14/08/2026
๐๐๐ง๐๐ฅ๐๐ฅ๐ฌ | ๐ฃ๐ฎ, ๐ฌ๐ผ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ฃ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ณ๐๐น ๐๐ผ ๐๐ผ๐๐ฒ
by Manuel Quigao Jr.
Pa,
There are words I have held for years like stones in my chest too heavy to throw, too painful to hold. Tonight, I finally lay them down before you, not as a son seeking answers, but as a boy who once waited.
I remember how silence lived between us. It sat at the dinner table, followed me into my room, and echoed louder than any voice you never used. I grew up memorizing the shape of your absence even when you were right there, close enough to see, but never enough to feel. You were a shadow that filled the house, and yet I learned to live as if I had no papa at all.
I was just a boy, Pa.
A boy who did not understand why love felt like something to earn, something to beg for in quiet ways. I watched other sons laugh freely beside their papas, their voices unafraid, their hearts unguarded. I wondered what it felt like to be chosen so easily, to be seen without asking.
But with you, love came with conditions I could never quite understand. And so I learned to shrink myself (my voice softer, my needs smaller, my presence barely there) hoping that maybe, just maybe, I would finally fit into a space in your heart.
I did not hate you then.
I only longed for you.
But longing, when left unanswered, grows into something else. It hardens. It builds a walls where bridges should have been. And somewhere along the way, the boy who once waited by the door stopped waiting at all.
Now I stand here, older, carrying both the ache of what was and the grief of what never came. And I must be honest, even if the truth trembles as it leaves me:
If there is another life after this one,
I would not choose you to be my papa again.
Not because of who you are,
but because I do not wish to live through this same quiet suffering twice.
Still, do not mistake this for hatred.
If anything, it is the absence of it.
Because hatred requires a kind of closeness we never truly had.
I write this not to wound you, but to free myself, from the weight of waiting, from the echoes of unmet love, from the boy who kept hoping you would turn around and see him.
I am learning now to become the warmth I once searched for in you.
To give myself the kindness I was taught to live without.
To heal, even if the scars remember.
And perhaps, in some distant way, this is my final act of love for you, to let go of the version of you I kept chasing, and accept the man you chose to be.
Goodbye, Pa.
Not with anger,
but with a quiet kind of peace.
โ Your son, who once waited and finally learned to walk away.
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Graphics by ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐. | Head Layout Artist
