I am happy to be here. To walk on this Earth. To live and love and, even many times, lose. And birthdays remind, they force to remember, that the sum of these moments, however messed up or ecstatically overwhelming, are worth living for. That after all these brief periods have swallowed us or dissipated and gone, it is a wonderful, beautiful, purposeful thing to have lived one more year – one more day.

Oh, the many years more.

There is a strangeness to early mornings. I think it’s the light that shines in patches, from fluorescence to the dawn that has barely broken. Or it’s the coolness of the air, the breeze that gasps crisply. Or it’s the sound of calm, the peace that sticks to morning air. Or it’s all of these, the subtle variances of nature, while silently fleeting, are the beautiful kind of rare.

I’ve been in Taguig for a little over a week now. It feels like a month or a year or ten years and my soul has not yet moved in with me. I don’t expect it to. Not this soon anyway. I figured that if I just moved out of CDO and left an old, tired self behind and went away from it all, I would feel better about myself. In a way I do. Yet in so many other ways, the transition is yet to finish unfolding and it tells me I have to hold on to my seat because turbulence is on its way and it’s going to be rough and please don’t take out the inflight magazines because they’re supposed to last a month before the next issue. Also put on your mask before helping others. Life jackets are under your seat. Or in the seat in from of you. I didn’t hear that part. I hope we don’t crash and sink. Or blow up. But blowing up would probably be better because I wouldn’t have to worry about life jackets.

Travel, in essence, is going: to a new environment, a different adventure, a better life. It isn’t leaving: from an old neighborhood, a sad memory, a bad place. Running away won’t take us where we wish to run to. But this time, I am taking the next flight to wherever, to anywhere but here. I don’t remember why, six months ago, gravity pulled me back home.

All my life, I’ve been running. I ran from place to place, people to people, problem to problem, life to life. And hell, I ran fast. I was, if anything, incapable of staying, not so much as a fear of commitment, but more so the inability to fight my battles. I was afraid that things got too wrong or too out of hand that I wouldn’t be able to survive the wreckage.

Adapted from Neil Gaiman’s “Babycakes”

One day, the trees went away.

They didn’t really tell us they would. We just woke up and they weren’t there. No trace as to why they left or where they went or how they even uprooted themselves. They did not leave seeds for other trees to grow or stick a note on our doors to say goodbye. They left their spots holed and broken.

People were crying and calling the police and the community church. Classes were cut off for a week and no one went to work. We were horrified at the idea of trees leaving. But we were more worried because the world might get too hot and we’d run out of paper and there’d be nothing to shade us from the ultraviolet. Eventually, the color green was transferred from the dictionary to history books because it no longer existed. Brown was attributed to soil and human flesh.

Someone pointed out that just because they left us, it wouldn’t have to mean that we should change the way we live. The trees just weren’t there anymore. But the world was still here. So it all went perfectly fine. Eventually, we got used to their inexistence. We returned to our usual lives and did what we always have done. Nobody cares about trees anyway.

After all, we could still plant babies.