Traffic was terrible yesterday; it’s as if the whole world descended on South Luzon Expressway. I left at 4 pm and arrived at 7:30 pm. I was just in time for the live broadcast of our talk show, where I wore a gorilla mask before my high school friends revealed that I’m the newest co-host.

The episode is a Halloween special and of course I’ve had a lot of those scary stories of my own. Two of our viewers last night were primary witnesses to my scariest story, which even freaked out my co-hosts. “You know,” one of my co-hosts and friend said, “we’ve known you for decades and we don’t have any freaking idea about this side of you. If we only knew that you were one entire horror movie, we wouldn’t have gotten you as our vocalist.” It was in jest but I could feel he got freaked out.

This is why I don’t like horror movies. I’ve lived through them.

Anyway, I was asked by some of our high school classmates to contribute to the photo gallery that we will be using for the homecoming. So I rummaged through my boxes in my old room and scanned some of them.

Then I found some treasures.

Here’s our mommy cat, Puppy (yes, that’s the name we gave her) and her kitten, Kulet. They’re so lovely.

Our cats by the old computer. My dogs. I suddenly missed them. I wasn’t joking when I told my kids that at one point we had four dogs, three cats, and a tankful of fish.

I also unearthed short stories I wrote and some drawings from high school that survived.

I’ve almost forgotten that I used to draw and do watercolors. I should revisit this one of these days.