Always Forever: From the depths of sorrow begins a journey of hope. [Paperback]

The arthur tell a touching love story. It don't have dramatic storyline but it keeps me awake to finish it all night long. From how AD met Mikee, how they recognise each other and how ad follow his own path. It remind me how it feel when falling with love with someone.

The journey begins with a meticulously recorded account of the build-up to a relationship; one that holds our attention because we've all been that route and can vicariously relive our own experience through his. The vividly captured detail of Manila, on the eve of a Mr. Gay World contest, reinforces the verisimilitude of the narrative, and our interest escalates as we realise this is going to be less of a novel than the genuine article. It's about as contemporary as any tale can be. We follow much of the development of this trans-oceanic love affair via SMS text messaging, and we share the eagerness and aching thumbs of racing to tap out those sometimes inane sentences, the impatience for those replies and the effort of trying to read what's left unsaid between the lines. About halfway through, a sense of foreboding builds as we wonder if the angel wings tattooed on the back of the beloved are destined only to briefly brush this earth, but we draw consolation from the words of `Our Song' quoted at the book's beginning: `This song is not about loss, it's about gain'. A deeply personal and beautifully crafted memoir. - Peter Moss (author of The Singing Tree)

The main question this memoir left me is: did AD meet Mikee too late or just in time? From the blurb of the book, you know that Mikee is dead and that his lover AD is attending his funeral. You start the book thinking you will read about a passionate love story, boy meets and loves boy, they will live happily ever after but fate has other plans. In any case the feeling is, this is a long term couple that only death shall part... and instead you open the book and read this date: 10 March 2011. And it's now August 2012, and the book is already printed and released, so how is that possible?

AD is flying to Manila to attend the Mr. Gay World competition as web reporter and the first day, 10 March 2011, he meets Mike Francis, Francis for his foreign friends, Mikee for his family. I don't think AD likes Mikee at first, but there was something pulling him to the guy. As an epiphany, when AD sees Mikee's angel wings tattoo, he realized Mikee is the love of his life. He would do everything for living this story, even moving to Manila from Hong Kong. But then, on 26 May 2011, not even 3 months after they met, Mikee is dead, and AD is coping with the loss. Or not coping. The strange thing is that AD didn't really know Mikee until he is dead; while attending Mikee's funeral, he has the chance to meet Mikee's family and friends, to start to understand who Mikee really was and what he wanted from life. AD will also understand that Mikee's reticence to talk about their future together was since Mikee knew they didn't have a future together. AD is really a fatalist guy, very into spiritual things and dealing with your emotional side, so, strange as it sounds, he is accepting Mikee's death, what he is not accepting is that he, at first, doesn't understand what was the meaning of meeting Mikee. The aftermath of Mikee's death will give him the chance to grasp that meaning.

This memoir was written like an outpouring of emotions into papers. It's not perfect, sometime I wanted to tell AD, stop doing that, but that is the difference of memoirs and novels, memoir is life and it doesn't have a carefully planned plot, and you cannot chance an event since you don't like it.

If I have to be true, I have the feeling that AD and Mikee were not destined to be a long term couple. They were too different, in age, in culture, in social status, even in their beliefs. AD met Mikee for a reason, and you will understand it reading this book, but the reason was not a love story. Truth be told, AD and Mikee don't have neither the time to decide if there was or not a love story between them; at today, AD considers himself Mikee's husband, he adopts Mikee's surname, and he made Mikee's family his own. But I think AD will find love sooner or later, and Mikee will be always a cherished memory, or at least I hope for him.