He found it strange how an old song that his dad always used to listen to on his cassette player had embedded itself so deeply into his brain that when he heard it again, it instantly took him to a time and place he could scarcely remember, a past that never was, memories that had faded into a story, into lore, more akin to fantastic fiction than to anything he had actually lived through.

Where was I? Where had I been? How did I get here? It wasn’t that he didn’t know the narrative of his life story. It was just that every time he rehearsed it in his mind, it sounded more and more like something that had happened to someone else, to someone perhaps who had never existed, just another character in some novel, existing only in his mind. He remembered the admonition of José Rizal, the martyred revolutionary who had stated that if you didn’t know where you came from, then you’d never figure out where you were going. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember, exactly. But he wondered if these were his memories, and even if they were, were they really memories, or just idealized narratives of events long passed, long ago divorced from any modicum of authenticity? And he started thinking, maybe I don’t want to know where I’m going, anyway, except that he knew, and of course, everyone knew. The end was obvious. Sooner or later, he would die. It was the getting there that was the complication, the thing that would remain mysterious and opaque so long as his memories continued to feel fake, as if they had been implanted all at once by some sinister band of conspirators.