some, a model of longevity for others. We laugh at the joke, but we know too well the old bumps in the road to take in readily that fairy tale. We talk about this sometimes: how, for example, we never really thought about the long years, or what it took to stay true. We have learned through the years not to rest easy, both of us. This thing takes work. Patience, too. And a supreme form of understanding for human frailty. All held together by the sheer truth that five years will not be five years if what is between us is not real. That even when we sometimes get blindsided by stress and work, by damning responsibilities, by the constant temptations preying from everywhere, we know what's real -- and ultimately we know that this is the only thing that matters.
