My favorite time of the evening is immediately after supper, when the pet birds have begun to slumber inside the the small loggia and I have the option of reading passages from a book in the silence of the studio lounge, or write passages with my dragon pen at my writing desk, or watch a DVD in my captain's cabin bedroom, or go up to the roof deck to sit on a park bench and watch the moon, the stars, and the dark, scudding clouds. Whichever the option--I will mention it here--I enjoy smoking cigarettes.

When I was but a little boy my father, then an army colonel, would take my youngest sister and me for a ride on evenings like this and have a chocolate drink at a place called V-Milk, on Quezon Avenue. There is something about little children that fathers hopelessly enjoy, as though they were trying to recapture their own childhood, a bond that suddenly changes when the children are no longer little and become adolescents.

During those evening rides I used to look out the car window and gaze with awe at the black clouds in the sky, moving and roiling like giant drops of ink dropped into water. They terrified me. I had this irrational notion that they would descend and take me. For many years they were the Shadow in my dreams. My father and my sister had no idea that I was mesmerized by those clouds at the time, and that they had such a terrible effect on me.

I no longer dream of giant clouds now. I guess, after the age of 40, one successfully confronts one's Shadow, though I cannot remember exactly how I did this, because every man's psyche is certain to repress that memory.