The Magazine of Dreams

     Memory is bound to cheat. But this is as fresh as tupig, the Ilokano rice cake, just out of the oven. The separation came last year when they made a collective decision in a place called Tribu Paraiso in Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines. Earlier, we walked away from them.
    We dreamed of TJ as the best Ilokano-English magazine in the imagined country of Amianan. A publication for young and old writers in the language. We did not have the money but we had the vision and the spirit  that would make it viable as a magazine, capable of paying its writers.
     There were two professional writers in the team. They were trained for many years in the so-called vineyards of journalism and creative writing. They were the best in the staff: the blogger and Errol Abrew, the writer from Caba, La Union.
     For at least five years, we sacrificed for the magazine and the organization--time, money, effort. Five years!
     For more than 60 issues of the magazine, we gave our best--we were the greatest producers of articles in the magazine. The writer from Caba burned the midnight oil for this ambition--he was the biggest contributor of poems, short fiction, essays.

What went wrong?

     We thought they were with us in the realization of this dream, this dream for writers and a linguistic tribe that has little history of reading and writing in their language.
     They, the leader and the lay-out artist, the old writer knew what they did.  
     How could they remove their two biggest contributors, their best talents?
     They knew what they did.  
      We could not understand why she, who proclaimed she was a good Christian, cursed us and wished us and Errol dead.
     And their followers swallowed hook, line and sinker what they told them about us.
     Estrella, the blogger told you everything.
      Yet we try to understand.
     We could have stumbled into a pit of snakes that walk upright.