by SHEINA ELIJAH PENETRANTE | graphics by PHIL LIAM NONO
I have always had an automatic inclination in writing for people even if it never reached them. I have always written for love, by love and through love; but not to love.
10:09 PM. December 31, 2025
My blank notion page stares at me.
Eyes shallow. Heart empty. Fingers hovering on top of slim squares.
10:45 PM. December 31, 2025
I try to make out a list of things I needed to say as I relive moments to try and make sense of what did not work out.
Images flash but I can’t press my keyboard in a hope to pause and cage it.
11:27 PM. December 31, 2025
From the careless opening in my window, I can hear the motorcycles revving, mothers with the clamoring of utensils, and children pushing the air out of their media noche-filled stomachs.
Yet here I am. In a contrast of space even if only cement borders the tunes of a decade old sound system that played out the same songs for the past 365 days. Lights out. Screen open. Tears dotting my pillow. Trying to find a possible word to stop an ending and let things be the same when everyone wants a new beginning.
11:58 PM. December 31, 2025
I tried to dissect every word that I have heard. Irises dilating as I vividly replay and edit the span of time where I tried to memorize every second we’ve spent because I already anticipated this. Trying to make sense of the narrative of a present I had gotten but only realized when it already became a part of my past.
12:00 AM. January 01, 2026
As the clock struck twelve, I did not feel new like I would normally anticipate.
Instead, I am bared open. My breath is unmoving. The floor where my feet are planted seems to widen to reach where you are. Hoping that presence will sustain what your absence extinguishes. My mind is as blank as the screen in front of me. Its corners reflecting a boxed hopelessness made not because I am afraid of the possibilities a new year will give but because I cannot accept that lights had started to go off without me.
I have always had an automatic inclination in writing for people even if it never reached them. I have always written for love, by love and through love; but not to love.
Yet, as I sit with my usual chipped mug with only traces of coffee in its rim, I can’t seem to weave and weep love out of me. Which is unusual because I have always given love to those around me.
I would give an extra 50 pesos to the trike driver just so I could rush to a friend in need;
I can come a little late in class if it means I get to walk with someone whom I know needs to clear their head;
Sleeping a little less than I normally do to meet people I care about at the seawall at 1 am just to debrief will always be a non-negotiable; and
I would clear out my schedule and learn my biochem notes a week before my long exam just so I could check in on you on finals week.
Now, I can’t seem to figure out why something bound to be natural can be sealed when you most need it.
While we often give love letters, no one has ever given love a letter. I think that is why it can be cruel and does not show up when you’re desperate enough to prove that you are worthy of being held. We have never given it periods and semicolons that it gave it to us in place of people in photographs we are forced to delete and restore until we realize that it is much easier if we had not forced ourselves to erase a memory only to shovel a void we then try to fill up.
Maybe we can’t sit with the ache.
With the act of writing comes the aches of remembering. Of overflowing futures made by the past and of presents never really blooming of what we wanted them to be.
Too afraid to relive moments we wanted to last even if it didn’t. Creating tiny cracks, for every millisecond of a moment recalled, in a tightly closed wound until its next outburst; a cycle of patching for we never fail to hope that what we have restored by numerous heartbreaks will someday be taken care of—gently opened and accepted.
Maybe we wanted it near us.
It was never meant to be mailed, because we wanted it to be near us, always—even if it only exists in replays in our minds till the day that we’ll all realize that we will never unlove someone but that does not mean we cannot move forward.
So, it stays unsent—clinging to a painful and selfish nostalgia, a reality where it is still present.
Maybe we never even knew what it was.
We never knew what love is and what love will ever be. That’s why we keep searching for it in places, in people, and in ourselves. Maybe that’s why we give letters in love but not when we are out of love because we fail to accept what we feel in moments when we are alone and in moments that we are proud of that we have no one to share our joy to.
It is still kept in my closet. Not along with your things but with the snippets of fast-paced afternoons and stretched out nights that I will always grieve. Of the futures we could have. Of the lists of things you said we’re gonna do. The list of me you always wanted to remember but chose to forget—you were a time when I thought I finally knew what love was but yet again proved wrong.
It appears as if love never wants to be found out—instead, it just wants to be felt.
And maybe we have so many maybes in our minds that we have failed to see what will be.
Just as I was ready to look at the fireworks in the sky, it was gone ten minutes earlier; the sliver of hope searing went down in the kitchen and all left were dirty dishes in the sink; and everyone was sleeping when I had just woken up.
I spent most of being in love imagining love that I failed to fall in love.
But if i can write to it,
it will contain all the hues love can form—in every person, in every second that I have encountered;
of first loves and first loves;
the ones we have pushed aside;
those shattered by previous loves;
the what could have been loves;
if I only met you a little bit earlier, love;
I would have fought for you but never you never allowed me, love;
a love we never wanted to let go of but had to;
that one love we know we’ll always be waiting for;
when we loved a bit too much or a little too less;
of loves deeply felt but were never translated into a language we understood, it never reached us;
and of the love that we still get to experience.
Love was never given a love letter because it was never meant to be sealed in the first place.
It cannot be permanently anchored by lines and curves traced in a page.
It is uniting. It is consuming. A conflicting synonymity that no one had ever comprehended after endless novels, songs, poems, and films.
Sometimes a concept, most times a mirror: of what we will never declare but would always hold on to.
It woke every part of me in days when I thought I never could. It made me feel seen when I can’t even distinguish myself.
But it also broke me when it said it can’t.
So, no. I have never given love a love letter – put my words as a testament that I have lived into a timeless unmoving paragraph – because I still have to love and be loved.
Sheina Elijah B. Penetrante is a sophomore of BS in Public Health in the University of the Philippines Visayas. She is the Feature Editor of Pagbutlak in its 51st year.
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