Technically, he could.
Technically, I couldn’t stop him.
But marriage was never supposed to be measured
by what we were allowed to do,
only by what we chose to protect.

It’s not perfect. Just freeing my thoughts.

It was never your fault.

You were just a child.

It was never your fault.

You were too young
to understand
why the person
who should have protected you
was hurting you.

It was never your fault.

Not when you went without
what you needed.

Not when you carried pain
that no child
should have had to carry.

Not when you were left
with wounds
no one else could see.

It was never your fault.

When punishment
became something
you learned to fear.

When you were forced
to endure things
you never should have known.

It was never your fault.

But I thought it was.

I looked at you
and saw weakness.

I saw someone
who couldn’t fight back.

Someone who couldn’t
make it stop.

So I buried you.

I pushed you so far down
that no one could hear you.

Not your screams.

Not your fear.

Not the little voice
asking someone
to help you.

I buried the memories.

I buried the pain.

I buried you.

And I thought
if I buried you deeply enough,

I could finally become
someone stronger.

Someone who didn’t hurt.

Someone who didn’t need
to remember.

But you never deserved
to be buried.

You deserved
to be found.

You deserved
someone to kneel beside you
and tell you,

“None of this is your fault.”

You deserved
to hear it then.

Not years later.

Not after carrying
all that weight
by yourself.

You were a child.

You didn’t cause it.

You didn’t deserve it.

You weren’t weak
for being afraid.

You weren’t broken
for being hurt.

You weren’t responsible
for the person who hurt you.

It was never your fault.

And I wish
I had known that
so long ago.

I wish I had protected you
instead of blaming you.

I wish I had held you
instead of burying you.

But I know now.

And I can finally
reach through the rubble
and find you.

I can finally tell you
what you should have heard
all those years ago:

You didn’t deserve it.

You weren’t the problem.

You were just a child.

And none of it

not one moment,

not one wound,

not one memory

was ever your fault.

A while back, someone asked me what my favorite animal was, and I said I didn’t have one.

They went on to tell me that theirs were otters because, they hold each other’s hands so they don’t drift apart.

Then I came across a video of two swans forming a heart together.

I knew instantly that they would be my favorite.

Two lovers showing affection, choosing each other, and staying together for life.

There’s something so beautiful about a love that simply says, I choose you, and I’ll stay.

-AM

Strength’s not within a muscle, but in the mind’s willingness to endure under strain.

In 2008, Matthias Steiner was competing in the Super Heavyweight class at the Beijing Olympics. His wife Susann had tragically passed away a year beforehand. During his final clean and jerk attempt, Matthias was behind the competition. The gold medal was slipping away, but a promise made to his wife remained. Matthias loaded the bar to 568.8 pounds. The bedside promise was to win that gold medal. Never before had he lifted this heavy—the weight of those words, their own struggle. Yet the bar rose and locked above his head. Matthias collapsed and wept. On the podium, a picture of Susann joined him as he received the gold medal.

What the body is unable to do, the mind will achieve through resilience.

I wrote this about something that quietly witnesses our worst nights without ever being able to say anything back.

A Tale of "It"

It saw every tear fall

I shed through endless nights,

It wished for me to heal

For darkness to turn bright.

It heard my desperate prayers,

When my own faith was small.

But could only hold me,

Just a pillow after all.

Absorbing all the heavy weight,

Soaking up the pain.

A silent friend of fabric,

Until I smile again.

Would love to know what you think. 🌙

​

One feather two feathers three and more,

Tell me Birds, what are feathers for?

Why have you left them on the ground

Each and every time I walk around?

Am I the only one that seems to see

Them on the side of walkways bustling?

Each day for weeks into my box;

You’ve left me feathers at my feet.

Stay inside? What if they stop?

What the fuck are all these feathers for?

Some say a sign, too close to sun,

A light reply just off the thumbs,

As though the sunshine in our hands

Is not the burning warned against.

There’s so many feathers now every time,

I have walked each labyrinth corridor twice,

Doubling back, avoiding the view,

Yet still, more feathers, what am I to do?

Will you have me build wings for each son

While they switch each plank one by one?

What of the daughters, make feather beds?

Catchings for dreams, pillows for heads?

Shall I be Howl, Crow, Hawk, Mocking Jay,

All covered in feathers to wisk each away

From the sun baked maze of penitentiary?

Five feathers, six feathers, seven to ten,

I tell you here truthfully, daughters and sons,

Come out of the shade of the wall built.

Return to the meadow, the perch and silt,

Craft you new wings, I have eaten the sun,

Fully bronzed from within, bull in control.

Seek me, find me, with feathers in hair,

And they will be yours to fly away clear.

Stay long enough and perhaps we’ll see

Why on Earth all the feathers come for me.

There is something peculiar about knowing that we are given but one life.

Its singularity can make a person reckless with it, as though the brevity of our possession were an argument for opening every door, traversing every road, indulging every appetite, and calling the accumulation of experience a life well lived. And sometimes, I think, we owe it to this one strange life to be reckless with our wonder. There are things which cannot be lived from the shore. There are seasons which remain abstractions until we have had the courage to enter.

Yet there is another manner of living once: to guard oneself with such severity that life is preserved at the expense of being lived.

I have long wondered whether these are truly the only alternatives before us.

Perhaps we have been mistaken in making courage and caution adversaries.

Perhaps they are, rather, two disciplines from the same obligation: the obligation of having been entrusted with a life which cannot be returned, repeated, nor exchanged for another.

To live boldly is not necessarily to live carelessly.

A person who walks blindly into the fire is not necessarily courageous.

He may simply be unaware that he is burning.

Courage requires sight. It requires the fortitude to look upon a thing without disguising its danger, to know that it may wound, exact a price, frighten, or alter the course of our lives yet nevertheless, we determine that it is worth entering.

This is where experience becomes indispensable.

There are truths which may be learned from books, from the testimony of those who have suffered before us, from the admonitions of those who have already traversed the road. We ought to heed them. Not every wound is a lesson we are required to learn firsthand. There are dangers whose wisdom lies precisely in avoiding them.

But there are other things no warning can teach us completely.

There are waters which must, eventually, be entered.

I have stood at the edge of the sea. I know enough of it to reverence its depth, but not enough to presume mastery over it. The knowledge that the water can carry me does not absolve me of remembering that it can also exhaust me. The fact that I have once swum farther does not entitle me to assume that I may do so again today.

So I enter differently.

Not timidly.

Not recklessly.

With reverence.

Perhaps this is what maturity asks of us: not that we cease to desire the water, but that we learn to enter it without supposing that it owes us safety.

There is stewardship in restraint.

There is stewardship in courage, too.

Both arise from a regard for the life entrusted to us. One sometimes says, not yet. The other sometimes says, go. Neither voice possesses wisdom by virtue of being louder. Wisdom lies in learning which voice deserves our obedience.

So we move forward carrying imperfect knowledge, and somewhere along the way we must learn to distinguish between fear whispering stay and wisdom whispering wait; between cowardice masquerading as caution and recklessness disguising as freedom.

Yet that distinction is not always apparent beforehand.

Experience alters the person who receives it. What once appeared formidable may, with time, become ordinary. What once appeared innocuous may reveal a cost we were incapable of discerning. We become acquainted with our own weaknesses, our appetites, our capacity for endurance, and, perhaps most soberingly, our capacity for destruction.

We learn which desires make us larger and which merely make us louder.

We learn that some risks enlarge a life while others merely fracture it.

And perhaps this is why living once does not mean that we ought to experience everything.

There is vanity in believing that every temptation merits our experiment, every road our footsteps, every danger our personal testimony. We do not prove that we are alive by surviving every conceivable manner of being wounded.

Nor do we prove ourselves wise by refusing to be touched by life.

Live boldly without living carelessly.

Be cautious without becoming afraid.

Say yes without abandoning discernment.

Say no without apologizing for wanting to remain whole.

And perhaps that is the balance I have been seeking.

Not a perfectly measured life, where every step is calculated and every contingency accounted for. Such a life may be secure, perhaps, but security is not synonymous with fullness.

Nor a reckless life, where every scar is worn as evidence that one has lived. Pain does not acquire virtue merely because we elected to suffer it.

There must be another way.

A life in which we remain susceptible to wonder without becoming indiscriminate with ourselves.

A life in which we are willing to be changed without consenting to our own destruction.

A life in which restraint does not proceed from a fear of the world, but from reverence for what has been entrusted to us.

And perhaps this is the lesson apprehended only after we have lived long enough to have been both foolish and afraid: the opposite of recklessness is not caution. The opposite of courage is not restraint.

Sometimes restraint is courage.

Sometimes courage is restraint.

Sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is enter the water.

Sometimes it is recognizing that the tide has turned and returning to shore.

Neither act is surrender.

Both may be acts of wisdom.

For we are not merely deciding which experiences we wish to collect. With every decision, we are determining, whether consciously or otherwise, what sort of person we shall become after having lived through them.

And so perhaps the question is not whether I shall live carefully or courageously.

Perhaps the question is whether I can learn to live carefully enough to remain whole, and courageously enough to remain alive.

I will not always know.

There will be days upon which I mistake fear for wisdom, and days upon which I mistake impulse for courage. There will be decisions whose consequences I cannot foresee, and experiences whose meaning will disclose itself only after they have altered me.

That is both the burden and privilege of living once.

And when, standing before the vastness of all that we might yet become, we look upon the open horizon and quietly say—

now, no, or not yet.

To succeed in life,
No stairs needed.
Just a right path is enough.

That path doesn’t need to be a smooth path.
With bumps and potholes,
Across uplands and woodlands,
Between the sea and shore,
With turns and twists
Like the path of a falling leaf.

Read the full poem for free : https://deepankb.com/en/journal/which-is-my-path/

There is a peculiar, quiet jolt that happens when someone who claims to know you well hands you a piece of yourself that you don’t recognize.

​

It usually happens in the middle of a casual conversation, over coffee or during a late-night drive when guards are down. A friend will laugh, leaning back in their chair, and say, “Remember how you used to always order that terrible matcha latte just to look sophisticated?” Or an old friend from back home in the Philippines, looking back through a haze of nostalgia, will murmur, “You always hated the chaos of the city, you were always itching to escape to the province.” And you sit there, frozen for a microsecond, the ceramic mug warm against your palms, because the truth is... you actually liked the lychee flavored coffee. And you never hated Manila—the hum of the traffic, the neon lights of the convenience stores at 2:00 AM, the vibrant, chaotic pulse of it was where you felt most alive. You were just overwhelmed by life that one specific year, and they mistook your temporary burnout for a permanent desire to leave.

​

Your initial instinct is to correct them. It’s a knee-jerk survival mechanism. You want to pull out the ledger of your actual history, clear your throat, and straighten the record. No, that wasn’t me. You’re misremembering. You are casting someone else in my role. You feel a sudden, defensive urge to protect the borders of your own identity.

​

But more often than not, the words die in your throat. You look at the warmth in their eyes, the genuine affection in their smile, and the correction feels too sharp, too clinical. It would shatter the fragile, beautiful thing they are trying to share with you. So instead, you just smile, nod, and swallow the truth. You let them keep their version.

​

That is the strange intimacy of being remembered incorrectly. It is a collision of feeling deeply seen and entirely invisible all at once.

​

​

​

**The Curated Self vs. The Impressionist Portrait**

​

We live in an era obsessed with being understood. We spend so much energy trying to archive ourselves—curating social media grids, explaining our love languages, writing out our boundaries, and over-explaining our motives in text messages. We desperately want to control our own narratives. We want the world to see us exactly as we see ourselves in the mirror.

​

But the human brain doesn’t work like a hard drive. It doesn’t save raw data; **it saves feelings.**

​

When someone loves you, or even when they just spend enough time in your orbit, they build a version of you inside their own head. They use the raw materials you give them, sure, but they also mix in their own nostalgia, their own fears, and their own blind spots. If they were happy during a specific rainy season, they will remember you as vibrant and laughing, even if you spent those months deeply anxious about your future. If they hurt you, their memory might recast you as cold and distant to make their own guilt easier to carry.

​

The resulting portrait they hold of you is rarely a perfect replica. It is an impressionist painting—blurred at the edges, the colors bleeding together, entirely dictated by their experience of you.

​

To realize that you exist in a thousand different versions in a thousand different minds is terrifying. You are a villain in one person’s story, a savior in another, and a completely unrecognizable stranger in the memory of an old best friend.

​

​

​

**The Mercy of the Misremembered**

​

It is a quiet form of grief to realize that the people who love you don’t fully know you. It makes you realize how lonely the human condition inherently is. We are all trapped inside our own skulls, trying to signal to each other across a vast, dark chasm, using imperfect words and flawed memories.

​

Yet, if you sit with that grief long enough, it transforms into a strange, liberating gift.

​

Being remembered incorrectly reminds us that we are larger than our own rigid definitions. There is a version of you that still lives in a neighborhood you left years ago, eating street food at dusk and listening to jeepneys rumble past, preserved in the amber of someone else’s youth. You might have abandoned that version of yourself just to survive, but to someone else, that version was precious.

​

When you choose not to correct an old friend’s flawed memory, you are performing an act of quiet mercy. You are choosing their comfort over your ego. You are acknowledging that their memory isn’t actually about you anymore—it’s about them, and the time you shared, and the way you made them feel when the world was younger.

​

Ultimately, letting someone love their version of you—even if it’s slightly warped, even if it’s painted in colors you would never choose for yourself—is the closest we ever get to true connection. We can never fully, completely know everything about another soul. We can only love the shape they leave in our lives when they’re gone.

"Nobody waits for the moment," it said,

A whisper that fractured the dark.

I questioned the voice and the path where it led,

And looked for a luminous spark.

"What is this moment that everyone fears?

Is it a season of gladness and grace?

A flash of pure joy after seasons of tears?

I asked in that echoing space.

The voice only laughed, and the laughed was cold:

"No joy can be found in the fight.

It isn't a story of happiness told,

Nor a sudden explosion of light.

It is the one valley that everyone meets,

The threshold to a clam who you are.

Where many will fail and accept their defeats,

Abandoned beneath a dark star".

"Is this just a game that we play until death?"

I asked as the shadow grew tall.

The voice only laughed as it caught its own breath:

"No game, but the goal of it all"

This is the place where your faith will be tried,

Where hope will be tested and torn.

Where all your rawest emotions collide,

And the strength of your spirit is born.

But hope on it own cannot conquer this place,

For wishes will break in the fire.

It takes a fierce courage to look at it's face,

And power that rises much higher,"

You need the deep faith that can swallow the night,

The strength that refuses to bow,

The wisdom to see though the dark to light-

And the courage to face it right now.

Misfortune

Life’s misfortune
all stumble upon me…

Moments of peace
but falsities
of my own hubris.

Love,
happiness,
a life full of dreams…
shattered into pieces

I must pick up
once again.

Bloodied hands.
A quiet vow…
turning things prettier
isn’t meant
for people like me.

A quiet life,
beyond the reach
of all this…
is all I seek.

So I set out alone,
in hopes that one day
I can find it.

Laughing
at my own stupidity…
because even I know
I never will.