The projector hums. In the theater’s dusk, a flicker unspools
a world. The scent of rice wine and stale popcorn grounds him,
a shadow of a boy who sinks into the creaking vinyl seat.
He came to this darkness seeking a map to a life he had never lived,
a life he hoped existed somewhere in the flicker.
He blinks, and the theater dissolves into Baguio’s fog-draped hills.
He feels the cool air and hears secrets hissing through the pines.
He watches a boy cradle a guitar, a woman’s laughter
a blur of silver. They cruise winding roads, strewn with brittle
pine cones and twigs, relics of the city’s wild embrace.
Rain streaks the car window, shivering city lights into wavering ribbons
as they enter a pine forest. Trunks breathe alongside them.
The film blurs. Memory and movie merge. A longing unfurls
for a home his heart never knew. He wonders if every yearning
shadows this first ache. “Umaga na naman…,” the guitar’s notes echo.
He feels his own longing sharpen, a chord striking deep within his soul’s silent chambers.
The screen pulls him closer, its light a luminous current. He yearns to run,
slip away, and drown in its luminous sweetness as music swells.
In his mind, a threnody lamenting a time that never was.
The film ends. House lights jolt on. His heart stutters in the sudden glare,
mourning the vanished mist, aching for a world that slipped through his fingers.
A part of him remains bound to that flickering ghost.
The reel falters, time bends and jumps forward. He stands in another city, now an older
man.
Swiftly, a scent of popcorn brings his body to a halt, a phantom pain that clutches his gut.
He looks at the streetlights, sees them as wavering windows, and for a moment, he is back.
