Today is Black Saturday, 2nd day of April 1994. Everyone else in the boarding house has gone home for Holy Week, and I'm still here, in Sampaloc, Manila, in a room that has gotten very quiet very fast. It's been two days now. I've noticed how differently time moves when there's no one around to talk to, it doesn't fly, and it doesn't really crawl either. It just sits with you.
I turned twenty-six late last year, and there's something about being alone in an empty house that makes a number like that feel heavier than it should. Old enough that I can look back and call it a life. Young enough that I'm still not sure I understand any of it. With nothing to distract me, my mind keeps going back, not to anywhere in particular, just to the people and places and some ordinary days that made up my childhood. I didn't know, while I was living them, that they'd stay with me this long.
I think silence does that. It doesn't invent memories; it just stops interrupting them. And these past two days, alone with mine, I've felt something I can only describe as an urge to finally write it all down, not to perform it, not to make it sound like anything, just to see if it makes sense being laid out in front of me. Maybe if I put it into words, I'll understand how I got here. Maybe I'll even put into words some of what I've been carrying quietly for years, because carrying something without knowing can make you believe that life is governed more by fate than by the choices and influences that shape it.
This isn't really about remembering the past for its own sake. It's about trying to understand it, going back through it so I can see more clearly where I am now, and maybe get some sense of where I'm supposed to go from here.
So. Here's where it starts.
The Place Where I Grew Up
I grew up in a place where children could wander freely and no one worried. It wasn't simply where I happened to live, it felt as though the place itself invited me to explore. Rural, unhurried, and just a little wild around the edges, it became the perfect landscape for childhood.
Beyond our house stood only a handful of homes. Past them stretched open fields that seemed to go on forever, promising adventures I could never quite name. Nature was everywhere, and provincial life moved slowly enough that exploring became the best way to fill an afternoon. It was a kind of freedom that many children today may never have the chance to experience.
These memories rarely return because I deliberately summon them. They simply appear, usually in quiet moments when nothing else demands my attention. They carry me back to a time before responsibilities, before I learned to overthink life, when curiosity alone decided where I would go. I wandered wherever my feet led me, often barefoot, never giving it a second thought. The earth beneath my feet felt as familiar as the floor of our own home.
Back then, everyone knew everyone. Doors were rarely locked. Gates were little more than something to lean on or swing open. There were no "No Trespassing" signs or invisible boundaries separating one yard from another. The neighborhood never felt like a collection of separate households. It felt like one large family living in different houses.
There was one place that drew us back almost every day. Technically, it belonged to someone else, but no one ever seemed to mind that we spent our afternoons there.
To us, it was almost sacred. Coconut trees stood around it like silent guardians, their fronds whispering with every passing breeze. Banana plants cast cool patches of shade across the sandy ground. Even the earth itself seemed perfectly suited for children, soft, warm, and welcoming, as though it had been waiting for us all along.
And what did we do there?
Everything.
We filled that little corner of the world with laughter, imagination, and endless games: siatong, dakop-dakop, tago-tago, bagol, tigsu, tubig-tubig, luthang, jolen, and many others whose names have long since faded from memory. Some games came with rules handed down by older children. Others we invented on the spot, played until sunset, and abandoned the next day for a brand-new adventure.
There always seemed to be another game waiting to be discovered. We never ran out of ideas, only daylight.
Back then, the world felt impossibly large, and afternoons seemed endless. We never knew boredom because there was always another tree to climb, another path to follow, another game to invent, or another mystery waiting just beyond the next field. Ordinary days became adventures without anyone planning them.
Looking back now, I realize it wasn't only the place that made those years so special. It was the freedom it gave us, the freedom to wander, to imagine, to explore, to make mistakes, and simply to be children without anyone rushing us toward adulthood.
We were, in every sense of the word, wonderfully and recklessly alive.
Nights of Storytelling
I grew up at a time when the boundary between the ordinary and the mysterious seemed much thinner than it does today. Folklore and superstition were not merely stories passed around for entertainment. They were woven into everyday life, shaping how people understood the world around them.
Few questioned those beliefs. They were handed down from one generation to the next, treasured like family heirlooms. As children, we never thought to ask for proof.
We simply believed.
Night was when the stories came alive.
Under the dim glow of a kerosene lamp or by candlelight during the frequent brownouts, we gathered close, shoulders touching, listening in complete silence as the elders began to speak.
They never narrated stories the way one reads from a book.
They recalled them.
There was an unmistakable conviction in their voices, as though they were recounting events they had witnessed themselves rather than tales passed from others. They spoke of wandering spirits, enchanted places, mysterious creatures, and encounters no one could fully explain. As they talked, the unseen world no longer felt distant. It seemed to linger just beyond the edge of the lamplight, close enough that every rustling leaf or unexpected sound could send a shiver through a child's imagination.
Yet among all those tales of the supernatural, the stories that stayed with me most were those about the war.
The elders spoke of surviving the Second World War, of hunger that lingered for years, nights filled with fear, families torn apart, and losses that never truly healed. To us children, these were not lessons from history books. They were living memories carried by the very people sitting before us. Even without fully understanding their experiences, we could hear the weight of those years in their voices.
We listened without missing a single word.
Those evenings beneath the faint glow of a kerosene lamp became far more than moments of entertainment. They connected us to the lives of those who came before us, to our community's history, and to a world where memory, faith, folklore, and lived experience existed side by side.
Looking back now, I realize those nights taught me something far greater than the stories themselves. Memory rarely remains neatly separated into history, belief, and imagination. Over time, they begin to overlap, blending together until each gives meaning to the others.
For a young boy listening in the darkness, that was enough to make the world feel infinitely larger, richer, and more mysterious than I could possibly understand.
The Winning Shot
Basketball wasn't just something I did as a kid, it was basically the rhythm of my whole childhood, the thing that kept time in the background. It started with a beat-up rubber ball, the kind that bounced crooked on the dirt road, but back then it felt like the most valuable thing I owned.
Pretty soon I wasn't just another kid chasing the ball around. They made me ball captain of our mini-player team, put me in charge of leading us through the inter-barangay tournament. To anyone from outside, it probably looked like just another local game. To us, it was the championship. The big stage. Our shot at proving something.
Every game we played, we earned. Dust kicking up with every sprint, our worn-out shoes squeaking against the rough concrete, families and neighbors lined up on the sidelines yelling their heads off. Every win made us feel a little more untouchable. One team after another, we knocked them all out, until there was only one game left.
The championship.
You could feel it in the air before it even started. Every possession mattered. Every basket got a louder reaction than the last. The score stayed tight all the way down to the final seconds, and those seconds felt like they were stretching on forever.
Then, near the end, the ball ended up in my hands.
I still remember exactly how it felt, the rough grain of it under my fingers, my heart slamming in my chest, the way everything around me just seemed to disappear except the basket in front of me. The noise dropped out completely.
I went up for the shot.
For one second, time just stopped.
Then.
Swish.
Straight through the net, clean.
The crowd went off. My teammates came running, yelling, laughing, grabbing me, hoisting me up on their shoulders. Right then, it felt like nothing was out of reach. We were champions, and I was the one who'd made the shot.
It was the happiest I'd ever been.
But childhood doesn't really ask before it changes on you.
A few months later, my family packed up and moved to another town. Just like that, everything I knew was somewhere else. The court I grew up on disappeared from my life. The cheering stopped. My teammates turned into memories.
Our new place was quieter, near the hills, a not much explored place, with not much going on. Life slowed way down. No more neighborhood tournaments, no championship games, no crowd on the sidelines. The court that used to be the center of everything was just gone, and in its place was a lot of quiet.
But that shot, it never really left me.
Even now I can still see the ball spinning through the air, still hear the noise that came after.
It's a reminder that some wins don't come with trophies. Long after everyone's stopped cheering, certain moments just keep echoing, reminding you who you used to be, and maybe what you were actually capable of.
Childhood Under Martial Rule
I grew up under Martial Law, back when staying quiet and staying careful weren't just habits, they were basically the rules nobody had to write down. At night, around 9 o'clock, a siren would start up somewhere in the distance. Long, low, kind of mournful, cutting through the quiet to let everyone know curfew was coming.
It wasn't really a warning.
It was an order.
The second it went off, whatever conversation you were in the middle just stopped. The roads emptied out fast. You'd hear footsteps hurrying down the narrow paths as everyone rushed to get home. After that, the streets belonged to soldiers, rifles on their shoulders, walking the dark, or at least that's what we were told.
As kids, we didn't really understand what any of it meant. We didn't know much about politics, or power, or why things were the way they were. We just knew the rules: be home before nine, stay near your family, don't wander off after curfew.
Nobody talked about being afraid.
But it was there anyway, quiet, in the background, the kind of thing everyone felt but nobody said out loud.
Even so, as a kid, the world didn't fully give in to any of that.
Dragonflies would catch the light over the fields like something out of a dream. Grasshoppers jumped from one patch of grass to the next, and we'd chase them down, catch them barehanded, look at them for a second, and let them go.
Before the siren went off for the night, we'd usually be out under the coconut trees, surrounded by bushes, open field, at times, under the moonlight. When the games wound down, we'd sit shoulder to shoulder on an old wooden bench, telling stories, laughing, talking about things that felt like the biggest deal in the world at the time.
My friends were basically my whole world, and their houses felt as much like home as mine did. Back then, your neighbors weren't just people who happened to live nearby, they were family, more or less.
Looking back now, I think being a kid was its own kind of protection. It didn't shield us from everything, but it kept the weight of what was happening from landing on us the way it landed on the adults. They carried the worry. We just stayed caught up in whatever small thing was in front of us.
We never went looking for anything extraordinary, because the ordinary stuff was already enough. A dragonfly's wings. Moonlight coming through the coconut leaves. An evening with friends. A neighbor's door that was always open to us.
We didn't ask the world for much.
And somehow, even with everything going on around us, it gave us more than we needed.
The Holidays Celebration
Every Christmas Eve, the house came alive for Noche Buena. It wasn't just a meal, it was more like a family ritual, a kind of joyful watch we all kept together, waiting for midnight to hit and Christmas to officially start.
The table would be loaded with whatever my mother had spent the day cooking, and you could smell it working its way through the house long before we were allowed to eat. Waiting for midnight was its own kind of torture.
It never really felt like Noche Buena until my aunt Tancing's recipe of puto and biko showed up. Mama Tancing, as we fondly called her, is my father's sister who could cook traditional Cebuano dishes better than anyone else. Every year her food ended up being the thing everyone remembered most.
Then, barely a week later, we'd do it all again.
Media Noche on New Year's Eve had a different energy to it. Food covered the table again, but this time there was also a pile of round fruit such as oranges, grapes, apples, pomelos, melons, whatever anyone could find.
The shape wasn't an accident.
Round fruit is supposed to look like the shape of money, it's an old belief that it brings prosperity, that the new year will be a good one. Nobody really stopped to ask whether it worked. It was just part of the night, something handed down without anyone questioning it.
As midnight got closer, you could feel the whole neighborhood tensing up with anticipation.
Then it just exploded.
Firecrackers going off everywhere. Pots and pans getting banged together as loud as people could manage, everyone trying to make enough noise to scare off whatever bad luck might be lingering. Then our lantaka would go off, a homemade bamboo cannon we had. The boom it made would roll out over the whole barangay, drowning out every firecracker.
The kids had their own thing going, blowing toy trumpets until they ran out of breath, laughing through all the smoke drifting around in the cold air.
Down the street, tartanillas, the horse-drawn carriages, would go rattling by with tin cans tied to the back, adding their own noise to everything else going on.
Right when midnight hit, all the kids would jump as high as they could, because we genuinely believed jumping would make us taller that year. We believed it completely, and honestly, that's probably what made it fun.
It was loud. It was overwhelming. It was chaos, but the good kind, full of light and laughter and family.
Looking back, I don't think the magic was ever really in the fireworks or the bamboo cannon or even the food on the table. It was in the people who showed up for it, in doing the same thing every single year, in the laughter that filled up the house and in knowing that, for one night, hope always seemed to show up right on time.
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