My name is JM. Seventeen years old, with a heart full of thoughts that often drift farther than my feet ever have. I live in Sitio Palico, a quiet, unassuming neighborhood in Nasugbu, Batangas, where the emerald mountains brush the horizon and the ocean whispers its salt-kissed secrets in the distance. Home is a small, wooden house that has stood for decades, its walls soaked in the comforting, garlicky smell of my mother's sinigang and the faint, sweet scent of ylang-ylang from the garden. The streets here are a map of my entire life—dusty and golden in the dry mornings, glistening and steaming after a sudden afternoon rain, always alive with the shouts of children playing patintero and the incessant sputter of tricycles weaving past vendors selling bibingka and suman.
Every day, I trace the same path to Bilaran National High School, BNHS. It's a sprawling complex of faded concrete and vibrant, shouting life. The corridors are a river of identical uniforms, echoing with the slap of rubber slippers, the shrieks of laughter, and the frantic rustle of last-minute homework. The classrooms hum under the strain of struggling electric fans and Mr. Santos's droning lectures, which I sometimes fail to hear as I get lost watching the geckos skitter across the ceiling. Teachers like him and the kinder Ms. Liza are like landmarks in this daily journey, their voices the scratch of chalk and the click of markers against the whiteboard. But most days, I feel like I'm floating through it all—a quiet observer soaking in the details everyone else seems to miss: the way the afternoon light filters through the jalousie windows, painting stripes on the floor; the specific smell of old textbooks, sweat, and floor wax; the small, dramatic heartbreaks and triumphs that unfold at every locker.
I am JM, utterly ordinary, yet on the cusp of something extraordinary, though I didn't know it yet. My world was small, familiar, and safe. It was a loop I knew by heart. But the best loops are meant to be broken. Not by a crash, but by a whisper. Not until I saw her.