My mother should have aborted me.
I say this not to create drama, but in the name of logistics. Like something that should have happened had someone taken a step back and looked forward clearly enough—at what life might have been without another mouth to feed, another life to account for.
I do not remember my childhood as carefree. I remember it as accounting.
Not in the literal sense, but in the way children learn to measure things long before they understand what measurement costs them. I learned early to read hesitation. To tell when desire was allowed and when it was already too much. I learned sacrifice before I understood safety. Money, favors, obligations, survival—these were always present, even when unspoken, shaping everything at the edges.
Children are not supposed to carry the emotional bookkeeping of a household, but I grew up inside it anyway. Hearing who helped, who lent, who kept things from collapsing. Slowly, I stopped feeling like a child being raised and started feeling like something that had to be carefully accounted for in order for things to hold.
And eventually, I stopped noticing the difference.
I think this is why I became so reluctant to ask for things.
It was never that I didn’t want anything. I wanted a lot. I just learned early that wanting had consequences that didn’t always need to be spoken. So I learned to scale myself down before anyone else had to. I became practical, self-contained, easy to manage.
What people call independence is sometimes just adaptation that no one questioned long enough to see as anything else.
There is a particular loneliness in being the person everyone trusts to figure it out. You become useful in a way that erases urgency. When you are capable, your effort stops registering as effort. When you keep going, people stop checking whether you are okay while going.
And I think that is where jealousy started.
Not for things. For something quieter. The way some people are held in mind without effort. The way their needs exist before language. The way care is already there, untriggered, unearned.
I don’t think I was ever taught that kind of attention was normal.
So I learned to become understandable instead of being understood.
Sometimes I buy myself things I don’t need, and it isn’t really about filling anything. It’s about proof. That I can still recognize myself clearly enough to choose something that feels like me. That I haven’t completely lost the ability to be reflected accurately, even if only by myself.
But it never fully replaces what it is responding to.
One of my dreams is to exhume my grandparents’ bones and reinter them somewhere gentler. Somewhere that feels less like disappearance happened slowly and more like care finally arrived afterward. Somewhere that signals return instead of neglect.
Sometimes I think about how easily a life becomes something visited less and less. Not because it stops mattering, but because attention doesn’t come back the same way.
Not erased. Just gradually unclaimed.
What unsettles me is not death, but becoming unvisited while still existing in memory.
The fear that struggle doesn’t end—it disperses, quietly, across generations.
This is where things become harder to explain.
There was a day we went to the movies. I was already carrying an anger I didn’t yet have language for. It stayed in me on the way home, tightening without shape. When we got back, my mother and I argued in my room. Her voice filled everything. Even with the door closed, it didn’t stay contained. It moved through the house anyway.
To her, it was necessary.
To me, something inside me stopped holding together cleanly.
Afterwards, I couldn’t settle. My thoughts wouldn’t stay in place. Everything felt overstimulated, like my mind had lost its ability to organize itself into something stable.
So I took all my benzodiazepines at once.
I didn’t experience it as a decision. It felt more like something already in motion finally completing itself.
What I remember most is not fear or panic. It is how quickly everything tried to return to normal afterward. Not rupture. Not interruption. Just continuation. As if nothing had changed shape enough to require anything else to respond.
That stayed.
Not the moment itself, but the fact that it didn’t seem to register as something that should have altered anything.
After that, I became more controlled. Not in a disciplined way. In a protective way. I learned how to keep myself from becoming too visible in my own distress. How to keep functioning without requiring interruption.
Because I understood what it meant when something does not interrupt anything at all.
So I don’t ask easily anymore. I don’t stop easily. I don’t let things spill into spaces where they might need to be acknowledged.
There are days I rehearse what I will say before I say it, just to make sure it doesn’t take up too much space. Days where I finish things alone because needing someone feels heavier than doing it badly. Days where I go quiet without noticing I’ve done it, as if silence arrives faster than intention.
And still, nothing outside really changes.
The house keeps moving. Time keeps moving.
As if nothing ever had to stop.
There are days I say something and realize no one responds, even though I am sure I spoke.
I check later to make sure my voice happened.
It did.
7d ago
May 28, 2026 at 10:19 AM UTC
In my life, everything arrives as an exchange.
If something good happens to me, I wait for the balance to be taken elsewhere.
A blessing for me must mean a burden for someone I love.
A door opens for me, and somewhere in the background, another one quietly closes for my mother, my father, or my brother.
I have lived with this fear for so long that even my prayers sound like negotiations.
God, make my grandparents happy.
God, guide my brother through his exams.
God, bless my mother with lighter burdens and fuller pockets.
God, keep my father healthy for many more years.
Do everything for them.
Even if there is nothing left for me afterward.
Keep them safe, alive, and untouched by grief.
If there is only enough room for a few good things in this lifetime, let them have all of it.
I can stay outside the blessing.
Sometimes I wonder why I believe in a God who trades in barter,
as if divinity itself were fond of something so painfully human,
so modernized by man.
Why do I speak to Him like a desperate customer at a counter,
offering pieces of myself in exchange for mercy?
Why have I convinced myself that love must always be purchased with suffering?
When luck came to me, I did not just carry my luggage or travel with friends.
I carried the quiet terror of wondering what the trip would cost us in return.
I kept waiting for the balance.
For bad news.
For a phone call in the middle of the night.
For some terrible thing to happen to me so the universe would finally consider the debt paid.
I wanted something to go wrong for me.
Something painful enough to spare the rest of them.
Because I have always believed happiness behaves like a borrowed thing in our family.
That every joy must eventually be returned with interest.
And if that is true, then let the payment be me.
Let me be the thing exchanged so their futures remain bright.
Let me carry the sickness, the grief, the loss, the bad luck.
Let them keep their laughter.
Let them grow old.
Let them stay warm and alive and whole.
I think I could endure almost anything if it meant nothing bad would ever reach them.
May 24
May 24, 2026 at 2:07 AM UTC
When I grow up, I want to live in a house that has more space than we ever needed.
Not because I dream of anything extravagant, but because I want the air inside it to feel unclaimed—untallied, unearned. I want it to exist without the quiet arithmetic of sacrifice lingering in every corner. I want my children to breathe without learning, the way I did, that even something as small as an inhale can feel like it costs someone else something.
I want them to fill their lungs without hesitation.
To never wonder if the air they take in is borrowed.
To never measure their existence against effort that was never theirs to repay.
I want them to exhale without guilt—without that subtle, gnawing thought that relief must be justified, that ease must be earned, that even rest is something you take from someone who worked too hard to give it to you.
I think of how easily we learn these things. No one sits you down and teaches you how to feel like a burden. It happens slowly, almost invisibly—through tired glances, through things unsaid, through the quiet awareness of how much things cost, not just in money, but in energy, in patience, in pieces of a person you love.
And so you learn to be careful.
Careful with your wants.
Careful with your needs.
Careful with the space you take up.
The first time I went to therapy, my counselor told me that I had to let my parents be parents—that I didn’t need to feel guilty for receiving what they were meant to give. It sounded simple enough, almost obvious in the way truths often are when they belong to someone else.
But no one really explains what to do with the other half of it.
No one tells you what to do when you see them as people, not just as parents. When you notice the cracks in their voices, the exhaustion in the way they sit down at the end of the day, the weight of choices they never wanted to make but had to anyway. No one tells you what to do when love starts to look like quiet sacrifices stacked so high you’re afraid to touch them, in case they collapse.
Because once you see that, how do you not adjust yourself?
How do you not try to take up less space?
How do you not soften your needs, trim them down into something more manageable, more reasonable, more deserving?
It feels almost cruel not to.
They didn’t choose their mistakes. They didn’t choose the limits they ran into. And so it feels wrong to make those limits heavier by asking for more than what seems fair.
So you compromise, in ways that are hard to name.
You become smaller in places that were meant to grow.
You learn to breathe just enough.
And maybe that’s why I think about that house so often.
Not because of the walls or the rooms or the land it might sit on, but because of what it would mean inside it. A place where no one feels like they have to apologize for existing fully. A place where love doesn’t feel like something that has to be paid back in restraint.
A place where a child can take a deep breath—
and never once wonder who it might cost.
May 3
May 3, 2026 at 11:22 AM UTC
The afternoon is heavy. The sun presses through the window, baking the tiles beneath me until they burn through my clothes. The fan rattles above, slow and tired, moving the air just enough to remind me it is still working. Outside, the street moves on without care: children shouting as they chase each other barefoot, a jeepney horn cutting through the heat, the smell of frying garlic drifting in from the neighbor’s kitchen.
I sit on the floor, knees pulled close. My phone buzzes, but I leave it face down. The kitchen hums with quiet work—the scrape of a spoon against a *** the careful counting of coins, the sigh of someone I love. I do not turn. I do not speak. I let it all settle around me.
The warmth presses into my chest, and under it, something else—something I cannot move, cannot set down, cannot share. I feel the pull of the care and worry that surrounds me, threaded into every small thing my parents do. It is a presence I cannot escape, a weight I cannot set aside. I have learned to carry it.
I eat slowly, chewing at the rice on my plate. The clock ticks. The street continues without me. The children laugh; the tricycle horn blares again. And I think about the things I have received—fruits of sacrifices I did not ask for, pieces of life handed down like invisible bills I cannot refuse. They are meant to be mine, and yet, in their weight, I feel the limits of what I can reach, what I can take, what I can be.
Evening softens the walls with gold that does not reach the corners. The fan slows, the air stills. I lie back against the tiles, letting the quiet wrap around me. Every small sound—the hum of a neighbor’s radio, the scrape of a chair, the soft murmur of voices—presses at something inside me. It is comforting, yes, but heavy. Every piece of care, every fruit of someone else’s struggle, settles in my chest like something I cannot put down.
I do not ask for more. I do not reach. I lie still, feeling the day fold into me, the weight of what has been given and what I cannot change, pressed alongside the quiet ache that will not leave. And still, I hold it, because to let go is not mine to do.
Mar 22
Mar 22, 2026 at 11:14 AM UTC
My Dearest,
You did not have to turn around for me to love you.
I loved you even when my eyes dared not meet yours.
I loved you in ways that the most accomplished poet could scarce articulate.
I loved you enough to know that water may kiss sand, but can never claim it.
I became fluent in restraint:
in measured tones,
in silent imaginings,
in the subtle whisper of a heart’s lament, known to itself alone.
I swallowed every confession
before it could pass my lips.
I turned longing into gentle discourse,
hope into the mere courtesy of words.
You only ever encountered
the calm, composed version of me.
You never glimpsed
the one who wept quietly afterwards,
nor the one who lingered, unseen,
upon the brink of some tender despair.
Some loves, my dear, are not destined to be chosen.
They are not meant for triumph, nor for flourish, nor for declaration.
They are to be endured,
like the lingering shadow of twilight
that drapes itself over the parlor long after the sun’s retreat,
like the faint perfume of rose that lingers in empty halls,
felt only by the solitary heart brave enough to bear it.
And so, at last, I write to you to release you,
to relinquish you from the chambers of my mind,
and, in so doing, to free myself.
And thus I loved you quietly,
softly, inexorably,
as one might love a secret kept,
or a cherished book that must never be opened aloud.
Feb 13
Feb 13, 2026 at 11:09 AM UTC
Guard this soft place in him,
fragile and glowing beneath hesitant hands that skim.
Let its shape be known,
yet shield it from the fear that coils when fire is shown.
Edges skim like tides along stone,
fingers tracing constellations on skin he cannot own.
Light slipping through the spaces he cannot claim,
a glow he reaches for but cannot name.
Forgive what never touched,
bless the warmth that flickered, fled, and meant so much.
Hold close the closeness trembling near,
shelter tenderness unclaimed, a quiet thing you revere.
Let it rest in the quiet vault above,
a whisper folded gently between confession and love.
Breathe over what remains unspoken,
cover the fragile ache with hands that soothe the broken.
Let it linger sacred and unbroken still,
a soft fire burning only in shadow as it will.
A hymn for what was never ours to fill,
yet offered tenderly and holy still.
Nov 20, 2025
Nov 20, 2025 at 3:41 AM UTC
We existed only in passing signals, words that flickered and vanished before they could mean anything real. Yet somehow, the days began to shape themselves around your absence, the hours rearranging just to hold the possibility of you. It was only a month, but time stretched itself thin, softening at the edges, as if it too wanted to believe there was more.
When the nights grew still, I found you in the spaces between thought and sleep. I forced you into my dreams when the skies showed no stars. I watered flowers in gardens meant to reside stones etched with names and numbers, tending to things that were never meant to grow.
I moved oceans and placed them in cabinets beside my clothes. I folded small impossibilities into drawers, hid the evidence of what never quite happened. I shifted landscapes without meaning to, quiet rearrangements, as though something unseen had passed through and left the air different.
The room stays the same but is different. Still blue but with a different intensity. Light falls softly across the walls, carrying traces of a sound I can’t name. The days pass quietly now, but sometimes I still feel the faint pull, like a tide that never really left, only learned how to move beneath the surface.
It’s as if everything here was remade under a held breath, as though the universe had come near enough to almost stay.
And still, there are moments when the air shifts, when a shadow moves just right, and for an instant, it almost remembers.
Oct 14, 2025
Oct 14, 2025 at 9:19 PM UTC
No one ever tells you how lonely it can be, chasing high-functioning careers.
They only speak of success — of life after graduation, of stability, of pride.
They tell you about the prestige, the paycheck, the purpose.
But they don’t speak of the quiet nights that stretch too long,
or the empty dinners eaten in silence,
or the kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.
No one warns you about the aching —
not just in your feet or your back,
but in your chest, in that place that once felt full.
The aching for warmth, for laughter in another room,
for a familiar voice calling your name just because.
No one tells you that you’ll miss the sound of home —
the clatter of dishes in the sink,
your sibling’s footsteps in the hallway,
your parent’s voice humming from another room.
That one day, you’d trade everything you’ve learned
just to sit at your kitchen table again,
with nothing urgent to do and nowhere you need to be.
You learn to crave things you never thought you’d miss:
a shared meal, someone remembering how you like your coffee,
a voice that softens when they speak your name,
a conversation that doesn’t revolve around work, or grades, or deadlines.
You learn how to carry the weight of being capable
while quietly falling apart.
You get good at answering, “How are you?”
with a smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.
You become someone who longs for home,
even when you have a place to live.
You begin to understand
that safety isn’t in walls or degrees or diplomas —
it’s in people.
In being seen. In being known.
In being loved without needing to earn it.
And no one tells you
how much you’ll miss that kind of love,
when your days are spent fixing others
but no one notices when you need to be held.
Jun 15, 2025
Jun 15, 2025 at 1:31 AM UTC
the noise, the contradiction, the suffering, the sadness…
our ancestors tried so hard to protect us from all the things that may hurt us in this world...
they learned how to mix cement, burn bridges, and build walls…
until building walls, cementing resentment, and burning people and pasts were all they’ve ever known…
they’ve been so preoccupied with mastering how to make the strongest foundations and columns
that a labyrinth of walls and isolation was all they’ve achieved in their attempts of trial and error…
the labyrinth became so big, it stretched to cover the outside, too…
And now, the noise, the contradiction, the suffering, the sadness—
they seep from the walls themselves, thickened with anger, sharpened with frustration,
drenched in apathy, twisted with hollow apologies.
At first, they were just sounds, bouncing off the walls,
detached, unshaped, incomprehensible.
But time sharpens everything.
And as the days stretch into years,
those echoes carve through the silence with clarity.
The words find me.
They seep into me, thread themselves into the cracks of my skin until they are no longer echoes.
They are me.
Time does not heal all wounds.
Sometimes, it presses you deeper into the soil,
where the weight of dirt and grief presses harder against your chest.
The longer you stay marinated in the bitterness of your inheritance,
the deeper you dig into the grave your ancestors left for you.
Until the day you wake and realize—
you never built walls to keep the world out.
You built walls to keep yourself in.
Jun 1, 2025
Jun 1, 2025 at 12:37 AM UTC
I fear smelling like the Garcia household,
I fear of walking through halls of gold, of diamond, of emerald, of amber,
And staining them with scents of aluminum, copper, and rust.
I’m scared of entering through the kitchen as I age,
With each step I take, utensils evolve from spoons, to forks, to sticks, to peelers, to scissors, to knives,
In the kitchen, where walls are stained with sauce, tomatoes, ketchup, and blood,
The kitchen, whose perimeter engulfs an unpredictable weather of hot and cold, of shrills and silences, of music and news, of laughter and accusations…
The kitchen table holds not just ingredients and tools,
It holds tupperwares stained with hard water and grease,
The very same water we wash our hands with before we eat, before we lie, and before we clasp our hands in truce or in resignation,
The very same grease that not only warms beings but also warns,
Warns us that our time at the table marks our calendars of the day when the wrong Mary* joins us in our last feast…
I’m scared of going outside with the same clothes I used to cook in,
I’m scared of having evidences of what happened in that house, of my lapses, of our mistakes, of their arrogance,
I fear of smelling like tradition—of poor execution, of living by definition, of the same old useless solution…
Menudo. Afritada. Mechado. Puchero.
I was taught how to cut, peel, segregate, saute, and appeal,
Generations of cooking bequeathed to me simply by inhalation,
This way, I could say that our family recipe was passed down to me by heart,
When in fact all I could smell was the smoke from the burning carcasses who drowned in their own pursuit of our identity,
And in my quest to find the smell of our cooking,
In my anguish and exhaustion of trying to know what our kitchen is supposed to smell like,
I then try to start each dish,
I try and rewrite the stories that once made my ancestors full…
But is it right to modify the taste of our dinner?
Or should I just let it be?
Let it taste like what it did decades ago?
When the people who cooked it first were still alive?
When the sins that marked the skins of the children of tomorrow’s relatives hadn’t been yet committed?
When we still worded words and still conversed in conversations?
When pages were still held together by the spine and not by the very feet that carried us?
If only life was as easy to mise en place in the kitchen.
I fear by the time I walk out of the kitchen door,
In my attempts to finish the crossfire between my past and my future,
I serve a dish so poignant, so red,
I can’t even tell if it’s from the tomatoes,
Or if it’s made from the dreams of escape that always simmered low.
Mar 22, 2025
Mar 22, 2025 at 10:29 AM UTC