Fragments of the Quiet Mind

sometimes, letting go doesn’t happen with a bang. it’s a slow fade-out, like your wifi signal dropping in the middle of a zoom call. this is your faux guide to vanishing gracefully—because who says being forgotten can’t be an art form? Step 1: Respond only in lowercase. no punctuation. no enthusiasm. just the emotional range of a potato. they’ll ask “are you okay?” and you’ll say “lol yeah” every message reads like it was typed from beneath a blanket of emotional detachment. you’re emotionally open the way a gas station bathroom is ‘open’—technically, yes, but no one’s excited to check. eventually, people stop expecting depth. or joy. or… replies. you become the human version of an autocorrect error. forgettable. soft. lowercase You’re basically elevator music now—heard, ignored, and emotionally skipped. Step 2: Exit group chats like a ghost with commitment issues. Don’t announce it. Just slowly react less. Heart-react a meme 3 days late. Laugh at a joke that’s clearly ...

Let’s begin with the obvious: some of us were simply built different. And by different, I mean wired to fall in love with people who treat us like foot rugs from NOVO—slightly discounted, questionably stitched, and always replaceable. You'd think we’d aim for warmth, tenderness, a hint of decency. But no. Our emotional GPS reroutes straight to the nearest emotionally unavailable person, preferably with a tragic backstory and 13 unread messages from us. We love them because they don’t clap when we win, they don’t check if we ate, and they only reply with “k.” In short, ideal partner material . Psych majors call it anxious attachment. Your tita calls it “ kulang ka lang sa palo .” But we know the truth: it’s probably our inner child cosplaying as a martyr. Some of us were not raised with affection; we were raised with conditional love and jokes that hurt a little too specifically during family reunions. We say things like: “but I see their potential” or  “they’re just going throu...

Mercury Retrograde—if you’ve ever scrolled through Facebook or overheard a group chat, you know it’s the ultimate cosmic scapegoat. The planet that supposedly rewinds, messing up communication, technology, and even relationships. When things go wrong, it’s not your fault—it’s Mercury playing its tricks. At this point, accordingly, Mercury is in retrograde again. Which must be why I left my term paper in the dusty printer tray of an old computer shop where I had it printed. Why I mistakenly told my students that their exam is next Monday. Why I agreed to take a sideline job and design a layout at 10 PM while eating Lucky Me pancit canton and listening to a pirated System of a Down CD—submission due in three hours. It had to be Mercury. The stars. The cosmos. The planetary gods punishing me for believing I could survive on instant coffee and obligation. Because surely, it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault I forgot to save the updated Excel file and had to retype 87 names by cand...

There’s a quiet cruelty in beginnings without ends. Books left to gather dust, their pages folded in half like promises I couldn’t keep. Poems that start with fire but die in silence, suffocated by my own hesitation. Plans drawn in the dirt, erased by the wind before they could ever root. It’s not laziness, exactly. It’s more like a slow unraveling—each unfinished thing a wound that never fully scars. I wonder if the weight of what I never finish is heavier than what I see through to the end. Maybe it is. To start is to hope, but to not finish is to understand your limits—your fractures, your quiet surrender. I’m an expert at the halfway point, the “almost there,” the shadow of completion that never quite arrives. Because finishing means facing what I’ve become—a mosaic of broken intentions and fading dreams. Sometimes I think the parts I abandon tell more truth than the polished whole. The silence between chapters screams louder than any ending ever could. I’m not afraid of failu...