ear Ma’am Ophie,
The problem with writing in the second person is the tendency to become too sentimental. You hate that. I hate that, too. That was one of the first things I learned from you. The difference between sentiment and sentimental. There’s always the fright- ful power of the word “you,” the absence of ambiguity in the direct address. Believe me, I had tried writing otherwise, and by the time you read this, this will have resulted into an embar- rassing pile of revisions. I will have to apologize in advance for the cloying frequency by which the word appears in this text. By no means was I supposed to like you. Look, I mean, you were the dean of the college—not to mention a looming, towering, lumbering behemoth of Philippine literature whose entire oeuvre constitutes some of the finest poems in English regardless of gender, era, nationality, and whatever middling
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