Five chapters. One life. One story.
I am a boy from Pardo, retracing the roots that shaped the person I became.
My story began in the quiet solitude of a boarding house on a Black Saturday of 1994 in my Sampaloc home in Manila. I was twenty-five years old, alone with nothing but my memories for company.
In that silence, the past slowly found its voice. It carried me back to the open fields, winding creeks, and tidal shores of the old Pardo, a place that would soon disappear beneath reclamation plan and the constant march of progress.
It led me to the story of the Colinas and the Ybiernases, whose lives became intertwined in 1962; to the first cry of a newborn inside a maternity house on a Friday the 13th; and to the half-forgotten folklore, whispered beliefs, and strange encounters that lingered in the shadows of my rural childhood.
As these five chapters unfolded, I realized they were never truly about solitude, even though solitude was where the telling began. They became an excavation of identity, a journey through the people, places, and memories that assembled my life, one fragment at a time.
I was shaped by a landscape that will no longer exist, by parents who carried the weight and wisdom of generations before them, by neighbors who became family, by cousins who filled my childhood with laughter, and by stories of spirits, omens, and unexplained fangs glimpsed in a rice field at noontime.
Whether those stories were fact or folklore was never the point. As a child, I never demanded proof before believing. I simply embraced the world as it was handed to me, allowing every story, every fear, and every wonder to become part of who I was.
Looking back, I find comfort in the quiet truth that nothing from those early years was ever wasted.
Not the mangrove forests that would soon vanish beneath concrete structures of reclaimed land.
Not the games we invented only to forget by nightfall.
Not even the moments of thoughtlessness and youthful cruelty that I was too young to recognize for what they were.
Every memory, whether joyful or painful, became another layer of the foundation on which my life was built.
Only later did I understand that the loneliness I experienced on that Black Saturday of 1994 was not an ending but a beginning.
It gave me the distance to see my past with greater clarity and gratitude.
Sitting alone in that small room, with no one to interrupt the silence, I discovered that memory could become a companion rather than a burden.
The emptiness around me became a space where forgotten voices returned, old places came alive once more, and the story of how I became myself finally revealed its shape.
I realized that the best way to honor that silence was to fill it with the people, places, and moments that had quietly shaped my life.
These chapters bring my early years to a close, but they are only the first excavation of a much longer journey.
Where every beginning leaves traces that echo through the years.
And where every memory points toward the man I was still becoming.
The road ahead holds more stories, more reckonings, and more discoveries.
If these pages reveal where my life began, the chapters that follow will reveal where those beginnings ultimately led me.
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