Being Here, Now.

I was running for my dear life to catch the connecting flight to Daraga.

The cause of all this huffing and puffing, and the cold, clammy sweat filming my forehead, actually began in Davao when my flight to Cebu was delayed for almost two hours. The runway had been closed for an hour for reasons not disclosed to us mere mortal passengers of this Cebu Pacific flight. After two episodes of The Crown (a show that, for some reason, always calms me during flights, in this case, pre-flight), we were finally told to buckle our seatbelts. Before I knew it, we were taxiing down the runway and off to the so-called Queen City, painfully aware of the now-shrinking time between my connecting flights.

We finally reached Cebu, and I was ready to accept my fate that I would miss my Daraga flight. But hope, as they say, springs eternal. After an eternity of people standing, getting their bags, walking out the aisle as if time meant nothing to them, I sprang out of that airplane, went up the escalator crowded with people who seemed to have no sense of immediacy, then rushed to the transfer desk, and on to the long marbled hallway where a staff member in an out-of-place Sinulog attire pointed me to a door leading to the security gate. There, a long line of people with (this time) a more palpable sense of immediacy waited to have their bags despoiled by the stern-looking forces of the airport gods.

I waited impatiently for my turn, and when all the ritualistic chants of “watches, laptops, coins, cellphones, pakilabas” were done, and I had finally exited the x-ray portal, my hope of catching the flight was down to ten percent — roughly equivalent to the ten minutes left before they closed the gate. I thought perhaps this was a sign. Burnt toast theory.

I had been reluctant to travel back to Naga for All Saints’ Day. My sister was the one who urged, pushed, and eventually convinced me to come home for the Pistang mga Kalag. She even booked my tickets, as if removing every excuse I could possibly make. After all, it would be our first visit to Papa’s grave for the Pistang mga Kalag, and the truth was I was not ready.

The thought alone tightened something in my chest and this airport odyssey made me fully aware of his absence. For years after I transferred to Davao, he had been the constant figure waiting for me at the airport back home, waving, smiling, pretending not to tear up. Now I was returning to a home where he would not be there, and even before I boarded the plane, that absence had already begun to greet me.

Yet, I still ran for my dear life to catch my connecting flight.

An airport personnel finally found me and informed me that the other passengers had already boarded and that it was my last call. He immediately herded me to the gate downstairs, where a bus was waiting with three other last-minute stragglers. I boarded the plane, breathless and relieved, and not long after, we were cutting through a leaden sky. I thought, not bad, universe.

Of course, they left my bag in Cebu.

I waited expectantly at the luggage carousel of Daraga Airport, watching bag after bag make their slow, clattering entrance onto the belt. Every time a green suitcase appeared, my heart leapt, only to fall again when I realized it wasn’t mine. I kept telling myself it would show up on the next turn, or the next, or the next. By the time the carousel gave a final jolt and shuddered to a stop, and still no green luggage with a dinosaur sticker in sight, the cold, clammy sweat returned with a vengeance.

I stood there for a moment, unwilling to accept the obvious, as if waiting could magically summon my bag into existence. Eventually, I asked around, and an airline representative approached me with a tired but sympathetic look. He explained that my baggage had indeed been left in Cebu and would be delivered to my house in Naga. Just like that. As if losing a bag were as routine as misplacing a pen.

This was the first time anything like this had happened to me, and the mix of exhaustion, frustration, and the quiet ache of knowing Papa would not be there to laugh it off with me settled heavily in my chest. It was strange how even a missing bag could feel like part of the day I was returning to.

Some stranger from a rental service eventually approached me and said my name with the confidence of someone who had been waiting far too long. It felt surreal to be welcomed not by a familiar face but by someone who knew me only because he had been instructed to find me. Still, I followed him to the car, too tired to question the oddness of it all. The road to Naga stretched dark and quiet, the occasional headlights slicing through the night as if reminding me I was still moving forward, whether I felt ready or not. By the time we pulled up to the house at around ten in the evening, the whole neighborhood was asleep. I stepped out of the car, the air thick with the scent of wet earth and the memory of home, and felt the weight of the day settle fully on my shoulders.

I stood outside our house and called out, “Mama, pabukas,” the way I always did when coming home. She opened the door and welcomed me in, and we embraced in that quiet, instinctive way families do after long absences. For a moment, I simply let myself breathe. The house carried a silence different from the silence of night. It was the kind shaped by someone’s absence, steady and unavoidable. I moved slowly through each room, reacquainting myself with the home that felt like it had learned to go on without Papa.

By morning, the final preparations for Pistang mga Kalag were underway, though Mama had begun them days before. She moved through the house with quiet resolve, arranging flowers—white chrysanthemums, red anthuriums, and a few others Papa would certainly have abhorred. She already packed the candles, checked the matches, folded the banig, and filled a bag with other knickknacks. I mostly kept out of her way, while she cooked breakfast and made coffee while a random Korean drama on Netflix murmured in the background. It felt almost shameful how naturally she carried the weight of the day, how she knew exactly what needed to be done without being told. There was something steadying about watching her work, as if her rituals were holding the morning together. Preparing for pistang mga kalag felt grounding, almost like easing ourselves toward a memory we were finally ready to face.

On the drive to the cemetery, the roads were filling with families carrying baskets of flowers, candles wrapped in old newspapers, children stumbling sleepily behind them. Vendors lined the streets, calling out the prices of flowers and candles in every color. The whole city moved with a singular purpose that felt both communal and deeply personal. It struck me how Pistang mga Kalag turns grief into something shared, softened by routine and ritual.

When we reached Papa’s resting place, Mama knelt first, wiping the stone clean before placing the flowers neatly at the center. I stood beside her, feeling the heaviness I had carried from Davao shift into something more bearable. The candles flickered in the balmy breeze, families murmured prayers around us, some exchanging gossips, and for the first time that day, everything seemed to slow down.

Sitting there in our foldable little chairs, I understood that coming home had been necessary. Grief doesn’t always reveal its purpose, but sometimes it simply asks you to show up—to light a candle, to say a name, to stand quietly beside the people who loved him just as fiercely as you did.

In the days that followed, my routines in Naga felt slightly altered, as if someone had turned the world half a notch to the left. Everything was different but also familiar, like a song I knew by heart played in a slower tempo. I tried to slip back into the usual rhythm — the places I went, the people I saw — but something in me kept registering the small shifts.

I visited a friend’s house, where the hours blurred into stories shared over cheap alcohol and laughter that rose too quickly, as if we were all eager to feel light again. The comfort was real, even if a part of me watched the scene from a slight distance, noticing how we laughed around the spaces we didn’t want to name.

One afternoon, I went to a coffee shop we used to frequent, and it looked exactly the same — the same tables, the same barista, even the same group of students pretending to study while gossiping. Yet it felt different, as if I had stepped into a memory rather than a place. The malls were the same too, bright and noisy and over-airconditioned, and walking through them felt oddly anchoring. Familiarity can be its own kind of refuge.

Still, in quiet moments, I kept sensing that subtle shift in the air, the way home had changed shape without Papa in it. The routines held, but they no longer fit me the same way. I suppose that’s the thing about returning: the place stays, but we don’t return as the same people who left.

On my last day in Naga, Mama and I went to the centro to buy dried fish and a box of brownies from Graceland. It was a simple errand, the kind we used to do without thinking, but that afternoon it felt like something more. The streets were busy with the usual chatter of vendors and tricycles weaving in and out of the crowd, yet everything around us seemed gentler, as if the city knew we were moving slowly. At one point, as we crossed the street, I reached for Mama’s hand. It wasn’t dramatic or planned. It just felt natural, instinctive, like a small correction to something slightly off-balance in the world. Her hand was warm and steady, and for a moment, I felt like a child again yet more anchored in a way I hadn’t felt since arriving. We walked like that for a few steps, not saying anything, just letting the afternoon sunlight settle around us.

It struck me then how grief rearranges the smallest gestures — how something as ordinary as holding my mother’s hand could suddenly feel like its own quiet prayer. In that brief moment, Naga felt both changed and familiar, and so did we.

That night, as we headed back home with our small bags of dried fish and Graceland brownies, I realized that nothing about this trip had gone the way I expected. The delays, the mad dash through airports, the missing luggage, the strange driver, the silence inside the house — all of it felt like fragments of a journey I hadn’t quite prepared for.

But maybe that was the point. Grief doesn’t arrive in the grand moments; it comes quietly, in altered routines, in familiar streets that feel slightly shifted, in the absence that follows you through airports and hallways. And healing comes just as quietly — in breakfast shared with Mama, my sister and my nephew, in candles lit at the cemetery, in laughter with old friends, in the simple act of holding someone’s hand as you cross the street.

On my last night, as I packed what little I had brought home, I thought about Papa — not with the sharp ache of the past months but with something softer, something closer to peace. Leaving Naga didn’t feel like letting go. It felt like carrying something with me, something steadier than memory, something that would hold even when the world felt altered.

My flight back was at six in the morning, and I had to be in Daraga by five, so I left home at three a.m.

The subdivision was still asleep, the roads empty except for the occasional dog barking in the distance, I took one last look at our house — familiar, changed, still home. Leaving didn’t mean letting go. It simply meant taking what mattered with me, in a way that would endure long after the world around me shifted again.