Where nobody expected to inherit anything from me.
Just a seventy-year-old woman learning something she should have learned much earlier.
That sometimes disappearing is not a defeat.
The first sunrise in the coastal town was silent, so different from the constant noise of Quezon City that for a moment I thought I had gone deaf.
I woke up before the sun came up, with that old habit of people who have spent their whole lives getting up early to take care of others.
But that morning there was no one to prepare breakfast for.
Nobody to wake up for school.
No one complained about the smell of the coffee.
I walked to the window of the small apartment I had rented facing the sea.
The sky was beginning to clear.
An orange line slowly appeared over the horizon as the waves gently lapped the sand.
For several minutes I simply observed.
I breathed.
And I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Silence within me.
It wasn’t sadness.
