Dreaming of the Sea | Raissa Rivera Falgui | Short Stories

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As an adult, sadly, I have hardly ever been to the sea. Yet it seems because of my early acquaintance with it, it remains in my consciousness. In a decade when my children were young and I was never able to set foot on a beach, and hardly even came close to Manila Bay, I wrote four of the stories in this collection: “The Creation of the First Children”, “The Silence After the Storm”, “The Last of the Mermaids”, “Dreaming of the Sea”, and “Light in the Water.” “What the Wind Brought” was also begun in this period, though I was only able to finish it recently. I also wove the sea in other stories written around this time. An island as well as Manila
Bay figures in my Palanca-winning future fiction story “Virtual Center” and a boat race in my alternative alamat “The Sorceress Queen.” Much later, I used the sea as the setting for an unlikely summer romance, “Summer of Sand and Sea” published in Friend Zones.

Perhaps I was hungering for the sea, for my last beach trip was to Boracay several years before I married. But I finally took a day trip the year my youngest child was born, and afterward, I found myself able to begin expanding “What the Wind Brought” and was inspired to write “Dancing Across the Water” and “Sun and Moon” sometime later.