yellow (draft)
I now associate you with the color yellow. Which is weird, because that isn’t your favorite. In fact, I never knew what your favorite color was. Whether it was because I never asked or you failed to mention it in our seven years of friendship is a mystery we’ll never know the answer to. But today I saw a small, yellow piece of plastic and I thought of you.
I remember the day you gave me your Tripko card. We were supposed to hang out. You travelled from your school to mine — all the way from Las Piñas to Manila. You rode that train, you said. The one which operations are now suspended for the construction of a supposedly better railway project. The same train we rode when we went to that art museum just beside the edge of the city. A trip we were so proud of because we could slightly call it “out of town”.
That day we were supposed to hang out, I had a panic attack. We never talk about my attacks, so it almost felt like second nature to you to say okay. That day, you said let’s just go home together. That was when we still lived in the same city.
You were never angry at me, I realized that only now. And it’s definitely not because our friendship was perfect. I now know that even the most divine-crafted relationships can have cracks — that’s the very nature of being human. How we never had any, or at least talked about having any, foul feelings may be where our fault lies. Instead of a crack, the breakage immediately cut us in half.
When I try to explain to an outsider, someone who wasn’t there to observe how our friendship evolved through the years, I couldn't-
This is an unfinished draft of an unpublished piece originally dated December 6, 2025.