I have a confession to make: I love this track. I remember sitting on the grass of Puerta del Parian in Intramuros listening to my friend shout the song's "I'm not sick but I'm not well. And I'm so hot 'cause I'm in hell" line as loud as he did and louder than I could. 24 years have passed since Flagpole Sitta's release. Its online popularity, relative to every other song from the 90s, is a sound indication for whether it will be remembered by our children's children.
Yesterday, just across the street from a coffee shop near the town square, someone caught my attention. A girl, no more than sixteen, though perhaps younger, appeared on the sidewalk with her dog. She wore a beautiful sundress, the kind that sways gently in the late afternoon breeze. She was striking — mixed race, maybe a European father and a Filipina mother — and there was something about her aura, the way she moved, that reminded me of a ballerina from a Degas painting. For a moment, I couldn’t quite place what it was that drew my gaze. I’m forty-six, married, a father of two. It’s been years since the sight of a stranger has stopped me mid-step. But there she was, and I felt a quick, disorienting pull — not love, not even lust in the conventional sense, but something more confusing. She walked into a nearby pizzeria, her dog trotting obediently beside her. I followed — not out of any conscious decision, but more out of curiosity, the kind that makes us read the ending of a story ev...
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