I’m hunched over a folding table at Enabling Arts. Marker ink on my first zine spread is still wet; it mingles with the deep-fried scent drifting off the Jollibee chicken and fries I’ve saved for later. Snip, snip—someone’s scissors keep a heartbeat beside me. On the page, I’ve written: i feel guilty while others suffer in quiet rooms. but grief and joy can live together after Lapu Lapu Day. Zine making, I’m learning, is a space where comfort and agitation coexist.

“Our goal is to break the design flaw,” says Daniel Hernandez Pinto, bassist for the Vancouver-based band, Empanadas Ilegales. Hernanadez Pinto and Daniel Ruiz, two members of their nine piece ensemble, had met me virtually; I was sun soaked in Jalisco practicing my Spanish when we arranged to meet. They made me miss Vancouver, meeting me with the kind of warmth needed in a city still raining on the precipice of June.