Fragments of the Quiet Mind

Araw ng mga Bayani is the last Monday in August. You blink and it’s gone. One day. One flag emoji. Maybe a parade if you're in the right city or have a cousin in the military. Maybe not even that. But June? June is a full-blown event. It’s loud and layered and bright enough to make even the grocery store feel like it’s trying to come out. Thirty whole days of rainbow merch, playlists, themed drinks, hashtags, and heated arguments online. And I started wondering—not accusing, not judging, just… wondering. Why does the nation give a day to the people who died for its freedom… but a whole month to those still trying to live in it? I’m not saying Pride shouldn’t exist. I think there’s something beautiful about people finally being allowed to celebrate parts of themselves that used to get them hurt—or worse, made invisible. We live in a world that once forced queerness underground, so when it comes out dancing, yeah, let it dance. But it still feels strange that the people who died...

  There’s a particular kind of silence that doesn't come from the absence of sound—but from the absence of being noticed . I started sensing it in passing moments. Someone would ask, “Have we met?” even though we had. I'd smile politely, pretend I hadn’t noticed. Or I’d speak in a group and the conversation would just move on, like my words were smoke that didn’t catch. It's not dramatic. It's not cruel. It just is . Like static. Like walking into a room and not shifting its air. I don’t think anyone meant to forget me. I just think I made it easy. Maybe it was a defense. Maybe if I became nobody in particular, I wouldn’t have to explain the contradictions in me—the softness I kept folding away, the chaos I never learned how to speak, the loneliness I wore like a neutral color. Being undefined was safer than being misunderstood. But invisibility has its own weight. A quiet grief. You start wondering if your life is happening to someone else. If you’re just borrowin...

There are stories we shouldn't have to write. Only silences we’re forced to translate. I read about a fire today.  A mother. Three children. A house that turned into a question no one knows how to answer. The most dangerous thing about depression is not how loud it screams, but how politely it knocks. It comes dressed like fatigue. Like waiting. Like trying one more time.  Until one day, it forgets to knock—and burns the door down instead. No one chooses to become unrecognizable. But pain does that. Not in sudden, cinematic moments—but in hours no one sees. When a woman looks in the mirror and no longer sees a mother, a daughter, a wife—just a thing that hurts too loudly to exist quietly. And what do we do? We wait. We say, “Let’s talk tomorrow.” We say, “Kaya mo ‘yan.” We say, “Magdasal ka.” And then we look away. We build systems that take reports but not responsibility. We believe in due process but not in urgency. We leave people at the edge and call it patie...

It wasn’t supposed to feel this heavy. We were just moving out. A change of address. A few boxes. A goodbye email. That’s what the memo said. But the soul doesn’t read memos. The decision came down with the usual cold efficiency — political maneuvering dressed as “strategy.” Someone upstairs, removed the scent of our coffee or the soft glow of kindness at the front desk, decided we were better off elsewhere. More aligned. More brand-consistent. Whatever that means. I packed my things slowly. Not because there were many — a mug, some folders, a forgotten plant — but because everything in that space had stories tangled in it. The smile of the security guard who knew when you were too quiet. The landlord who once fixed the busted ceiling fan on a Sunday. The hallway where I paced during panic attacks and found calm in the hum of old fluorescent lights. How do you walk away from a place that remembers you when you don’t want to remember yourself? People call it “just a space.” T...

There’s something charming—almost poetic—about being politely asked to step into your own firing line. “Courtesy resignations,” they call it. Like being handed a thank-you note before your eviction. Like being broken up with via scented stationery. It’s governance by ghosting—but with manners. And oh, what timing. The king’s popularity is dipping, and suddenly, it’s the court’s fault the crowd is booing. Not the decisions, not the mirror—just the reflections. So now it’s time for the grand reshuffle. Not a purge, mind you, just a “realignment.” Because we wouldn’t want to sound tyrannical—we just want results. And nothing says “results” quite like rearranging the same deck chairs on a sinking narrative. Let’s be clear: this is not about personalities, the King insists. It’s about “performance.” But only after the performance failed to get a standing ovation. Strange how urgency is always retroactive. When the people whispered discontent, it was politics as usual. But when they scre...

There are goodbyes that shatter, and then there are silences that echo. Not all endings announce themselves. Some just slip quietly into the background — like static you stop noticing until you realize the music’s been gone for a while. No slammed doors, no explanations. Just a gradual erasure, like watching ink fade from a letter you read too many times. You keep checking your phone, not because you expect a message, but because some part of you still hopes silence can be broken like a fever. Unspoken words hang heavier than shouted ones. The things we never said take on lives of their own — mutating into doubts, rewrites, what-ifs. You rehearse arguments you'll never have, play both sides until you forget which one was yours. And isn’t that the cruelty of silence? That it offers no shape to mourn, no moment to collapse against? Just a formless absence where meaning used to live. Closure is a myth we invented to survive unfinished stories. But silence — silence tells you there was...

No one warns you that choosing a toothbrush can feel like choosing a version of yourself. Aisle 7. Fluorescent lights. Hundreds of bristles staring back at you. Soft, medium, charcoal-infused, biodegradable. Every choice is a quiet manifesto: who you’ve been, who you’re becoming, who you quietly promised to be after your last breakdown. You don’t say this aloud, of course. You just stand there, pretending to read labels, but really you’re grieving something. Maybe time. We outgrow people the same way we outgrow objects — silently, then all at once. The old brush sits in your bathroom like a relic—worn out, bent at the neck, holding morning rituals and midnight guilt. Throwing it away feels cruel. Not because it’s useful, but because it knew you when you weren’t. It was there the morning after you said too much. The night you didn’t say enough. It held silence between your teeth. Even the most ordinary objects become archives when you’re paying attention. And this new one—this seem...

  Way back in college, I found myself drawn to book sales at Centermall, that old mall in Baguio with creaky floors and stubborn echoes. I’d roam those cramped aisles searching for something steady, something that might outlast me. But grief—grief rewrites the rules. It taught me that what I thought was permanent was never really mine to hold. When loss came, it didn’t just take someone from me. It tore apart the foundations I built around them—the coffee cups we shared, the songs that used to stitch moments together, the streets that once felt like home. Everything I thought was solid softened and shifted beneath my feet. I realized memory isn’t a monument; it’s water—always flowing, impossible to grip. The silence after the calls stopped was the first crack. It wasn’t just absence; it was a rupture in my story. Grief isn’t a moment—it’s a slow dismantling of certainty. The past I trusted became a stranger, and I had to learn how to live with someone who knew me less than I thou...

Monday mornings feel like waking up in the aftermath of something unspeakable. The alarm goes off—not like a gentle chime, but more like a siren dragging you out of some place deeper than sleep. You don’t wake up so much as surface, disoriented, the bed a kind of shipwreck you were clinging to all night. The sheets are twisted like torn sails. Your body, waterlogged with dreams and dread, doesn't move. Not yet. It’s not just fatigue. There’s a kind of existential drag, as if the very structure of the week is built to resist your being. You stare at the ceiling like it might offer a reason to rise. None comes. The world beyond the blanket is already demanding something from you—your time, your answers, your alignment with a schedule you didn’t invent but are somehow bound to. The idea that Monday is a “fresh start” feels like a corporate myth. Nothing about it is fresh. What you feel is continuity—the heavy kind. Everything you didn’t finish last week is still there, waiting, as if...

I woke up at 3 a.m. to go to the CR. Nothing dramatic. No nightmare. No existential crisis—just the bladder doing its biological thing. But on the way back, as I passed through the hallway, I noticed it again. That chair. The one in the corner. Beige. Woven arms. Slightly tilted, as if someone had just stood up and forgotten to fix it. Except no one ever sits there. It’s weird, right? How a chair—something built for sitting—can spend its whole life untouched. Like it was assigned a role and then silently exiled from it. That chair doesn’t serve a function anymore. It’s a fixture. A witness. A relic. And in the half-light of 3 a.m., it didn’t look lonely. It looked… patient. That’s when it hit me. What if it wasn’t just a chair? What if it was absorbing things? Regrets. Thoughts no one says out loud. That creeping, subtle unease you feel when your life is technically okay but still feels misaligned. Maybe that’s why no one sits there. Maybe that’s where those quiet feelings go to...

This is w here the light breaks just to drown. Hope isn’t some pretty thing. It’s a slow burn that keeps you awake at night, fooling you with a whisper, “Maybe this time.” It digs its claws in, even when everything screams you’re done. Hope’s the hook you can’t shake, even when it’s tearing you apart from the inside. Despair doesn’t wait politely. It crashes in like a storm, cold and sharp, and it doesn’t care if you’re ready or not. It doesn’t dance with hope—they fight. It’s brutal, ugly. Despair wants to swallow everything whole, leaves no room for mercy. There’s no peace between them. It’s a war you didn’t sign up for, but you live it every damn day—grasping for that fragile flicker, even as the darkness tightens around your throat. You hold hope like a lifeline but feel despair pulling the knot tighter. No balance. No graceful dance. Just a mess of broken promises and shattered dreams. Hope keeps you chasing ghosts; despair waits, patient, knowing it will win. And the worst p...

On the freedom of not knowing where you're going—and not caring who sees. We walk as if we’re always headed somewhere. As if movement itself is the purpose. But what if not moving was the truest form of existence? To be lost is not to be absent, but to be fully present in the world’s unspoken chaos. It is the only place where you can truly hear yourself. There’s an odd kind of peace in being directionless. The world demands a map, a plan, a goal. But in that silence, that unknown, I feel a truth that others miss— that the journey itself is the destination . We rush toward an illusion, pretending that destination will give us meaning, but the truth is, meaning is found only in the wandering. When I stand in the middle of a crowd, I am a whisper among shouts. I am invisible and, yet, I have never been more real. People are too busy trying to place their feet on the right path, but I’m learning the path is nothing more than an arbitrary line drawn by those who fear getting lost. ...

The 2025 elections just ended. Not with fireworks, not with riots—just the quiet unraveling of yet another chapter in our nation’s long and complicated dance with democracy. There’s something different in the air this time. Something subtle, like the way dusk falls before you even realize the day is gone. You feel it before you name it: a shift. Not seismic, perhaps not even visible to the untrained eye. But there, like a whisper at the edge of a crowded room. People have grown wiser. And no, this isn’t naive optimism. It’s not the kind of blind faith that wears campaign colors and chants slogans. It’s the kind of wisdom that comes from repeated heartbreak—from choosing hope too many times, only to be betrayed by men in suits and smiles. From believing in change only to see it morph into the same old trapo politics dressed in newer fonts. “Pain is a brutal but effective teacher—especially in a country where memory is often the first casualty of every election cycle.” But maybe ...

The flame does not mourn the wood it consumes—it becomes light There is something holy about the way fire teaches. It consumes with no apology, no restraint, and in doing so, it does not simply destroy—it transforms. There is something in us that wants to be the flame, but we fear the cost: the loss of the structure we once were, the certainty of form, the memory of being whole before ignition. We speak often of growth as something soft, something nurturing. But the flame teaches otherwise. It teaches that growth may be combustion. That to evolve, we must let parts of ourselves burn—relationships, beliefs, comforts, even our former selves. The light we become is born of these necessary losses. Watch the candle. The wax does not survive the flame, and yet its purpose is fulfilled in disappearing. What if our own vanishing is a kind of arrival? What if obliteration is not the end, but the offering? The flame also teaches presence. It flickers, vulnerable to the winds around it, b...

W e are taught to seek healing as if it is an erasure. That once we "get better," the pain vanishes and the person we were before returns, whole and untouched. But I have never returned to anything. Only continued. Pain does not politely excuse itself when it's done with you. It lingers like smoke in the walls, reshaping the air you breathe. To heal, in the way most understand it, is to forget the fire. But what if you needed the fire? What if the pain was not a detour, but the road? I have grown not from resolution, but rupture. My becoming came through bloodied thresholds—through nights where sleep was a mercy I was denied, through mornings that greeted me with grief curled on my chest like a feral cat. I did not become wiser because I learned to numb it. I became wiser because I stayed awake through the storm, soaked and shivering, refusing to close my eyes. The world rewards polished survival. The tidy narrative. “I went through something hard, but I’m okay now.” But ...

They teach us early: don’t cry too loud, don’t love too recklessly, don’t ache too visibly. Emotions are to be managed, filtered, trimmed down to bite-sized pieces palatable to the performance of normalcy. The world doesn't want your rawness—it wants your compliance dressed as calm. But feeling—truly feeling—is dangerous. It is to let the world strike you without armor, to open your ribs to wonder and grief alike. It is to refuse sedation in a culture addicted to distraction. The rebel is not the one who shouts the loudest, but the one who sits quietly with her heartbreak and doesn’t flinch. The one who does not scroll it away. In an age of curated detachment, empathy becomes an uprising. To carry softness through a battlefield of indifference is a form of spiritual insurgency. You will be called sensitive, dramatic, too much. Let them. The numb are always unnerved by the living. Feel anyway. That’s the revolution.

There’s no announcement.  No grand epiphany.  Just a soft unraveling.  Like mist slipping from the mountain as the sun stretches itself across the horizon — slowly, quietly, completely. It hits you while doing your usual tasks. Perhaps while washing the dishes or passing by a street you once avoided. It doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t need to.  You realize you’re no longer holding your breath for the sound of a message, no longer tracing their name in the dust of memory. And it doesn’t sting the way you feared it would.  It just…  settles. At some point, you stopped checking if they viewed your story. You stopped wondering what you did wrong, what you could’ve done differently, what they'd say if they saw you now. The fantasies grew faint like old film reels — flickering, distant, unnecessary. They used to feel like prophecy. Now, they feel like fiction. It’s not that you no longer care. It's just that the waiting part — the gripping, hoping, aching p...

They laugh at the echo and think it is me. But it is not. I wind up the strings of my own voice, make it dance in the air like something alive. But I am the puppeteer—and I no longer remember the sound of silence that belongs to me. They call me vibrant. Charming. Magnetic. And I smile—not because they’re wrong, but because they’ve mistaken the flicker for the flame. They see the light, never the burn. truth is, i don’t talk. i translate . i don’t joke. i offer . not because i want to—but because i know how. I wear my extroversion like a tailored coat— flawless in fit, hollow in fabric. Inside, I shiver where no one looks. and the paradox is cruel: the better i become at being someone everyone can love, the further i drift from anyone who might understand me. what is the word for being surrounded and starving? for being applauded and erased? maybe i am just a prism—light passes through me, gets refracted, becomes beauty. but the prism itself remains invisible. used. clear...

 I’ve been thinking about patterns lately. Not the loud ones—the mistakes that crash into your life and demand to be noticed—but the quiet ones. The ones that repeat so subtly they start to feel like personality. Like how I default to gentleness in conflict. How I make excuses for silence. How I anticipate needs I was never told, then overextend to meet them. It doesn’t feel heroic. It feels familiar. Mechanical. Reflexive. I used to call it empathy. I’m not sure that’s the right word anymore. Somewhere along the line, I learned to offer the kind of care I wanted to receive. Not consciously—not as strategy—but as language. As instinct. The kindness wasn’t performative. It was sincere. But it was also laced with a hope I never admitted out loud. That someone might notice. That I might be met there. But the truth is, I gave so much of that kindness in rooms where it went unnoticed. Not unappreciated—just... unreturned. And that does something to a person. Not all at once. Not in...

There was a time when I believed that happiness had a shape, a clear, undeniable form—something I could reach out and touch if I tried hard enough.  And so I built it piece by piece: the right job, the right place, the right people, the right version of myself. It all seemed so simple, so attainable, like following a map laid out in front of me, each step leading closer to the thing I thought would make everything click. But now that I’m here, standing amidst everything I ever wanted, the map feels oddly irrelevant. The edges are frayed, the ink is smudged, and the directions seem somehow off. All the things I gathered, hoping they would fill me, now stand like silent monuments to an unknown truth. They don’t soothe me. They don’t calm the storm inside. They just make the silence more conspicuous. I thought getting what I wanted would silence the voices of doubt, but now it’s louder than ever. The strangest thing about having everything is realizing that you’re still missing some...

There are mornings that begin without warning. Not the kind that come with light filtering through the blinds or the smell of coffee wafting from the kitchen, but the kind that just appear — a sudden here-ness , like you’ve woken up mid-sentence in someone else’s story. Lately, most of my days feel like that. Suspended. Not quite real, not quite imagined. Just movement — toward deadlines, toward conversations, toward yosi - break and another episode of a show I won’t remember. I used to think life would be this wild river I’d have to learn to swim through. But now it feels more like a conveyor belt, slow and numbing, carrying me past things I forgot to want. I miss wanting. Not for anything specific. Not for love or escape or clarity — though those too, maybe. I miss the ache that used to come with being alive. The soft hunger of dreaming, of reaching for something just out of sight. That quiet desperation that reminded me I had a heart, even when I didn’t know what to do with i...

I searched for running shoes once—just once—after a friend casually mentioned they’d started jogging to feel alive again. I didn’t even click anything. Just hovered. Scrolled. Wondered if movement could outpace emptiness. Three hours later, Instagram showed me orthopedic insoles, breathwork ads, and a podcast titled “How to Run from Yourself Without Moving.” I laughed. Not because it was funny—but because it knew. There’s something eerie about being mirrored by a machine. Something quietly intimate in the way it doesn’t need to ask me questions. Just listens to my silences. Patterns. Pauses. I never told anyone I’ve been waking up with static in my chest. But YouTube offered a video on chest tightness and repressed memory. I didn’t search it. I just sat with it. And it knew to stay. When I linger too long on wedding videos, it adjusts. When I scroll past them like they’re ticking bombs, it adjusts again. Every avoidance is a signal. Every hesitation becomes a breadcrumb. It’s str...