1 | the heights above Waimanalo

I was 21 and, like all many people that age, felt invincible, immortal even — on that trail at the very edge of the escarpment above Waimanālo, its sheer green face dropping hundreds of feet down to the village below then the strip of land before the ocean’s vasty darkblue self — I imagined myself a mountain-goat, impervious to the heights, sure-footed running and jumping from rock to rock, in microseconds determining whether it would hold a body and not crumble away taking its foolish human to its certain death far below through intervening space before the rooted certainty of tree, bramble, ground, earth, gravity. I still vividly remember the ecstasy and insouciance of it all, the feeling that my foot would never slip, the rock would always abide, hence it was not possible to die; not in the cards to lose oneself to mortality or the nerveless acts of fate itself, a thing I both believed in and completely ignored at the same instant. “Bahala na” literally a notion lived, through the vagaries of cultural spacetime and the immense heedlessness of history itself, in the face of which one was a nothing, neither a singularity nor an absence.

2 | the day of the typhoon in Diliman

Like a few years earlier, before me and my family immigrated to America, by the skin of our teeth eluding the clutch of the Marcos dictatorship and its heinous but stupidly blind self, unaware that someone was actually escaping, someone who could speak truth to power and not care that death itself might intervene — like my mother’s brush-strokes on the cover art of that national journal depicting a laughing Jesus; or my father’s voice from the pulpits he stood upon questioning the legitimacy of a corrupt president, one of his own tribe of Ilokanos no less; or like my own writing, still in potentia, but already formed by the seeds of a political awakening. I think it was powered by running, quite literally, embodied in that moment when Fidel and I ran under a lashing typhoon through the Oval at U.P. Diliman, the branches and limbs of those spreading acacia trees crashing all around us, with the atmospheric violence of howling winds, near-horizontal sheets of rain, deadly lightning and deafening thunder… surviving that, and with ecstatic aplomb, all else that would come to pass in later years could only be a validation of living through that moment.

3 | hit by the jeepney along Rizal Street

A decade or so before that, another moment that contained the stark probability of permanent extinguishment… I was around 6 or 7 at the time, walking home from school, somewhere along Anda or Rizal Street (I can’t recall clearly which one, now)… and I was struck by a passenger jeepney, whose driver didn’t see my small self crossing the road, perhaps darting across it out of haste or distractedness. It was also raining that time, in the months of the monsoon. They said I caromed off the vehicle’s front face into a canal; perhaps the driver braked at the last instant, erasing what should have been a fatal strike. Maybe that moment planted the seed of my sense of invulnerability: to happenstance, to gravity, to time itself; or maybe it was just a stroke of dumb luck. Either way, I would go on to make my largely anonymous way through the world, from year to passing year, through the veritable dozens of them, and even through the eras of human folly, wisdom, derangement, righteousness, and grace.

4 | running in Ai’ea, Moanalua Valley, Kilauea

Soon after we immigrated to America, landing on O’ahu, Hawaii — where the dictator we were fleeing would ironically find himself in abject exile — I continued to evolve as a runner, and found a running partner, who called himself Tim Lone Hawk as I embraced the name Lloyd Running Shadow. The sapling of awakening, in this particular country, growing upon the ground-grim reality of indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific Islands, with whom we deeply identified; me a Filipino who could easily pass as Navajo or Hawaiian, Tim a hapa Japanese-Caucasian who was otherwise Incan or Oglala Sioux in countenance and spirit. We ran the foothill roads at Ai’ea and the paths on the heights above the town, the trails through Moanalua Valley where once we turned around when we heard the sound of invisible drums and a white dog standing at the far end of a dry streambed, just sitting there watching us with a curious, distance-held gaze. We knew not to cross Tutu Pele when she was around. Some time later we offered the apology of our running feet at a 10K race which wound through the lava fields inside the crater at Kilauea, now vanished, braided through with new lava and old longing.

5 | the dark sidewalk at Fort Mason

It was on the lampless sidewalk on the Fort Mason side of broad Bay Street, near midnight a couple weeks ago. I was walking along late on the arc of that evening’s long constitutional, listening to a podcast and then doing the mindless thing people in this era do: taking my phone and looking into it to scroll for some nugget of information elsewhere, a thought triggered by something someone said in the audio. So I didn’t see nor heed the sudden appearance of that tree root I knew to be there by day but was oblivious to by night, and especially not on this dark patch of the park. I tripped, fell heavily to my side on the ground in a way I am not accustomed to: the way a body in its seventh decade will, called by inexorable gravity and sudden unmoored-ness in space. There was pain, but nothing broken, it seemed, after gingerly feeling for such things. Hoped for a mere muscle pull and not a broken rib. The evidence of the following days suggested something in between; discomfort, dull aches persisting, nothing sharp and suggestive. A bit like the passage of my time itself, the canonical toll of the bell its years: clanging or muted, resonant or oppressive, but always telling — a sound rising and falling, tuned to the tidal pull of the neighbor moon, or the wild energy of the distant sun.