Fragments of the Quiet Mind

The government says it shut down 7,000 illegal gambling sites. Great. That’s like taking a mop to a flood and calling it progress. Because this isn’t a coding issue. It’s a coping issue. You can kill the website. But if the hunger stays, the next one’s already in the queue. Gambling doesn’t thrive because it’s accessible. It thrives because it fills a void. And no one wants to talk about the void. Take Scatter. The poster child of this mess. Offered on legal platforms, monitored by systems that “ban” users— if their families report them. As if addiction sends out early warnings. As if people don't rot quietly before anyone notices. Regulation without prevention is just crisis management with better lighting. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? Make it shiny enough and people stop asking if it’s dangerous. And now? Gambling isn’t underground. It’s center stage. It's in your feed, dressed up as lifestyle. Influencers selling false jackpots like spiritual Kool-Aid. Fake payouts. Fla...

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...

 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...

I remember the night I stopped resisting the dark—the moment I let the shadows fold me in like a cloak, heavier than grief and colder than loneliness. It wasn’t surrender. It was survival. When the world’s light scorches too bright for a soul already cracked, sometimes disappearing feels like the only refuge left. To be unseen is not mercy. It is exile without borders, a slow erasure traced in invisible ink. You become a ghost in your own life—there but forgotten, present but hollow, a whisper no one listens for. The ache isn’t in being alone, but in knowing you’re erased, erased with such precision that even memory begins to doubt you existed. Invisibility is not absence; it is a wound disguised as silence. There’s a brutal kind of violence in invisibility. It is not peace. It’s a wound kept open to the cold silence, a place where no one cares to search. Being unseen means you live on the edge of absence, your name forgotten like a language no one speaks anymore. And yet, from thi...

There’s a strange stillness that settles in the aftermath of everything falling apart—like the world has exhaled, but you’re still holding your breath, waiting for something to change. You move through the wreckage, unsure of what to salvage, but you know you can't keep pretending everything is fine. The weight of it all presses down on you, suffocating, relentless. Hope feels like a distant concept, something from another life, while the storm around you only grows louder. It’s as if you’re standing at the edge of a blade, every step carrying the sharpness of inevitability. You search for relief, for an escape, but what you find is the echo of your own pain. It’s not just betrayal—it’s the feeling of being left behind, discarded in favor of something more convenient. The faces you once trusted now hide behind their lies, their smiles sharp like knives that cut deeper with every moment. It’s as though you’ve become a shadow, a ghost haunting a life that doesn’t fit anymore. Each b...

Despair doesn’t knock. It just enters, creeping through the cracks in your mind, sliding into every thought, every breath, until it feels like it’s always been there. You never see it coming. One moment, everything feels normal, or at least bearable. And then, like a thief in the night, it’s there—silent but suffocating. It wraps itself around your chest, makes it hard to breathe, and the more you try to push it away, the stronger its hold becomes. It doesn’t announce its presence with any grand gestures, no dramatic flare. It’s subtle, sneaky even. Maybe it starts with a moment of confusion, a fleeting thought you can’t shake. Or perhaps it’s the weight of a thousand little disappointments, stacking up until you can no longer ignore their presence. Each new layer presses down harder, until it becomes your only reality. The world becomes distant, almost irrelevant. The faces you see every day, the voices you hear, they seem muffled and unreal, as if they’re happening in another worl...

I used to believe in karma—naïve, I know. That moral ledger balancing debts and credits, handing out justice on time. Turns out, karma’s broken. Or maybe it never existed, just a myth we told ourselves to sleep at night. The worst people don’t just slip through the cracks. They built the cracks. They thrive in the ruins, stacking money on the bones of those who trusted them. It’s not a game anymore. It’s a machine—greedy, ruthless, and programmed to reward the cruelest operators. The bad don’t just get ahead—they consume whole worlds, leaving scraps for the rest. And here we are, pretending fairness is around the corner while the cold truth settles in: the world belongs to those who take without guilt, who use without mercy. Kindness is weakness. Empathy, a liability. The soul is currency no one wants to buy. Sometimes I wonder if the good are just ghosts in this system—forgotten, erased, slowly fading into silence while the vultures feast. No grand justice is coming. No reckonin...

 There is no justification for walking into a place of worship with a weapon. No cause, no grievance, no theory—nothing—can make sense of that kind of cruelty. To kill people in the middle of prayer is not rebellion, it is desecration. It is not rage—it is rot. The kind that begins in the soul and spreads through history, disguised as ideology. On October 27, 2018, a man entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire. Eleven people were murdered. It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history. And yet, somehow, it wasn’t surprising. The world had been inching toward this—subtly, then shamelessly. Hatred no longer hid. It posted. It shouted. It ran for office. It wore suits and badges and usernames and smirks. And when it pulled the trigger that morning, it did so with the confidence of someone who had already been told: yes, you belong here too. The Tree of Life. Etz Chaim. A name that echoes through both scripture and longing. A symbol of ...

I remember the news trickling in, the way the earth gave way in Benguet and Cebu — houses swallowed, lives buried beneath rubble that was once the land we called home. It’s easy to point fingers at mining companies, at open-pit scars carved like wounds across the mountainside. But what about us? What part do we play in this quiet violence? Mining is a cruel pact. We dig not just for gold or minerals, but for the promise of progress. We tell ourselves the earth will forgive us, that the price we pay is worth the convenience and wealth it offers. But the land does not forgive — it remembers. The landslide is not just soil collapsing; it’s the earth’s way of whispering a bitter truth: we are strangers here, not masters. The calls to ban mining are calls to respect a fragile balance we have long ignored. Yet, the complexity of survival in a place like the Philippines makes this no simple moral judgment. The people who rely on mining for livelihood are caught in the same web of contradict...

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 remember the first time I caught myself censoring a story. Not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid. Afraid that the words I chose would mark me as “other,” or worse, unsafe. It was subtle—a hesitation before speaking, a carefully edited sentence—but it was there, like a quiet tremor before an earthquake. Language policing isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a whispered warning, a sideways glance, or the slow erasure of dialects and accents. It’s the constant pressure to speak the way power expects us to—neatly, politely, “correctly.” For marginalized communities, this isn’t just about words; it’s about survival. When your language is policed, your identity gets clipped at the edges. You start to doubt if your stories are valid if your voice deserves space. Freedom of expression becomes a minefield, where one misstep can mean exclusion or worse—silencing. But here’s the thing: language is alive. It breathes the culture, history, pain, and joy of a people. To police it is to...

In the dark, silent hours of the night, As I cling to a bottle of solace, My heart speaks with a resounding voice, Echoing louder than the world's noise.   I could shatter a picture frame with force, Reduce it to fragments of shattered glass, But the agony that consumes my soul, Beats with a heavy, incessant pulse.   I could burn every memory to ash, Watch them vanish into wispy smoke, But the pain in my chest persists, Refusing to leave or be revoked.   I could erase her height from the wall, Efface every trace of her existence, But the void that she left behind, Is an indelible wound that resists.   I could beat a punching bag until it breaks, Until bruises cover every inch of skin, But the ache within my shattered heart, Is a battle that I simply can't win.   I could spend an entire day with a friend, Wrenching sobs from my chest until my voice is gone, But the magnitude of my loss remains, A weight that...

Its fundamentally an eschatological treatment to one’s miserable year: in other words, regret. People are resentful of their past year, hoping to make the upcoming year better, brighter and lighter by making promises to themselves which most of the time, they really have no intention of keeping. I don’t make resolutions as I know that I am bonded to my promises. I never want to make a promise to myself that I can’t preserve (in as much as I don’t want to make promises to people that I know I can’t keep.) As clichéd as it sounds, we don’t need to wait for a new year to aim for transformation and new life. Change takes place everyday- Mutation (destructive) and Evolution (constructive) takes place every fudgin day. From the setting of the sun to the rising of the moon, we are already at the mercy of change though most of the times, we ignore it. We are a completely different person 1 second ago – and we don’t have to make promises to appease ourselves of the change happening in us. We w...

They thought it would end me. The silence. The turning away. The way they spoke my name like it was something bitter in their mouths—or worse, not at all. They made the burial look like mercy, but I knew what it was: an erasure. A quiet undoing. They called it consequence. I called it betrayal. I wasn’t ready. And yet, the earth took me in. At first, I fought it. I clawed against the weight. I screamed in a language only the dead understood. No one heard. No one came. There’s something hollow about being forgotten while your heart is still beating. Something feral. Something cold. But the dirt... the dirt didn’t judge. It simply held me. I lay there. Long enough to forget the shape of light. Long enough to imagine that maybe I’d deserved it—this burial, this becoming no one. I wilted inward, until even my thoughts stopped making sound. But what no one tells you is that seeds don’t bloom in the open. They rupture in darkness. Quietly. Painfully. I cracked. Split wide, with...

Maybe the cure for anything isn’t grand. Maybe it’s not found in redemption arcs or second chances. Maybe it’s just this— Music. Coffee. Smoke. The holy trinity of the broken who still try to feel. I don’t go a day without them. Music drips through my veins like morphine. It doesn’t ask anything from me—just lets me be. I keep Korn on repeat—yeah, I know, not everyone gets it. Their sound is abrasive to the polished, but to me, it’s a mirror. Every note, a scream I’ve been too tired to let out. They’ve kept me alive longer than some people have. Angst. That beautiful, shapeless thing. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re okay or not. It just sits with you in the in-between. You’re not sad. You’re not fine. You’re a suspended breath. A body between pulses. It’s not even pain, not really. Just the haunting suspicion that you’ve felt too much and nothing all at once. And when that feeling builds—when it claws up my spine and fogs my thoughts—I write. Not for applause. Not for people. J...

There are things I have never said—because I couldn’t, because words fracture the weight they try to hold. You see, some truths do not fit inside syllables. They are too wide for vowels, too wounded for grammar. I carry them not in my mouth but in my spine, in the slight curve of a shoulder that remembers who left, in the tension of a jaw clenched too often in silent rooms. This body—this soft machine of survival—has become a vault of truths I was too afraid or too inarticulate to name. And maybe that’s what we forget in our obsession with expression: that not all honesty is verbal. Some of it is kneeling on a cold floor after another sleepless night. Some of it is the hesitation before a touch. Some of it is how you flinch when the world comes too close. I have smiled while dying. Laughed while disintegrating. The world only sees what sounds pass through the lips. But what if I told you the real monologue was happening behind the eyes, under the skin, in the thousand micro-movements...

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 moment — sharp and sudden — when you realize the voice telling your story isn’t the hero, nor the villain. It’s the unreliable narrator, fumbling through the scenes, editing, omitting, dressing truths in pretty lies. Memory is a sly trickster, ego its loyal accomplice, weaving fiction where facts fail. You want coherence, meaning, a through-line, so your mind edits and colors outside the lines. That lost conversation? It never ended that way. That insult? Probably imagined. The pain? Reframed, softened, or amplified, depending on the day. We are artists of self-deception, and our brush strokes are bold and brazen, crafting mythologies out of mundane moments. Sometimes the lie is tender — a kindness toward the self, a survival tactic when the truth is too sharp to hold. Other times, it’s a mask so convincing even you believe it. The story we tell ourselves is less autobiography and more a shifting dreamscape — fluid, unstable, a kaleidoscope of who we were, are, and desperat...

I ran this morning. Gray sky, nothing special. Weather that doesn’t force you to feel anything. Usually, I wander without purpose. Today, something stopped me. Time is a trap. We pretend it’s limited, but it isn’t. So we rush through it—steps, choices, life—until it all blurs. The small things disappear. The smell of earth, the quiet air. Gone. A song got stuck in my head. “I’ll stop the world and melt with you.” Unwanted. Persistent. How did it get in? Maybe fate. Maybe nothing. I don’t believe in destiny, but here I was—stuck in the sound, stuck in a loop. The world paused inside me. I didn’t move. The day went on. Hands trembled—not from connection, but from the weight of existing. Scars on skin—maps of past failures. Nothing clean, nothing clear. I touched a cheek. No softness. Smoke? Habit? Grip loosened—like sanity slipping. Wanting to let go, but afraid of the emptiness that follows. I kissed a cheek. A stupid move. A laugh broke the silence. A glitch. A mistake. Coffee a...