"the first impulse" is a privilege of distance and memory

my unfiltered thoughts, starting 2026 by reading "the first impulse" by laurel flores fantauzzo

we often imagine that the closer we are to a situation, the easier it is to talk about it. this book flips that impulse, so to speak, on its head. distance has its own clarity, carves out a more vivid space to be filled with more contradictions and complexities than we know what to do with.

the story follows the untimely demise of film critics and journalists in love, Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc. but it’s not a sensationalised story that lingers on the gory details. it is an exploration of the cultural forces that bound these two distinct individuals together; not just the love of film, though that lingers on the surface and threads its way through each line.

but Fantauzzo is able to capture something even more enigmatic, an essence that Tioseco ironically would have appreciated had he been alive: she bears witness to the cultural forces that fragment each person’s identity, the weight of social expectations, the historical cloud that looms over every move they make.

this is a recounting of a border-crossing, tragic love story, but it is also an ode to the Philippines left reeling from the harsh winds of Spanish, American and Japanese colonial pursuits. the Philippines struggling for order and progress amid the relentless, gauche depletion of a dictator and his bloody regime. the Philippines trying to challenge its people’s shortening attention span and capacity for patience amid the impossibility of progress. the Philippines and its uncrossable chasm between classes, the dangling hope of social mobility, and the unspoken threat of keeping the peace at any cost.

“The First Impulse” is a testament to the untapped power of Filipino creatives to convey taboo topics around grief, legacy, responsibility and embodiment. it is a celebration of the Filipino film industry, the vocation of teaching, and of the written word itself—because, honestly, Fantauzzo has an incisive yet coaxing writing style that taps into the current beneath Tioseco’s own.

more than that, this book makes me feel like a metal detector over some hidden treasure i’ve not yet articulated the contours of. it elucidates that persistent desire to write a book of my own, the roots of which i stumbled upon in a magazine almost three years ago.

i feel like an impostor, traipsing into the most glimmering shards of a heartbreak that echoes one i’ve known and recovered from. but something, deep down, tells me to keep going. something tells me these people, whose devastation i can only parse in elephant-hide pieces, will finally rest when i put pen to paper.

that audacity is something else, no? but it stands, looking over my shoulder anyway. their pain reaches out through time and space to me, trying to find a safe place to land once and for all. there are so many reasons not to get started, to write this desire off as a misguided projection, as wishful thinking, as a clever party trick.

but Fantauzzo’s recollection of strangers’ lives and deaths makes me feel less alone, less boastful and more empowered. if she had ignored the pull towards the stories of Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, the Philippine literary scene would have been robbed of a genuinely journalistic, deeply human artefact. my own life would have felt incomplete, undisturbed on the surface but for a brief ripple in time.

we cannot always see where the thread of creativity will lead us. all we can do is follow it with all the care and generosity we can muster up, which is always more than we feel capable of at the time.

yet when it comes to true crime stories like this one, when the pain is fresh and reverberating even nearly two decades on, one has to confront the limitations of entertainment and inspiration.

it’s easy to slip into the details that feel larger than life, the shocking point A leading to a partially-dissolved point B. but, again, “The First Impulse” is not just about a crime. it is about an unyielding devotion to the motherland that continues to disappoint us, the parents whose obligations weigh heavily on us, the romantic partnerships we can’t explain but instinctively click into, the myriad possibilities for expressing our capacity for connection with each other.

it is, in the end, through and through, at the beginning, about love. because what else is there to talk about, anyway?