Fragments of the Quiet Mind

Way back in college, I had this quiet hobby of slipping into book sales. Not the big ones—just the messy, dusty tables tucked inside Centermall, one of Baguio’s oldest malls. The kind of place where the lights flicker and the scent of rust and forgotten pages lingers longer than the shoppers. It wasn’t about finding something specific. It was the hunt. The maybe. One afternoon, I came across a book with no title on the spine. The cover was soft, torn in the corners, like it had been through several hands that never loved it properly. Inside, on the first page, someone had scribbled in pencil: “Don’t finish this unless you’re ready to lose something.” I didn’t buy it. I kept turning the thought over in my head though, for years. I don’t even remember the plot. Just the feeling it gave me: like someone had whispered a secret then vanished before I could respond. We never really crave the thing, do we? We crave the tension before the having. The idea of it. The fiction we write a...

Memory isn’t a photograph. It’s a murmur in a dark room. A smell, a shift in light, the sudden ache when a song you forgot you loved finds you again. It arrives uninvited, but familiar—like someone who used to know you well. I used to believe memory told the truth. But lately, I’m not so sure. The more I revisit the past, the more it changes. Not drastically, not all at once—but like a shoreline slowly pulled into new shapes by the tide. One day you notice the sand isn't where it used to be. There are scenes I return to that feel real but never happened. A conversation with someone who never said the right thing, but in my memory, they do. A touch that never landed, yet still leaves warmth. I don’t think that’s lying. I think that’s longing, trying to make sense of itself. Sometimes, I miss the version of me that existed in those imagined moments. The me who was loved better, understood more clearly. And maybe that’s what memory really is: not a record, but a refuge. A softer w...