I WRITE this in the dark. The Christmas lights have dimmed. The stars are dead. The silence is a scream. It is suicide hour, witching hour. At three in the morning the phone will not ring, the prince will never come and all the right words live in other writers? pens. I am told to write of hope and the New Year, but sometimes words write themselves, and they come without bells jingling or the echo of carols.

I used to think that inside every man was an instinct for good, that all that was needed was to show the truth, to call it out, and then the world would come raging down, a winged battalion with flashing eyes and silver swords. This is the truth, I tell you. The emperor has no clothes. The general is a murderer. The senator is a hypocrite. The judge is a bigot. The left-wing revolutionaries are waltzing with the tyrants, the dead woman had a bullet in the eye, and the father of nine died alive buried in a pile of earth. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and still the madding crowd goes waltzing on.

See the tycoons in their skyscrapers. See the giggling girl in short pink satin stumble out of the club at dawn. See the blank-eyed masses with their free campaign T-shirts. It is as if chaos is the standard by which we live, as if mass murder were an act of God or politics or, in the words of an airport taxi driver, those murdering Muslims in the South.

In the last year, 464 died in a typhoon called ?Ondoy.? Fires swept over the country, volcanoes came to life. It was a year when teachers were beheaded, priests kidnapped, ferries collided, film critics murdered and bodies left on bridges to rot inside cardboard boxes.

In Maguindanao, 57 people, including 31 journalists, were shot on the road to Cotabato. Some were raped, some were mutilated and some were buried still alive.

Homosexuality became an act of immorality, rape became a woman?s fault and thousands of women died at childbirth just as the Church called the use of condoms abortion.

Martial law was declared. It was a year when a contingent of devotees hung on to presidential coattails in a junket to the United States, spending millions on meals and limousines. Unemployment rose to 14 million in the first quarter of 2009, 3.7 million families went hungry.

Compared to the massacre in Ampatuan or the body count of Ondoy, it is an improvement to say ?only 10? died, as was the case in the RCBC Bank in Cabuyao, Laguna last May, when robbers pumped bullets into the bodies of 55-year-old bank manager Isagani Pastor, his staff of eight and a depositor named Ferdinand Antonio who happened to come in early.

It is an improvement only until we allow ourselves to accept every one of the dead among the ?only 10? had believed they would be awake at the dawn of 2010. It is true that we cannot give them all faces; we cannot allow them all names; we cannot, for example, think of the fact that Ferdinand Antonio left behind two round-faced children and a weeping sister.

To allow it is to carry that staggering guilt of knowing that the hundreds of thousands lost and dead and homeless are not numbers but people, each an individual, each with bruises and stories and once-bright eyes.

It is only when the storm drowns Manila, when the dead boy is a friend with Japanese eyes, when the massacred reporter writes for the same paper you once read, when reality comes uncomfortably close, that we allow ourselves to care. Then we reach for the words. Unspeakable, we say. Unimaginable. But it is imaginable, it should have been spoken of, it happened before, to someone else whose name we didn?t want to know.

When mud-coated bodies floated up after Ondoy, we were all Filipinos. During those two brutal weeks, every man was a brother, every child a daughter, every lost home our home, because it happened to us too. And yet there were 20 storms in 2009, not just Ondoy, killing 1,238 people, destroying 395,000 houses and causing damage of close to P45 billion. But it was not our story; it was not mine, not until the water swallowed our home north of the metro and with it my capacity to call anything unimaginable.

It is the same imagination that plagues Joan Teodoro, when she thinks of the journalist father dying under the ground, bleeding from bullets.

It should have been the imagination that plagued us, when the first rumors of private armies and chainsaw massacres rose from the fields of Maguindanao. It should plague us now, when we look at the private armies in Pampanga and Sultan Kudarat and Basilan, of those in Sulu, in Lanao, in Samar and Masbate and Nueva Ecija, and Abra.

It is a heavy thing, this imagination, that ?fatal capacity? that Frederick Buechner calls feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else?s skin, the imagination babbling at three in the morning, whispering demands at Christmas parties, demanding that we move, speak, act, uncomfortable and uncontrollable, a fanged monster living in your head.

The toddler named Franco who liked cars and danced on his high chair could have been your Franco, it could have been your four-year-old baby who drowned in Batangas one sunny day in June.

The boy named Alexis who loved films and words and hardbound books could have been your Alexis, it could have been your brother or cousin or friend who was shot at his Times Street home with his girl. Journalist Jimmy Cabillo of Midland Review could have been your Jimmy, it could have been your father who fell to his knees in Sitio Masalay and begged Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. to please, please let him live.

We cannot resist what we cannot imagine. So we tell our stories, we will say no, even if the battalion does not come and the men in power toss us lies in paper bags. We speak because if we do not, we offer our consent with our silence.

This is what I want to say. The emperor has no clothes. The general is a murderer. The senator is a hypocrite. The judge is a bigot. The left-wing revolutionaries are waltzing with the tyrants, the dead woman had a bullet in the eye, and the father of nine died alive buried in a pile of earth.

I do not believe in raging angels. I do not believe in perfect kings. I do not believe that the fact Lito Lapid is ranked fourth in the reelection surveys after six years of refusing any pretension of usefulness in the Senate means that we are going to hell, only that our humanity demands our occasional stupidity. I believe in a people willing to risk imagination, in men and women who will not go gently into the dying light. I believe being alive in this country is an accident of circumstance, and because it is, it demands those who survive to live as human beings.

I?ll tell you what I see when I close my eyes. I see the arm of a yellow backhoe grubbing for dirt on a low hill in a small town. There is a shoe, a leg, and then a body drops from the metal claw, what was once a man bloated and soiled, and in my mind?s eye I see it falling at my feet, see my sneakers stepping quickly back. I see it now because I saw it once, and I write about it, again and again, sometimes because I am trying to forget, but most of the time because I am afraid I will.

To a new year.