early in the morning, hot coffee in hand — just like the usual setup.

i open facebook and let the reels take over. mindless scrolling, one thumbnail after another, the way most of us numb ourselves awake before the day officially starts. and then, out of nowhere, a tagalog-dubbed episode of doraemon stops my thumb mid-scroll.

i almost skip it. i don't. i watch it instead.

hearing nobita's and doraemon's voices again feels like time folding in on itself. it feels like being young again. like yesterday. but not exactly how i remembered it — softer in some places, heavier in others, the way memories are never quite the same size once you're grown enough to hold them properly.

why it hits different now?

when we were kids, we never noticed the meaning tucked inside the cartoons we loved. we just felt happy. that was the whole point, and it was enough.

now that we're adults, the same episode lands differently. not because the cartoon changed — it didn't. we changed. we've lived through the kind of scenes those stories were quietly telling us all along, and back then we couldn't see it, because all we wanted was to be entertained. we're still entertained now. but somewhere in the middle of an episode, it turns into something else — like you've been watching your own life, dubbed and animated, without realizing it.

we all know what a dandelion is. as kids, we'd make a wish, blow the seeds loose, and watch them scatter into the wind, hoping it would somehow find its way to whoever grants those things.

i still do it, honestly. i think we all still do, quietly, even as adults. just not with the same weightless joy we had as kids. this time there's a small ache folded into the hope — the kind that comes from wishing for something you now understand the cost of.

a dandelion needs sunlight. it needs space to grow. so do we. we need room to stretch into. we need something worth reaching toward. we need to find ourselves before we can live with any real sense of direction.

and yes, a flower can survive in a single spot, untouched, unpicked, left completely alone. but this episode was a small, gentle reminder that surviving isn't the same as growing — and that we deserve more than just being left alone in one place. believe that.

because a dandelion can take root somewhere and still need to lift, to drift, to move when its season comes. not because that first space failed it, but because it wants more than what one small patch of ground can offer. so it rides the wind, hoping to land somewhere it finally belongs. i hope you do too, someday.

the dandelion isn't just a flower to me anymore. it's life in its deepest understanding.

life is out there — not confined to the single space where you've been slowly shrinking, day after day, telling yourself this is just how it is. but like the dandelion, you need light. and if it's still dark right now, stay facing it anyway, because after every dark stretch, there is always a sun on its way back.

so take it easy on yourself. everyone moves at their own pace, and there's no prize for arriving early. wherever you are right now — that's still progress. everything you're doing, even the parts that feel small or invisible, is still progress.

you are a dandelion. and you deserve more.

life is never linear. someone once said you can never step into the same river twice — because the river has changed, and so have you. i used to believe that. i used to believe time only moves forward, that healing is a straight road with an end you can see.

but grief doesn't work like a river. it works like a tide. you feel like you're getting there — the dream, the fantasy — and then in a blink you realize you've come back, rushing, running, but you can't even move a single foot. you're stuck. the water pulls you back to where you started.

and your past stands there, waiting, demanding forgiveness.

we all grow up in different environments. no household is ever perfect. every family, whatever their status, faces its own struggles, every day, trying to adapt to what a “perfect family” is supposed to look like. trust me when i say every family has secrets that keep them together. that's why the word “family” exists.

but what happens when the two walls of a family, the mother and the father, can no longer hold their secrets?

not because they want to say it out loud, but because they're both suffering from the very secret they're trying to hold together. turns out they both had one. they both needed to let go. they both needed to make a decision. a decision that could end their children's chance at a good future.

there's a filipino word, “kapwa” — the idea that your sense of self is bound up with others, that you are never truly separate from the people who raised you. i think that's why our secrets weigh so much. they aren't just ours. they belong to everyone who shares our blood.

this is not someone else's story.

i grew up. thanks to my parents, who taught me that at a young age. i know they don't hate me, or my siblings. they just hate each other — which is why they could no longer hold on to a piece of a ring.

every couple has their own struggles. we know that, especially once they start building a home. i remember my father, every time he was drunk, telling me the story of how i was born — which wouldn't have happened if they hadn't lost two children before me, my brother and my sister. they lost my brother while my mother was giving birth to him. my sister lost her breath in an accident my father always told me was my mother's fault — one night she was accidentally covered by a blanket, and by morning she wasn't moving. god took her life. that's what i've always believed, even though my parents kept blaming each other for it.

at some point, i understood them. no parent wants that for their child. and maybe that's the cruelest thing about grief — it doesn't ask permission before it moves into a house. it just stays, quietly rearranging the furniture, until everyone forgets what the room looked like before it arrived.

they still tried to stay together — that's why they had me. the youngest. the one born out of two absences. until my mother decided to leave, and chose a different home.

i can't blame her. but as a child who needed a mother, all i ever did was ask when she would come back. because the reason she gave me was that she was just working in the city. until weeks became months, became years, became a decade. i waited and waited, until i lost hope of waiting for a mother who i want to call home.

i let myself grow old. i became my own mother, even though my father was trying his best to be one too. i'd be lying if i said i didn't still search for the woman who carried me in her stomach.

i let myself be big, even though i was thin as a stick. i let myself excel in school. but every family day that struck the calendar, no matter how many awards i brought home, i always felt alone. my siblings were all figuring life out in the city, while i sat in a classroom waiting for my father to come.

because at some point, he was the only one i had left.

every day he brought my lunch and stayed while i finished it — he always gave me the best food. he made sure to be present at every card-giving day, consistent since my grade school years. he was so happy every time i brought home grades i'd worked hard for. he let me join boy scouts, join school activities, even though i knew it strained him financially. he was kind to everyone — you'd know it the moment you stepped into our barangay, because everyone knew him. they called him "mayaman," rich, because he always gave, genuinely, even though we weren't. he was always my supporter, always on my side whenever i fought with my siblings. and i'd hear it from the neighborhood too — how proud he was, how vocal he was about everything i achieved. he was proud i became a theatre artist. he couldn't wait to see me on stage, on screen.

but someone who is always kind carries a monster too, one he kept locked away — like a man who keeps the porch light on for everyone else's children, while his own house stays dark inside. even though he was vocal about how angry he was at my mother, i know part of him was suffering from the same thing — the abandonment, the feeling of being left behind, the weight of becoming a burden to the family. he was just a husband who lost his wife to another man. he was hurting too. and in the quiet moments, i think i made him feel that same thing again, the day i left for college in the city.

i still carry this grief — the wanting to go back, to stay with him a little longer.

my father suffered from more sicknesses than i can count, and he nearly lost his memory. the day i was walking into class, everything already felt heavy, and i was uneasy in a way i couldn't explain. then i got a message from my brother. my father had passed away.

i couldn't move. i felt like i was carrying the whole world, and then suddenly, i couldn't carry anything at all. i cried in front of my classmates. i walked alone. blank. everything just was. no one to talk to, because i didn't want anyone near me. all i had was regret and pain.

when i got to our house in the province, everyone was waiting for me. i smiled. because somewhere, i had already prepared myself — i already knew he was dying. i made myself look strong, refused to be vulnerable in front of my siblings, the way i always had.

until i learned that his only wish, the day he died, was to hear my voice one last time.

and i wasn't there to give my dying father that one last wish.

there's a kind of silence that isn't peace. it's the sound a house makes right after someone stops breathing in it — not empty, just rearranged around an absence. i think i have been listening to that silence ever since.

then, my mother came back. forgiveness.

i remember staring at my phone, writing the same word over and over.

how, on earth, do you forgive a mother who was gone for 17 years, who is suddenly standing in front of you?

i don't know if i missed her. but i'd be lying if i said i didn't — because somewhere in me, i did. and now that she was here, all i could do was forgive. forgive the past. forgive the child who suffered.

i let my mother reclaim us. my siblings kept saying, whatever happens, she's still your mother, and that's a fact you can't change.

still, i questioned it.

still, i forgave.

someone once said forgiveness isn't a gift you give the other person — it's the only way to put down a weight you've been carrying for them, so you can finally use both hands to hold your own life. i think i understand that now. until one day my mother texted me, for the first time, “i love you” and i cried — the child in me who had waited seventeen years for those three words finally let go.

i'm okay with my mother now. we're still in the process. but who am i, to not forgive?

all i think is, while she's still here, let me be her son again — and still be his.

the day i got a big role in theatre, my siblings and my mother watched me perform for the first time. they were so proud.

but there was a quiet ache in me — my number one supporter, the one who was supposed to be there, wasn't. still, i know he's proud, wherever he is.

this is a grief i will always carry. and still, i choose to live. there's a line from nightbirde i keep coming back to — you can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy — and i remind myself of it, over and over. i hope we all do.

sometimes i hear my father's voice. and the more i move on, the more i forget what it sounds like. i hope i don't forget. i hope it lives in me forever.

and in the quiet moments, i still look at nowhere and wonder,

did i betray my father, by forgiving my mother?

maybe love was never meant to be a scale, one parent weighed against the other. maybe it's more like a house with two rooms — you can grieve in one and heal in the other, and it's still the same home. i just haven't learned yet how to walk between them without feeling like i'm leaving someone behind.

do you ever feel like wanting someone so bad, to know you — i mean the deepest soul of you. the part you're trying to hide. the part still begging to be seen.

as a kid, i never felt the love of my parents.

that's a hard sentence to write. harder to say out loud.

maybe they did love me. maybe it was there the whole time. i just didn't feel it.

i remember grade school — kindergarten through grade three, to be exact. every single day, i cried when my father left me at school. yes, my father. my mother left us when i was three.

i didn't care who saw. i'd press my face to the window just to watch him walk away. something in me broke a little, every time.

and i was never embarrassed to cry my lungs out — even in grade three, when boys my age were already learning to swallow it. that says something about how deep the fear went.

maybe it was the fear of being left behind. the trauma my mother planted before i even had words for it. separation anxiety, they call it now. back then, it just felt like the world ending, over and over, every school morning.

now my father is gone. and i still carry this quiet ache — like i was never loved the way i needed to be. maybe that's not his fault. his generation didn't have language for mental health. love, to them, was providing. staying. not naming feelings out loud.

but a kid doesn't know the difference between "he stayed" and "he understood me." a kid just feels what they feel.

so now — i crave it. i go looking for it in people. someone who can hold the deepest, messiest parts of me and not flinch. maybe because i never got that as a child, i'm out here trying to collect it as an adult.

sometimes i wish i could just be content alone. but my heart was never built for that. it wants to love, fully, recklessly.

with friends, sure. but i'd be lying if i said that's the same thing. there's an intimacy in loving someone romantically — deeply, dangerously — that friendship just can't hold.

we romanticize the art of being alone. the peace of it. the self-sufficiency.

but sometimes, in the quiet, i stare at nothing and wonder — is this solitude something i actually want?

or is it just the safest way i know how to protect myself from being left again?