by Ibardaloza Ray Pana
This piece is part of Cicada’s spring/summer 2026 issue, titled abandonment and reconciliation.
In wine, truth is supposed to come out of you, sweetly oozing out of your loosened yet swollen tongue. But that night, truth was instead held in the drink aptly named 春江花月夜, foamy and taffy flavored. You floated across the piss-stained streets of Mong Kok, buzzed, your English thick with accent. You lean close onto your friend’s arm, hoping he doesn’t pick any of that up.
“Wanna keep going?”
Neither of you bothered to glance at the taxis going by behind you, not when the neon hues above you danced across your flushed features, humming with the promise of excitement. Light and dumb, you spun around his thin body like a makeshift telephone pole, despite the weariness tugging at your soles. It was your first night out together, after all. So, at the excuse of waiting for the earliest train to start up, you yelped through a yawn that was plotting to take you apart,
“Let’s do another round!”
*
You were rarely desired as a man. Only in times of desperation, like when a couple made advances towards you a year ago, at the crummy smoking area of 新都城中心’s balcony. That couple being your friend and their foreign exchange student boyfriend, the planes above you droning on when they said his name. You’ve already forgotten it. All you could remember was how he held himself against you—how they looked at one another, then straight back at you. Though the couple fondly watched you squirm behind squinted lashes, what was laced in their eyes was not desire but a craving, not unlike the short-lived thrill of nicotine. In that moment, you ignored the way their laughter blanketed the purring engines below on streets, and accepted their shared cigarette—happily mixing spit with people you can’t call yours.
*
You wake up coughing at night. Your inflamed throat only allows you a reprieve of twenty minutes before it hinges your jaw awake and wrenches it apart. Whenever your body trickles off to slumber, only then your liver would decide to protest, heart hammering alongside in tandem, as if escape to the waking life is any sweeter than forgotten dreams. Tar sticks at your dry teeth and buries into your gums like a parasitic worm. With blind feet you search for your sandals and step into the bleary light. Two fingers cling onto a dangling water bottle, one that’s equally as scratched and worn as you are, you pray your roommate doesn’t wake up to your inane, muffled coughs.
You barely talk to your roommate, or your family for that matter. One out of introversion, and the other out of—whatever daughters have to deal with nowadays. For every new piercing that decorates your body, for every time you stay out on weekday nights, paragraphs of WhatsApp texts bombard your screen.
(1/3/26) Papa
There is no one eats dinner until 11pm unless partying or drinking alcohol. Your lifestyle is too liberated than most of the family members. Even piercing of nose and too many earrings looks so…
…
…
…. i don’t know how to describe 9:32PM
(12/20/25) Papa
You’ve been on the way home for a long time 11:22PM
You ignore my calls when u don’t need us. 11:25PM
You are feeling entitled 11:25PM
Maybe u enjoy much outside than our home 11:27PM
And at times, your mother likes to shoot in ridiculous texts too.
(1/3/26) Mama
what rbu doinh ,so vold outside late slready, ist ur routibe everyday at form 11:06PM
dorm 11:06PM
*
Sometimes, you wish they knew how much of a good daughter you tried to be, no matter how much you crop your hair, get new piercings, or walk with your arms broad, like your Tita—now Tito. You tried. Just as they were searching for their now 21-year-old child past dinnertime, they were trying their best with their foreign English. Though you would take their oddly spaced commas and naive spellings any day over the AI-generated birthday messages they had sent you. You wish your parents could accept you the same way, the day you tell them you are not their daughter.
You are the average height of an adult Filipino woman—the average of both such averages in 2024 and 2025 actually, but carry the guilt of an outsider invading their homes. Your skin, ridden in wispy unshaven hair and dotted injection scars, is pale enough to be considered a foreigner, yet tan enough to make narrow-minded Chinese kids exclaim, 「你係咪美國人？唔係 … 非洲人？唔係 … 噢！你係咪外星人呀？」 Like squash bugs, dozens of fleshy, red cardamom pods bundle atop your skin, begging to be scratched open by your chipped nails. Your flesh prays that if you itch hard enough, your insides will finally spill out, and you can make them see who you are. Instead, you ignore ointment and pick at inflamed skin.
Your tongue ties around itself at Cantonese consonants when you answer, tone lilting and childish because you know the person that’s listening will never take you seriously. You do the same in English. But what you believe is soft and inviting, is just you grasping at last straws. You think maybe if you spoke femininely enough, you can outstand the six-year-long legal wait for hormonal therapy in Hong Kong. But nothing ever goes your way. Despite wishing so badly to be loved as a daughter, you never even bothered to learn Tagalog, having only picked up your exasperated parents’ curses, in a language that feels so familiar yet so far away.
You used to triumph over every Chinese kid in local government schools; winning trophies for being the best at English was simply a given. So, when the rabbit relaxes in the middle of the race, the next Chinese turtle comes snatching up that award. Back then, you always thought with a killer’s intent, I have to be better than these people. But like all gifted kids, in this case, someone who happens to have English as their mother tongue—you burnt out and gave less of a shit. Especially when your own local friends’ eyes already glow at your foreign-accented English, believing that it is somehow leagues better than their own accent; you can’t help but wonder how deserving of a prize that could be. Thus, as the apathetic rabbit, you decidedly accepted those lazy trophies, willing to take anything you can get.
*
You flirt with straight men, which somehow always ended up being westernised Asians. You choose to ignore the implications of that. It is fine, because to be fair, your other usual options are straight girls with boyfriends or rebounds, falsely confessing to you about how much they would love to fall in love with you if they were lesbians. You think the confusion surrounding your androgyny has led people to feel sexually confused too. A heterosexual man confessed his love for you to the moon, for two entire years—despite knowing what you were. You remember how, under the guise of mutual innocent love, you would share a box of cheap Tic Tacs with the boy, breathing the citrus mint in through each other’s mouths. Crashing onto concrete pillars that reeked of engine smoke and cigarette ash, he kissed you like he was savouring the last piece of candy in the entire world. You begin to think that you should have cannibalised him right then and there, eaten his molten eyes and bit off his lax, syrupy tongue. Maybe then your greatest passive mistakes can be calcified with carnauba wax and crushed.
No? You don’t think so? Then let me put this plain and simply: you wish, you wish, and you wish, to be something greater yet plainer than what you can be. You think every queer bone in your body has to disintegrate into ashes and bury into rivers, boats, and moonshine, but if still nobody loves you then, you wouldn’t know what to do, and God knows what you want to do.
When you reach your 20s, you will realise that you will never be truly desired. You will want your parents to see you grown, yet still wish on counted planes that pass through your circled fingers, silently praying for someone—anyone to hear your desperate wishes, only being honest in hushed conversations with a God you don’t even believe in. These superstitious beliefs only make you think that if your knees hit the wood hard enough for these people, then maybe, maybe they would give something back. With your head bowed and hands outstretched, you reach for anything grounded—
Only to find yourself in the piss-stained alleyways of Mong Kok again. When you wake up, throat inflamed, yet sidled with warmth—you sob, and you slur. Because your dull and unused tongue only knows how to betray you at a time like this.
“I don’t know! Life’s just so bleak, man… Isso bleak!… I didnevenow if I could make it till Christmas…”
By then, sleeved arms wrap around you and a part of you knows that he would never be so bold, not without downing a seventh drink. It’s only under these strange circumstances that you were able to see him this vulnerable with you. But you can’t be bothered to care about any of that now, not when he says:
“I know it feels impossible, but you gotta live, man! … You gotta keep going.”
By the end of your cheap rail shot, truth was laid out in blurred, wet beads. Your light feet tacked onto cracked concrete ground, you held onto each other within the quiet thrum of dawning streets. Maybe then, you think, you can make it a little longer past this Christmas.
Ibardaloza Ray Pana is a Filipino writer based in Hong Kong. He is a final year BA undergraduate at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and primarily writes about queerness, desire, and identity.