Fragments of the Quiet Mind

  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...

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...

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 ...