The first time I met the Negroni was at a fresh, neon-lit college bar. I asked the bartender for their strongest drink. “We have a drink made entirely of alcohol,” she said. Without knowing what it was, I ordered it. It was ridiculously cheap for such an elegant drink. Every time I returned to that bar, I ordered it. Every time a friend would ask for a drink suggestion, I suggested it. Three Negronis in, I’d be tipsy — by the fifth, I’d have teleported elsewhere. It was only later on that I learned how to celebrate its nuanced flavors.

…

The Katipunan Avenue I once knew was only about a kilometers long. At one end is a fast food restaurant and at the other is a commercial building. On the north-bound side of the avenue is a university and across it are restaurants, condominiums, and shops. When I was a student there I only walked along this one kilometer line. I was young, soft, and unadventurous. I only rarely visited the better restaurants in the backstreets. I often avoided hangouts, preferring instead to go home early to avoid the afternoon jeepney rush. I also had no interest in the seedier…

We have a problem, Kalas told me. I had just arrived at the place he told me to go: it was an expensive neon bar in a palace filled with pretty young faces. They all looked like rich kids — you could look at any one of them and know that they smelled good. What’s the problem? I asked Kalas, worried that, this time, he might be serious. The problem is — he handed me a shot glass and poured freezing, sludge-like liqueur in it — the problem is that you look depressingly sober. Drink up, my friend.

This was…

When I was younger, I dreamed of a fast, dizzying lifestyle filled with beauty and fizz. Soon, I was living it. Drinking enhanced my charisma, and I made many friends. Alcohol was laughter, romance and experience. I lived, for months, in perpetual night, dancing with shadows. When the morning came and people stopped coming to parties, it was just as though I was rudely awakened. I had been living in a dream, and when I tried to recreate it in reality, it was disappointing, and it made me look pathetic. I was inviting people who had already moved on. I…

The goal of my life is to become an aesthetic. My great work will be posthumous, published when an obsessive scholar collects my literature into a book of essential writings. I want to be romanticized as a philosopher-poet. That being said, I want to be read not because of my tight prose, but because of how my words resonate and linger. When someone describes the smell of old wood and sweet liquor, I want them to also imagine books I’ve written, laying on a mahogany desk, alongside religious figurines and a cigar case. On the wall is a framed mandala…

Don’t go on dates when you’ve just broken up with someone, Kalas warned me. He took a slow, deliberate sip from his coffee and I just watched him. He has this way of talking that makes you keep listening even when he’s not saying anything. I coped badly when Frances and I broke up, he continued; I went on three dating apps and frantically booked dates with strangers I met online. I went on at least one date for every day of the week. There was a time I even flirted with three people in one night. I was running…

I enter my dreams through a train. Outside, it is raining. In the distance, like a shimmering illusion, is a city. I am greeted by a cat, who looks at me with an upside-down smile. They lead me by the hand, past sleepy cafes and empty convenience stores. The folks that people my dream look like when you stare at a painting long enough and the figures seem to start moving. We float right through this strange crowd. The cat drops me off at a building on the corner of two avenues and whispers telepathically that I live there. I…

When Kalas asks you where you are, he only wants to know if you’re nearby, so he can invite you to drink with him. This is his miserable reputation: that he is always the first to get drunk and the last to leave. I hadn’t seen him in a while and had, not long ago, thought of him while I was out drinking with friends. When I got his text before noon, I thought it was an invitation for lunch. But when I arrived at the place, I realized that it was actually a bar. Unsurprisingly, he was the only…