It was a quiet morning in Baguio, I'm off to my usual morning run, when I heard a child speaking broken Ilocano with a cadence that didn’t quite belong here. His mother, wrapped in layers too thin for the mountain cold, held his hand too tightly—like someone afraid of losing something else. I didn’t ask where they came from. I didn’t need to. You can recognize dislocation even in silence. It has a certain weight. Like a suitcase packed with the wrong memories. We talk about refugees as if they all cross oceans, but some just cross rivers, or barbed wire, or city lines. And some don’t even move at all—they’re just slowly pushed out of the center of their own lives. Not every exile is geographic. Sometimes, it’s spiritual. Cultural. Bureaucratic. We measure displacement in kilometers, but it is better measured in lost language, eroded rituals, in the way children forget how to name the trees their ancestors worshipped. What makes a home isn’t the walls, but the ability to imagine ...
I dwell in the spaces where shadows meet light, where questions outnumber answers. A seeker of truths buried deep, I write to unearth what lies beneath the surface. In the chaos, I find my voice. In the silence, I find myself.