The World of Second Chances

School Shootings in the Philippines

August 22, 2026

Filipino Culture, Life & Love

School shootings have long been associated more strongly with countries such as the United States than with the Philippines. Yet whenever a shooting involving students, teachers, or school personnel occurs, one uncomfortable question inevitably follows: Why does a young person reach a point where killing another person becomes an acceptable response to anger, humiliation, or grievance?

It is tempting to reduce the issue to gun ownership. But that explanation is incomplete. There have always been Filipino families who owned firearms, and most children who grew up around guns never used them to threaten, hurt, or kill anyone. The presence of a weapon matters because it can make violence more lethal, but the weapon alone does not explain why someone decides to use it.

One factor worth examining is the possibility that the psychological barrier to violence is becoming lower for some young people. This does not mean that an entire generation is becoming violent or morally worse. Most young people exposed to bullying, rejection, anger, or violent media will never become violent themselves. However, the environment in which today’s teenagers develop is fundamentally different from that of previous generations.

Young people are now exposed to graphic violence, humiliation, threats, revenge narratives, and online communities on an unprecedented scale. Violence is no longer something they encounter only in movies or television. It can appear repeatedly in social media feeds, videos, online discussions, games, and communities where extreme ideas can be reinforced. Repeated exposure does not automatically create violent behavior, but it can potentially make violence feel less psychologically distant. When violence is repeatedly portrayed as a means of gaining power, settling scores, or getting revenge, the idea of using violence may gradually become less unthinkable to someone who is already psychologically vulnerable.

Another major difference is the nature of bullying and humiliation.

Bullying has always existed. A student could be mocked in the classroom, excluded by classmates, or humiliated in front of friends. But traditionally, there was at least a physical boundary to the experience. A child could leave school, go home, and have some distance from the people who had embarrassed him.

That boundary has largely disappeared.

Today, humiliation can continue through Messenger, Facebook, TikTok, group chats, comments, and private messages. An embarrassing incident can be recorded, shared, screenshotted, and replayed. A student who was humiliated at school may continue experiencing that humiliation long after leaving the campus. What used to be an isolated incident can become a 24-hour social experience.

For an emotionally immature teenager, this can be devastating. Adolescents can experience social rejection and humiliation with extraordinary intensity. What an adult might perceive as an unpleasant but temporary event may feel, to a teenager, like a catastrophic loss of status, dignity, or belonging.

But humiliation alone does not explain extreme violence. The more important question is what happens after the humiliation.

Some young people process pain by seeking support, talking to someone, withdrawing temporarily, or eventually moving on. Others may begin constructing a narrative around their suffering: Everyone is against me. Nobody understands me. They deserve what is coming to them. They will pay for what they did.

This is where grievance and revenge become particularly important.

There is a psychological difference between saying, “I was hurt,” and believing, “They must suffer because they hurt me.” The first is an expression of pain. The second transforms pain into justification.

When a young person begins to define himself primarily through grievance—through the belief that he is constantly victimized, rejected, humiliated, or persecuted—anger can become part of his identity. Revenge may then begin to feel less like an impulsive act and more like a form of justice.

The internet can make this process more complicated.

In the past, a teenager with an extreme or violent thought might have had very few people with whom to discuss it. He might have been forced to confront the thought alone and recognize that it was disturbing or unacceptable.

Today, he can potentially find people online who will validate his anger.

This does not mean that online communities cause school shootings. They do not. But they can sometimes provide reinforcement for distorted thinking. A person who already believes that the world is against him may find others who tell him that his anger is justified. A thought such as “I hate them” can gradually become “They are all evil.” And “I want them to suffer” can become “They deserve whatever happens to them.”

That shift is important because violence often requires more than anger. It requires some degree of moral disengagement—a process through which another person stops being seen as someone whose life has value and instead becomes an enemy who supposedly deserves punishment.

Adolescence itself also matters.

Teenagers are capable of sophisticated reasoning. They can understand complicated social issues, debate morality, and make surprisingly mature decisions. But the adolescent brain is still developing, particularly in areas related to impulse control, emotional regulation, and the evaluation of long-term consequences.

This does not mean teenagers are incapable of knowing right from wrong. They absolutely can.

It means that intense emotions can sometimes overwhelm judgment in ways that are less likely in a psychologically mature adult.

There is an enormous difference between “I hate my teacher” and “I am going to school tomorrow to kill my teacher.” A normal moment of anger does not automatically evolve into homicidal intent. There are multiple psychological steps between the two.

That is precisely why prevention cannot begin only when someone is already holding a weapon.

We need to pay attention to the escalation that can occur beforehand: persistent humiliation, social isolation, obsessive grievance, revenge fantasies, fascination with previous attacks, threats, violent ideation, and the increasing belief that violence is justified. None of these signs, by themselves, mean that a teenager will become a school shooter. Most troubled young people will never commit violence.

But when several of these factors converge—particularly when combined with access to a lethal weapon—the risk becomes much more serious.

This is also why the conversation about school shootings should not become a simplistic argument about whether guns are the cause.

A firearm can dramatically increase the consequences of a violent decision. Restricting access, securing firearms properly, and preventing children from obtaining them are therefore extremely important. But removing the weapon does not necessarily remove the grievance, the hatred, the desire for revenge, or the psychological process that produced the violent intention in the first place.

Likewise, focusing exclusively on bullying misses part of the problem. Bullying has existed for generations. What has changed is the environment surrounding it: social media, constant connectivity, permanent digital humiliation, online reinforcement, and unprecedented access to violent content and communities.

The Philippines should therefore be careful not to dismiss school shootings as something that could “never happen here.” The cultural context is different, and the frequency of such incidents may be far lower than in countries where school shootings have become a recurring phenomenon. But rarity does not mean impossibility.

The goal should not be to label today’s teenagers as a violent generation. That would be both unfair and inaccurate.

Instead, we should ask a more difficult question: What happens when an emotionally vulnerable young person experiences humiliation, develops a grievance, finds an online environment that reinforces his anger, begins to see revenge as justice, and eventually gains access to a lethal weapon?

That combination is far more important than any single factor.

Preventing school violence therefore requires more than simply telling children to be good. It requires schools that take bullying and threats seriously, parents who pay attention to dramatic changes in behavior, adults who are willing to intervene when a young person becomes consumed by revenge, responsible control and storage of firearms, and communities that do not normalize violent fantasies as merely teenage drama.

Most angry teenagers will grow up, move on, and forget the people who once embarrassed them.

The danger lies in the minority who do not move on—those who turn humiliation into grievance, grievance into hatred, hatred into revenge, and revenge into a justification for violence.

And perhaps that is where the conversation about school shootings should begin.

Not with the question, “Why did he have a gun?” but with the much harder question: “What happened inside this young person that made killing seem like an acceptable answer?”
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Loved, But Not Chosen

August 14, 2026

Life & Love

I tend to read my old blog entries from time to time—not just for nostalgia, but to see whether I have actually progressed as a person.

I want to look at the problems that once consumed me through the eyes of the woman I am now. Did I become wiser? Did I heal? Or did I simply learn to carry the same wounds differently?

This time, I found myself thinking about one of my exes.

We had a seven-year rollercoaster of a relationship that eventually ended in a breakup. It was more painful than my first breakup because, by then, I was ready for a future. I was financially and emotionally prepared to build a life with someone.

So when almost seven years suddenly seemed to have no future, it was difficult to accept.

There were flaws and red flags in the relationship, yes. But I stayed committed. I believed that commitment meant staying and working through things.

The breakup came after a major fight about where the relationship was heading. The last four years had been long-distance, but we were still much like any other couple. We saw each other on weekends whenever we could. We talked. We made plans. We continued being part of each other’s lives.

That was probably why I was so blindsided.

There was a tiny part of me that continued to believe the relationship could still be saved. Maybe that was denial. Maybe it was hope. At the time, I couldn’t tell the difference.

It took me a year after the breakup before I started dating again.

A year later, I met the man who would become my husband.

Meeting him eventually swept away the romantic feelings I still had for my ex. But it did not immediately erase the pain. Those are two different things. I could stop loving someone and still carry the hurt they left behind.

Because my ex and I had common friends and acquaintances, I continued to hear bits and pieces about his life—usually unintentionally. For years, there were still moments when I would get angry, especially when I discovered things he had done while we were still together that I hadn’t known about at the time.

It took me about ten years to finally return something that had remained with me from that relationship: his family’s old photo album.

He had asked me to keep those photographs when we were still together. Years later, both of us were married. I thought about his family seeing those pictures again—the ex as a young boy—and realized that the album no longer belonged with me.

I didn’t want his physical address, so I digitized the photographs, sent them by email, and threw the album away.

It was a strangely symbolic thing to do.

I wasn’t returning the photographs because I wanted him back.

I wasn’t returning them because I was still in love.

I was simply returning something that no longer belonged to me.

By then, the romantic love was gone. Most of the pain was gone, too. What remained were occasional triggers whenever I heard something about the relationship that I hadn’t known before.

And now, nineteen years after the breakup, I realize something I couldn’t have understood when I was younger.

It was wrong for me to assume that he never loved me.

I think I used to believe that if someone truly loved you, they would inevitably choose you. So if he didn’t choose me, then perhaps the love itself must have been fake.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Loving someone and choosing someone as your life partner are two different things.

A person can love you and still not see a future with you.

Perhaps he had a vision of the kind of life and partner he wanted, and I didn’t fit that vision. I used to take that personally. Today, I don’t.

Because I have learned something else about myself.

When I was young, I believed that love was enough to make a relationship survive. I was loyal. I was committed. I showed up for the people I loved. I spoke and acted according to my values.

But being a loyal person does not guarantee that the people you love will have the same definition of loyalty.

Being committed does not mean the other person is equally committed.

And having strong values does not mean that someone else will share those values—even if that person is kind, decent, or someone you love deeply.

That may be why two people can love each other and still clash repeatedly.

We don’t just bring love into relationships.

We bring our definitions of commitment, family, responsibility, loyalty, sacrifice, money, success, and the future.

Sometimes, those definitions don’t fit.

That is something I understand now that I didn’t understand then.

Love is not enough to be chosen.

There has to be a vision for the future.

Looking back, I can see the difference in how I met my husband. Our courtship was a whirlwind. There was a quick engagement, and we were married in less than a year.

It wasn’t necessarily the length of time that made the difference.

It was that there was love—and there was a clear intention to build a future together.

That distinction matters to me now.

I no longer need to decide whether my ex loved me enough. I don’t need to rewrite seven years of my life as either a great love or a terrible mistake.

It was a relationship that mattered.

It simply wasn’t the future we ended up choosing.

And perhaps that is the part of my younger self I finally know how to comfort.

She wasn’t foolish for believing in love.

She was simply too young to understand that love, by itself, doesn’t always tell you where two people are going.
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A Realization 18 Years Later

August 11, 2026

Life & Love

Original Post 18 Yrs Earlier: Tara, Laro Tayo – The World of Second Chances

I sometimes think relationships are not very different from the games children play.

When we are young, finding someone to play with seems like the most natural thing in the world.

You don’t make a checklist.

You don’t ask what their five-year plan is.

You don’t calculate whether they are good enough for you or whether you are good enough for them.

You simply see another child and ask, “Laro tayo?”

And sometimes, that is how a relationship begins.

There was once a little girl named Sandy who met a little boy named Ben.

Ben asked her to play.

Sandy hesitated.

She was afraid that if she played, she might get hurt.

But Ben assured her that he wanted her as his playmate. So Sandy eventually said yes.

And they played.

They played jack-and-poy, holen, jackstones, patintero, and whatever other games children invented to fill an afternoon.

Sometimes Sandy fell.

Sometimes she went home crying because she had scraped her knees or hurt herself.

But the next day, she came back.

She played again.

Because that is what children do.

Getting hurt does not necessarily make them afraid of the game.

Sometimes it only makes them want to play again.

And Ben enjoyed having Sandy as a playmate. She was kind. She played fairly. She didn’t cheat. She didn’t take advantage of him.

For a while, it seemed like they would keep playing forever.

But children grow.

And sometimes, they simply become interested in different games.

Ben began to lose interest.

He played less often with Sandy.

Then one day, Sandy went to his house and knocked on his door.

She asked him to come outside and play.

Ben said he wasn’t there.

Sandy thought perhaps they were playing taguan now.

So she waited.

She spent the whole day outside, believing that Ben was simply hiding somewhere and that, eventually, she would find him.

But he never came out.

Later, she saw him playing patintero with other children.

She approached them and asked if she could join.

Ben told her they already had enough players.

Sandy pleaded.

Just let me play.

But Ben told her to find another playmate.

That was when Sandy’s eyes filled with tears.

Ben didn’t like seeing her cry.

So he told her not to cry.

And Sandy, wanting so badly not to upset him, tried to hold the tears back.

She didn’t understand then why she was the one trying to make things easier for the person who had hurt her.

She only knew that she didn’t want Ben to feel bad.

Eventually, they stopped playing altogether.

Ben disappeared from her afternoons.

And Sandy’s mother eventually noticed.

She asked her daughter why she and Ben no longer played together.

Sandy answered that they were still friends.

They were just playing taguan now.

She was the one who was “it.”

And she couldn’t find Ben.

He was very good at hiding.

Eighteen years later, I think Sandy would understand something the little girl couldn’t.

Ben wasn’t hiding.

He wasn’t waiting for Sandy to find the right place.

He wasn’t secretly hoping she would keep looking.

He had simply stopped playing.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest things to understand when we are young: not every disappearance is a game.

Sometimes we keep searching because we cannot accept that the game has ended.

We reinterpret silence as mystery.

Distance as shyness.

Indifference as confusion.

We tell ourselves that perhaps the other person is just hiding.

Perhaps they will come back.

Perhaps there is still another round.

Perhaps if we wait long enough, we will hear the familiar voice again:

“Sandy, laro tayo.”

But adulthood teaches us something childhood doesn’t know yet.

Sometimes there is no next game.

Sometimes there is no dramatic explanation.

Sometimes nobody cheated.

Nobody betrayed anybody.

Nobody did anything unforgivable.

One person simply wanted to stop playing.

And the other person was left standing outside the house, wondering what happened.

Maybe that is why the story of Sandy feels different to me now.

If I were Sandy eighteen years ago, I might have wondered what was wrong with me.

Why wasn’t I enough?

Why did Ben enjoy playing with me before and then suddenly prefer other people?

Was I boring?

Was someone else prettier, more interesting, more exciting?

Did I do something wrong?

Those are the questions we ask when we are still measuring our worth through someone else’s willingness to choose us.

But eighteen years later, perhaps Sandy doesn’t ask those questions anymore.

Perhaps she has finally realized that being rejected by someone does not automatically mean that there was something wrong with the person who was rejected.

Ben’s decision was about Ben.

It doesn’t rewrite the afternoons they spent together.

It doesn’t make Sandy less kind.

It doesn’t make the games less real.

It simply means that the two children eventually wanted different things.

And perhaps that is true of relationships, too.

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if something ends, it must mean that it was never real.

But something can be real and still end.

Someone can have genuinely loved being with you and later decide they no longer want the same thing.

Someone can have been important to you and still not belong in your future.

And sometimes, the most painful relationships are not the ones that ended because of betrayal.

They are the ones that ended without a sufficiently satisfying reason.

Because there is nothing to fight against.

No villain.

No great injustice.

Just an empty space where someone used to be.

I also think Sandy eventually learns another uncomfortable truth.

Perhaps she wasn’t looking for Ben all those years.

Perhaps she was looking for the feeling of being chosen.

She was looking for the little boy who once knocked on her door and asked her to play.

She was looking for the afternoons when she was someone’s favorite playmate.

She was looking for the version of herself who believed that if someone asked her to play, they would keep asking forever.

And maybe that is why some people remain in our memories long after they have disappeared from our lives.

We don’t necessarily miss who they became.

We miss who we were when they still wanted us.

We miss the innocence.

The possibility.

The anticipation.

The feeling that something could become something more.

Sometimes nostalgia disguises itself as love.

It makes us look backward and wonder whether we should have done something differently.

But perhaps we don’t actually want the person back.

Perhaps we want to go back to the beginning—before we knew how the story would end.

If I could speak to Sandy now, I wouldn’t tell her to stop looking for Ben.

She was a child.

Of course she looked.

She had no reason to understand yet that some people leave without coming back.

I would simply tell her:

You don’t have to keep searching.

The game is over.

You didn’t lose because you couldn’t find him.

He wasn’t hiding from you.

He had simply chosen another game.

And there is something liberating about finally understanding that.

Because once you stop searching for the person who disappeared, you can finally notice the people who are still standing beside you.

You can find new games.

New friends.

New versions of yourself.

And perhaps, one day, you can even look back at the little girl who spent the whole afternoon waiting outside Ben’s house and feel tenderness instead of embarrassment.

She wasn’t foolish.

She was simply young.

She believed that when someone said, “Let’s play,” they meant “Let’s keep playing.”

It takes years to learn that sometimes people mean only:

“Let’s play for as long as I want to.”

And that is not necessarily a tragedy.

It is simply one of the rules of the game.

The tragedy would be spending the rest of your life standing outside a closed door, still believing that someone is hiding behind it.

Eighteen years later, Sandy finally knows better.

She is no longer the girl who is “it.”

She has stopped looking.

And perhaps the real ending of the story isn’t that she finally found Ben.

It is that she finally found her way home.
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She Felt Like Home

August 11, 2026

Life & Love

I have this childhood friend. We’ve known each other since we were young kids.

Ever since then, we’ve been complete opposites.

She was loud, confident, and very much a mean girl. If there was a classmate she didn’t like, she wouldn’t hesitate to bully them.

I was different.

And yet, unexpectedly, we clicked.

Throughout grade school, we were almost always together—except during school parties. She preferred mingling with our popular classmates, and I never took it personally.

I was perfectly content being her friend outside those circles.

High school wasn’t much different.

She remained the loud, confident one, while I stayed more reserved. But despite her flaws, she had one quality that I always found endearing: she wasn’t selfish.

Whenever I needed a gown for a school event, she would gladly lend me one.

It was a small thing, but those small things mattered.

In college, even though we attended different schools, we still kept in touch.

After graduation, we found ourselves seeing each other almost every weekend, especially during the time she was nursing a broken heart.

And somehow, that became a pattern.

Through the years, she would often remember me when she was going through something.

For a long time, I wondered why I continued to accept the imbalance in our friendship.

Why didn’t I get tired?

Why didn’t I simply say, This isn’t the kind of friendship I want anymore?

After all, friendship is supposed to be reciprocal. You shouldn’t only remember someone when you need comfort, company, or someone to listen.

But then I realized something about myself.

Maybe I wasn’t holding on simply because I accepted her as she was.

Maybe I was holding on because she had been my friend since I was five.

She felt like home.

Not necessarily because of who she was in the present, but because of who I was whenever I was with her.

Whenever we talked, memories came rushing back.

Grade school classrooms.

School parties.

Gowns borrowed for special occasions.

The people we used to know.

The places we used to go.

The ridiculous things we used to laugh about.

The carefree version of ourselves who had no idea what adulthood would eventually demand from us.

Talking to her somehow brought me back to that little girl I used to be.

And maybe that’s why I found it so difficult to let go, even when I knew the friendship had become uneven.

I wasn’t only holding on to a person.

I was holding on to a time.

Maybe that’s also why, when I feel the distance between us, what I experience isn’t simply the sadness of losing a friend.

It’s nostalgia.

I miss the years she represents.

I miss the childhood that existed when we were both five, ten, fifteen.

I miss the world as I knew it before life became complicated.

And perhaps this is something we don’t realize about old friendships:

Sometimes, we don’t pine for the person as much as we pine for the version of ourselves that existed when that person was beside us.

We think we’re longing for them.

But perhaps we’re longing for the life we had when we were young.

For the girl we used to be.

For the years that can never come back.

She became a living memory of my childhood.

And maybe that’s why, despite everything, a part of me still pines for her.

Not because I am unaware of the imbalance.

Not because I cannot see her flaws.

Not even because the friendship is the same as it used to be.

But because somewhere in my heart, she is still the five-year-old friend who walked beside me through the happiest years of my childhood.

And perhaps that is the real reason why letting go has always been so difficult for me.
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The Years I Remember Best

August 10, 2026

Life & Love

Sometimes I wonder about my memory.

I can remember things from when I was a toddler.

Not everything, of course. But there are flashes…little scenes, feelings, places, people. Then my childhood becomes clearer. By the time I reach my teenage years, my memory almost feels like an old film reel that someone carefully preserved.

I remember people.

I remember conversations.

I remember where we were standing.

I remember what someone said that nobody else thought was important.

I remember the embarrassment, the excitement, the crushes, the friendships, the little dramas that felt enormous at the time.

I can tell you stories from high school as though they happened yesterday.

But then something strange happens.

I reach my twenties.

And suddenly, the film becomes thinner.

My thirties are even more compressed.

It feels like a collection of major events rather than individual days.

I know I lived those years. Of course I did.

I worked.

I got married.

I built a family.

I became a mother.

I changed jobs.

I experienced successes and disappointments.

I made decisions that shaped the person I am today.

But if someone asks me to describe an ordinary day from my twenties, I sometimes struggle.

Where was I sitting?

What did my room look like?

What did I do after work?

Who was beside me?

What did we talk about?

Sometimes I know the answer in broad strokes, but the actual scene doesn’t come.

And yet, ask me about something that happened when I was sixteen, and suddenly I can see it.

The terrace.

The boarding house.

The people around me.

The boy I had a crush on.

The things nobody else knew.

It’s almost absurd.

Why does my brain preserve a random afternoon from adolescence while apparently throwing away hundreds of ordinary days from adulthood?

Maybe the answer is that not all memories are stored in the same way.

Our younger years are filled with firsts.

First crushes.

First heartbreaks.

First friendships that feel like forever.

First experiences of independence.

First embarrassing mistakes.

First realizations about who we are.

Those experiences are emotionally loud.

They help build our identity.

They become stories.

And stories are easier to remember than routines.

My twenties, on the other hand, may have been filled with repetition.

Work.

Commute.

Responsibilities.

Relationships.

Bills.

Family.

Work again.

There were important moments, certainly. But perhaps many days looked too much like the days before them and the days after them.

When life becomes repetitive, individual days lose their edges.

The years become a blur.

Maybe that’s why I remember my teenage years as scenes but my adulthood as chapters.

I remember what happened in my twenties.

I just don’t always remember what it felt like to be there on an ordinary Tuesday.

There is another possibility I find even more interesting.

Perhaps my teenage memories survived because I kept revisiting them.

We tell stories about our younger selves.

We laugh about old crushes.

We remember the ridiculous things we did.

We talk about the people who once mattered to us.

Every time we tell a story, we bring the memory back to life.

We polish it.

We attach new meaning to it.

We see our younger selves through the eyes of the person we have become.

That’s probably why some memories from decades ago feel more alive than something that happened five years ago.

The old memories have been visited.

The newer ones may simply be waiting.

Sometimes I wonder whether my adult years are really as empty of memories as they seem.

Perhaps they’re not gone.

Perhaps I simply don’t have the right keys to unlock them.

Maybe I need a song.

A photograph.

An old address.

A former colleague’s name.

The smell of a particular food.

The layout of an old house.

A school uniform.

A workplace.

A particular road I used to travel every day.

And suddenly, maybe the door opens.

A scene comes back.

Not necessarily an important one.

Maybe just an ordinary afternoon.

Maybe me sitting somewhere, younger and unaware of how quickly that particular version of my life would disappear.

There is something bittersweet about that.

We spend our adulthood accumulating experiences, often believing that we’ll remember them.

But life moves so quickly that many ordinary days disappear without leaving a clear record.

Perhaps that is why childhood memories can feel so precious.

They remind us that we were once people who experienced life slowly.

A summer seemed endless.

A school year felt enormous.

A crush could last four years.

A friendship could feel like the center of the universe.

A single afternoon could become a story we carried for decades.

Then adulthood arrives.

And suddenly, ten years can feel like one paragraph.

Maybe I don’t need to be frightened by the gaps in my memory.

Maybe I should simply become curious about them.

Instead of asking, “Why can’t I remember my twenties?”

I can ask:

“What is still hiding there?”

Because perhaps those years aren’t gone.

Perhaps they are simply quiet.

Waiting for the right song, the right photograph, the right name, the right smell—or the right question, to bring them back.

And maybe one day, I’ll discover that my twenties and thirties weren’t really blank at all.

They were just written in a different ink.
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The Dream

July 22, 2026

Life & Love

Last night, I had a dream that left me with an unsettling feeling long after I woke up.

I found myself surrounded by people from different chapters of my life. What struck me was that I was my present age, but they remained frozen in the age when I had last known them.

Princess, my friend from my second company, was there. She told me she was leaving for a new company. I smiled and replied that I already knew she had moved on from the company where we once worked together. I told her how much I missed the days when we used to hang out after work.

She didn’t respond. Her face was blank, devoid of emotion. Then she simply walked away, disappearing among a pile of junked cars. The surroundings looked post-apocalyptic—desolate, eerie, and abandoned. Watching her vanish filled me with an inexplicable sense of loss.

Then Didith, my grade school classmate, appeared. We were never particularly close, which made her presence in my dream all the more puzzling. She stood silently, gazing at us with her big, expressive eyes. In my dream, she was still the twelve-year-old girl I had known decades ago.

A moment later, Elizabeth appeared, wearing our high school uniform. In my dream, I remember thinking, How could she be here when she had already passed away?

She pointed toward a swing and quietly told me that she used to sit there and spend hours swinging as a child. The scene shifted, and I saw her sitting on the swing, gently moving back and forth with a peaceful smile on her face.

Then I woke up.

There was a quiet heaviness in my heart.

Perhaps it was because these three women each represented a different season of my life—my childhood, my teenage years, and my early adulthood. They reminded me that life keeps moving forward. Some people leave, some drift away, and some leave this world altogether.

What stayed with me most was this: in my dream, I had grown older, but they had not. They remained exactly as I remembered them. It made me realize that memories have a way of preserving people, keeping them forever in the version we last knew.

Time is fleeting. People move on for reasons we may never fully understand. Yet somewhere in our memories, they remain unchanged, quietly waiting to visit us again—sometimes in a dream, reminding us of the lives we once shared.

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The Tragedy of Rene Baterbonia

July 21, 2026

Filipino Culture, Life & Love

The tragedy of Rene Baterbonia resonated with so many people not only because of the way he died, but because of the life he lived.

Born into a poor family in Talacogon, Agusan del Sur, Rene had already established himself as one of Mindanao’s most promising young basketball players before deciding to pursue a bigger dream in Manila by joining Ateneo de Manila University’s UAAP basketball program.

His accomplishments at such a young age spoke for themselves. He was named Most Valuable Player at the 2025 Palarong Pambansa, represented the Philippines at the 2025 ASEAN School Games in Brunei where the national team won the gold medal, and earned a spot in the Mythical Five at the 2026 Palarong Pambansa held in Agusan del Sur. By every measure, Rene was a rising star with a bright future ahead of him.

Yet what endeared him to so many people went far beyond his talent on the basketball court. Friends, coaches, and those who knew him remembered him as humble, respectful, and deeply devoted to his family. Like many young Filipinos from disadvantaged backgrounds, he dreamed of using his God-given talent to lift his family out of poverty. His story inspired people because it represented hope—the belief that hard work, discipline, and perseverance could change one’s life.

That is why his death feels like such a profound loss.

Rene and fellow Ateneo athlete Divine Adili lost their lives after drowning during a team-building activity in Dipaculao, Aurora. Based on what has been reported, the tragedy raises difficult questions about whether the accident could have been prevented. It is also worth asking whether the university had adequately assessed the risks involved in an activity that had reportedly been conducted for years.

Beyond the accident itself, Ateneo has also faced criticism over how the tragedy was handled. In Rene’s case, his family reportedly was not given a clear account of what had happened before they saw his body. According to reports, he was still wearing his wet swimming shorts when they viewed him—an image that no grieving parent should ever have to carry for the rest of their lives. No apology can erase the pain of that final memory.

As for the speculation circulating online that Rene may have died because he was beaten by teammates, I do not subscribe to that theory unless credible evidence emerges to support it. Suspicion alone is not proof. Competition, jealousy, and insecurity can exist in any sports team, but those emotions do not automatically lead to violence.

In fact, one of the videos taken during the team’s trip to Aurora showed Rene happily singing, laughing, and playfully teasing Divine on the bus. To me, it did not appear that he was isolated or unwelcome among his teammates. While appearances can never tell the whole story, they are also not consistent with claims that he was being ostracized by the team.

Until the facts are fully established, I believe the focus should remain where it belongs: on finding the truth, learning from this tragedy, and ensuring that no family has to endure the same unimaginable loss again.

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