By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   To a love unspoken, but “spoken” in so many ways. You are loved, you will always be.   Where is your song now, my love?   We used to walk on the sand barefoot, and bare we felt, we understood the messages of the waves…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   FOR reasons I cannot explain, I miss Professor Doctor Jose David Lapuz. Professor Doctor is the appellation he wanted to be called, and he always wore his 4” x 6” United Nations (UN) ID over his black unironed suit. He had these sheets of paper…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   YESTERDAY, a friend of mine was talking about how she felt differently towards a former colleague. She remembered him as one who had a deprecating way of looking at things, but lately she said, she realized that it was probably because it was his way…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   I NORMALLY prefer the silence of the morning to inspire myself to write. Debussy competes with the silence at times, but not often. This morning I spontaneously played Debussy’s Clair de Lune, one of my favorites among his compositions. It is probably an impulse, or…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   MY niece, Ashang (Maria Graciela Pasalo Crespo), is going to Hokkaido. With today’s internet everyone knows where it is. She told me the weather is freezing out there, often below-zero degrees. She is being hired as an International Specialist Communication, which entails, “help business managing…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   Not love it was not love, I think, at first it was a recognition of something I owned lost in the papers on my table in the misery I tried to ease for others, or so I told myself not acknowledging my own there, in…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   WE used to visit a loved one in a temporary detention facility. In this place, a visitor can only see their friends or relatives through a picture on the mobile phone, which they can look at for less than a minute before the image was…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   SHE could not remember their faces. Their faces have changed with time, and the expression of their bodies changed with their mindsets and physical wellbeing. What is there to say after more than thirty years, barely touching each other’s lives or not touching at all…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   UNLIKE in jazz and rhythm and blues, where blue notes are used in spirituals, chants and rhymed narrative ballads, the blue note in poetry is melancholic, unrhymed and unsung. A silent, heart-rending wail living in between the verses, unable to shed tears.   The knowing…

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo   FOR someone who has not experienced addiction, it is easy to give advice and encouragement. It is easy, too, to condemn and ostracize. It is not, for one who had experienced the same. Lorenzo E. Gabutina posted this realization: “Recovery fr drug abduction is not…