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...

Do you believe in soul mates? I don’t. It’s absurd, isn’t it? The idea that there’s someone out there who completes us, who fits the missing piece we feel we’re missing. Maybe it’s just human nature. We all want to connect, don’t we? We crave understanding, the sense that someone else gets us, sees us for who we really are. We search for it in a thousand different ways. Some people create gods and deities to give meaning to their lives. Others wrestle with cognitive dissonance, clinging to beliefs that make the absurdities of existence feel manageable. And then, there are those who disconnect completely, hoping that silence will speak louder than words ever could—hoping someone will hear their unspoken plea. I run. That’s my escape. I don’t just run away from things, I run to something. In each stride, I feel a connection—a thread tying me to something bigger than myself. The hard ground beneath my feet, the wind slicing through the air, the scent of pine trees as I breathe deepl...

I went back to my old school because of a term paper i have to submit—an unavoidable deadline that drags me back into the world of libraries. Honestly, I don’t like the internet much. Too loud, too fast, like a thousand birds all squawking at once with no promise of meaning. I prefer books—their weight, their quiet certainty, the way they don’t blink or scroll away when you stare too long. And then, just like that, the smell hits me. That heavy, almost sacred scent of old paper and ink, trapped in the seams of forgotten pages. It’s a smell that carries time itself—decades folded into the dust, stories layered beneath the weight of silence. It catches me off guard, like a memory I didn’t know I was missing. That smell pulls me inward, beyond the term paper, beyond deadlines. It drags me to a place where the world slowed down—where silence wasn’t absence, but presence. A place where waiting was part of the story, and meaning was something you earned by sitting still. In this scent, I f...