Fragments of the Quiet Mind

Araw ng mga Bayani is the last Monday in August. You blink and it’s gone. One day. One flag emoji. Maybe a parade if you're in the right city or have a cousin in the military. Maybe not even that. But June? June is a full-blown event. It’s loud and layered and bright enough to make even the grocery store feel like it’s trying to come out. Thirty whole days of rainbow merch, playlists, themed drinks, hashtags, and heated arguments online. And I started wondering—not accusing, not judging, just… wondering. Why does the nation give a day to the people who died for its freedom… but a whole month to those still trying to live in it? I’m not saying Pride shouldn’t exist. I think there’s something beautiful about people finally being allowed to celebrate parts of themselves that used to get them hurt—or worse, made invisible. We live in a world that once forced queerness underground, so when it comes out dancing, yeah, let it dance. But it still feels strange that the people who died...

Do you hear the echoes, reverberating through the corridors of your mind? Memories, elusive and unforgiving, wrap their tendrils around your thoughts, playing a relentless game of hide and seek. Forgetting, they say, is the logical response to life's tragic joke. But perhaps, just perhaps, you spoke too soon. In the depths of your melancholic streaks, something stirred within you. Terrifying existential thoughts danced with ideas, casting a flickering light upon the shadows of your understanding. It's as if, in some peculiar way, you have been granted a glimpse of enlightenment, a fragment of comprehension in the vast tapestry of existence. Memories themselves do not inflict pain; it is our perception of them that does. The labels we attach—embarrassing, painful, blissful—those determine their weight. See, some souls cringe in utter humiliation at a person who stumbles down the stairs, while others doesn’t give a rat’s-ass and merely shrug on it. It is the lens ...