Fragments of the Quiet Mind

It’s not the knife that breaks you. It’s the hand you thought would never hold one. I’ve had people talk behind my back. I’ve been insulted, excluded, underestimated. I’ve had strangers throw shade, coworkers act petty, random people online say stupid things. It stings for a second, but I forget about it by the next day. Because honestly, I expect that from people who don’t know me. Who have no investment in who I am. It doesn’t really get in. But what stays—the thing I carry—isn’t from enemies. It’s from people I trusted.  And it always catches me off guard. Every single time. Because you never expect it from them . The ones you let in. The ones who knew your soft spots. The ones who said, “I’m here, always.” The people who didn’t just know your story—they were in it. And then, somehow, they become the ones who hurt you in ways no stranger ever could. It’s never loud. It’s not some explosive betrayal with dramatic exits and slammed doors. No, it’s quieter than that. It’s the u...

Last night i was scrolling through my feed, watching friends share grief after grief—losses, heartbreaks, moments that should have made us gather, cry together, hold each other close. Instead, all I did was tap a heart emoji under each post, one after another, like I was ticking off some empathy checklist. I felt this strange disconnect. Was that really me caring? Or just a shadow of it? It hit me then—this paradox we live with every day. We’re more connected than ever, but somehow the caring feels hollow. The digital world teaches us to perform empathy in tiny clicks and quick comments, but it rarely lets us be there. The silence, the awkwardness, the weight of someone else’s pain—those don’t translate well through a screen. I keep asking myself: When did empathy become a set of symbols? When did “I’m here for you” turn into an emoji? There’s something unsettling about caring that feels rehearsed, like a script we all read but don’t fully understand. It’s empathy reduced to conven...

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...

Once more, the battle commences… This is my eternal struggle with my bed, or rather, with sleep itself. All I am yearning and hoping for right now is having the ability to slide into a peaceful slumber. It should be a simple task (This is supposed to be simple!) Reclining my self on a chair, slouching, resting and closing my weary eyes. Simple right? NO! It is in this moment, when I enter the realm of taming my racing thoughts is where the true challenge lies. This is the time that my mind becomes active. The memories of our shared nights resurface, and I find myself relating all too well to the notion of the "hair monster." You know, that feeling of being smothered by a fluffy creature, waking up to find strands of hair strewn across your face like wayward tendrils of affection. It was just last night, after we indulged in a few drinks, that she retired to bed. I watched as she succumbed to the whimsical artistry of the "sloppy drunk" style of sleep...

I stand there, beside her, but not truly there— caught in the strange gravity between presence and absence. In these tragic moments, when words should matter most, I find myself retreating, silently. My voice, though formed with care, meets no resonance. It's as if the air between us thickens into something impenetrable. I crack a joke—lighthearted, perhaps too light for the weight of the moment. It drifts away, unnoticed, and I am left wondering, am I fading too?   What’s worse than being unheard? It’s not even the absence of words but the hollow feeling that swells in the silence afterward, like standing in a room where the walls are slowly closing in. The mind stumbles, thoughts tripping over themselves as they scramble to reach the surface. Each idea dissolves into the air before it can take form—vanishing like smoke against the cold, hard surface of her grief, her preoccupation. Yet still, I stand there, trying. Failing.   There's a gap between us, and though I feel it ke...

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...

Goodbyes are rarely the dramatic moments we imagine. We think they’ll be loud—final, decisive, with all the weight of an ending hanging in the air. But in reality, goodbyes often take their time, slipping in quietly, unnoticed until they’ve already happened. It’s never one single moment, but a slow withdrawal, a gradual absence. The first missed text doesn’t feel like much. The second time they cancel plans doesn’t seem like a signal. But over time, these small moments accumulate, and one day you realize they’ve stopped calling, stopped reaching out. You don’t know when it happened exactly—just that it did. It’s a strange thing, how people can disappear without making a sound. You can still see their name on your phone, hear their voice in your head, but in the space between you, there’s a silence that didn’t exist before. It's not an ending. It’s a slow, deliberate pulling away—one step at a time, until there’s a distance too great to bridge. Some goodbyes don’t shout. They’re ...

I’ve never been good at it. Small talk. Idle words traded like pocket change, meant to buy just enough silence to keep us from slipping into something too real. “How’s your day?” “Busy.” “Weather’s been weird lately.” “Yeah, climate change or something.” No one means anything they say. Not really. And yet we say it anyway, like incantations to ward off the ghosts of intimacy. I find myself participating out of habit. Not because I enjoy it, but because I don’t know how not to. Because answering “How are you?” with “I don’t know, I haven’t felt like myself in months” is too much honesty for a hallway or a checkout line. But what is small talk, really? A dance? A mask? A form of mercy? Maybe it’s all three. We’ve been trained to speak without saying, to connect without touching. Politeness as performance. Distance as default. We ask about the commute, not the chaos. We mention the new restaurant, not the quiet ache in our chest that hasn’t left since December. Sometime...

“We outgrow people the same way stars abandon light—quietly, irreversibly.” There’s a strange kind of grief that doesn’t come with funerals or heartbreak songs. It just settles in—quietly, like dust on a shelf no one touches anymore. It begins when conversations feel forced, when silences grow louder than shared laughter used to be. No fight. No betrayal. Just… stretch. Distance. A slow fade of alignment. You try to ignore it. You meet up, talk about safe things—weather, shows, work. But you feel it in your body, don’t you? The gentle pull away. Not because you stopped loving them, but because you stopped recognizing yourself in the reflection of their eyes. They stayed where you left them. Or maybe you were the one who drifted off-course. Either way, the shapes no longer fit. The same jokes don’t land. The same stories feel like reruns. Nostalgia becomes the last thing holding the room together. You want to say something—but there’s nothing cruel to say. Because they didn’t do anyt...

“Some people fade the loudest when they leave in silence.” Most of the day was spent watching that tiny green dot appear and disappear. Not hoping—just noticing. Like waiting for a storm that never fully arrives. A one-word reply was enough to hold the whole weight of an unfinished history. Nothing dramatic ever happened. No final fight. Just a slow erosion. The kind that doesn’t make noise until it’s already gone. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that this thing—whatever it was—had weight. Had velocity. Something unnameable, but not imaginary. There’s a particular silence that comes with knowing too much and saying nothing. We thread ourselves between lines, overanalyzing tone, spacing, absence. And in that absence, we find a weird kind of clarity. Understanding without explanation. Agreement without contact. Melpomene doesn’t wail here. She hums. It’s not a tragedy worth headlines—just one that repeats quietly in the background of otherwise normal days. Somehow, not speaking became ...