𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

MARCH 14, 2025 – I was looking forward to seeing Intervals live, but the show got canceled. Bad weather, they said. The official excuse. San Francisco gets a little wind and suddenly everything falls apart. Whatever. We’d already paid for parking—nonrefundable, naturally—so we had to make something of the night. A quiet defeat.

The cold was the kind that crawls under your skin, settles in your bones, and makes you regret not wearing a better jacket. My husband and I walked through Union Square, past tourists gripping shopping bags with stiff, frozen fingers, past the street performers playing half-hearted sets for half-hearted tips. The city smelled like wet pavement and overpriced perfume. We ducked into Macy’s—not to shop, but in search of a restroom. The things you think about as you get older. I have money, but I won’t buy new clothes until I lose a significant amount of weight. A rule I made for myself. An unnecessary battle of willpower waged in a department store.

Eventually, we ended up at an Irish pub on O’Farrell, stepping into a riot of green and gold. St. Patrick’s Day weekend. The air thick with laughter, whiskey, and the kind of drunken camaraderie that only happens when people are three beers deep and pretending they have Irish heritage. It was loud, but not aggressively so. Everyone exactly where they needed to be. A well-cast scene in a film we hadn’t planned on starring in.

We ordered cocktails and wine—not out of indulgence, but out of necessity. Having Celiac Disease and psoriasis means no beer, no casual sips of stout. No leaning into the full experience. Gluten-free by obligation, not by choice. There’s nothing cute about it.

We had three hours to kill before retrieving the car. We spent half that at the bar, talking about nothing and everything. I tried to taste the wine, really taste it, but mostly I was waiting for my cocktail to water down into something more palatable. There’s something about sitting in a dimly lit bar with good company, surrounded by voices that blur into background music. It reminds you that time is still moving, even when you’re not paying attention.

I ordered an Oscar Wilde, because if I was going to embrace anything Irish, it would be their literature. A toast to aestheticism and beautiful self-destruction. The first sip took me back to my early twenties, to Manila, to the beer gardens and bars where I spent too many nights debating books and philosophy with people I’d never see again. There was something romantic about it back then—drunken intellectualism, the illusion of depth in a well-worded argument.

Drinking is an event now. A rare occasion. Coffee, though—that’s the real vice. The addiction I lean into. So naturally, the conversation drifted toward taste, toward memory, toward the things we consume and the ways we document our lives. Pictures, caffeine maps, receipts that prove we were here.

Everywhere I go, I take up space. I have mass. I exist. Tuesday, after the gym, I had coffee and a bagel with my husband—breakfast together, something that happens less than it should. He works nights. Coffee before bed is a bad idea, but we do it anyway. Some things aren’t about logic. Some things are about carving out a moment before the world takes over again.