(sketch from the Sigbin)

nostalgia became the fuel for a conversation that attempted to capture nine years worth of lives lived and lessons learned. friends from way back, back when the world was simpler, and smiles still did not have any reservations behind them...

recollections of places and people and how everything was. overlapping memories; a collage of the present and the past. everything set in that little place we now hesitate to call home, but will never be different from us; no matter what we become, no matter what becomes of it.

to people who have oriented their entire lives to cities, it's a curious place. rural legends rage as furious as its urban counterparts. here you find stories of political power plays between local landlord-politicians versus the all-consuming powers of the syokoys and the merpeople. dopplegangers taking shapes of neighbors and a certain caped crusader. hogs wearing sandals and roaming the streets at night.

and to think that some of the supposed perpetrators and main characters of the stories are of distant blood, a stamp of strangeness that lingers wherever i go.

i do not believe in these fairy tales, but neither can i ignore people who swear that they were witnesses of these weird happenings. for them that little town has become a borderworld for the supernatural demons and demigods...

strange that everywhere i go, i seem to end up in similar places; borderworlds of the bizarre and the beautiful. instead of the supernatural, i now encounter all-too-real demigods and just-as-ferocious demons in this place where i now call home.

but perhaps the strangest thing, above everything else, is that in this world that i now tread i am, for some, a demigod passing through hastily with fierce passion. still for others, i am the demon who withers lives with a touch, with a word.