Balasan Is a Kind of Blue

fiction by Roger B. Rueda

The van smelled like sour tamarind candy and engine grease. I was pressed between a window and a woman clutching a basket covered in old newspaper, beneath which a rooster occasionally clucked like it remembered some insult from a previous life. The child across from me sang in bursts—something in Hiligaynon, lilting and off-key, with the occasional interruption of a plastic toy being dropped and retrieved like clockwork.

I stared out the window, not because the view was remarkable—at first it wasn’t—but because I didn’t know what else to do with my face. Iloilo City had already begun to fall away behind us, its buildings shrinking like things remembered too late. I watched the transition like someone witnessing a version of their own past dissolve: the sidewalks frayed, the cement thinned, and the tricycles grew rustier, louder. Soon, everything was sugarcane and sky.

It was strange to feel this kind of stillness inside a vehicle. As if the silence of the province was leaking through the windshield and into my bones.

Balasan arrived without drama. One minute we were rolling past fields that shimmered with sun-patched boredom, and the next we were there—among tired signage, open-front sari-sari stores, and motorcycles parked like sleeping dogs under trees.

The driver shouted something I didn’t catch, and suddenly the van emptied. I stepped out, my shoes crunching gravel. The air hit me in the face with no apology: thick with the wet scent of fish entrails and the ghost of something frying—maybe bread, maybe hope—and something metallic, like rust. Or blood.

I didn’t flinch.

I walked toward the poblacion, dragging my suitcase over uneven stones, passing a store named “Blessed Mami House,” and a poster of a local mayor smiling like he’d personally discovered happiness.

The room I had rented online was behind a bakery that sold stale ensaymada at five pesos apiece. The key was waiting in a plastic box taped to the door, along with a note that read simply: “Stay safe, God bless.”

The door creaked like it had secrets. Inside, it was nothing—bare window, single lightbulb, thin curtains that barely clung to their rod. A small bed. A fan that looked old enough to remember Martial Law. A smell, soft and unplaceable, like mildew mixed with candle wax.

But somehow, it felt holy.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at the blank wall, letting the silence settle around me like a shawl.

This was the first silence that didn’t ask me to explain myself.

And I didn’t realize until then just how tired I was of talking.

****

In Balasan, time felt like a story being told underwater.

Each morning folded into itself with quiet precision. I’d wake before the sun had fully broken open the sky, wash my face with water that felt like it came from a river’s memory, and step out into the already-thickening warmth. Outside the bakery, a woman in a hairnet sold pandesal from a plastic tub lined with white cloth, the kind that smelled faintly of wood smoke and flour. Her kape was instant but generous, served in reused ice cream cups, too sweet to be taken seriously, but somehow exactly what I needed.

I walked to the santol tree near the plaza—a knuckled giant with leaves like sagging hands—and opened my journal. The pages were already starting to curl from the humidity. I didn’t write much, not yet. Mostly fragments. Sentences that didn’t know how to end.

“The sun here doesn’t burn—it lingers.”
“Even the dogs seem to remember something I’ve forgotten.”
“Loneliness is different when no one is watching.”

Around me, the town moved like a daydream. Children ran barefoot on concrete hot enough to bake, chasing each other with sticks and laughter. Vendors arranged green mangoes in pyramids, their voices slicing through the air in rapid Hiligaynon. A karaoke machine somewhere sang “Sometimes When We Touch,” off-key but unashamed. The town was a collage of noises that didn’t demand attention—they simply existed, like birdsong or breath.

On Thursdays, I went to the market.

It was there, between the dried fish section and the stacks of empty Styrofoam trays, that I saw him.

He was tying a bundle of plastic rope for an old man, measuring it against the length of his own arm. His shirt clung to his back, damp from heat and effort. His laugh was low, lazy—like it had nowhere else to be. And then he looked up.

Our eyes met.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no violins, no slow zoom, no cinematic pause. Just a flicker. Like when your skin registers a change in air temperature before your mind catches up.
Recognition?
Projection?
I didn’t know.

But he looked at me as if he’d just remembered something he wasn’t sure was real.

And I held that gaze a second too long.

He nodded, politely, then returned to his task. That should’ve been it. A moment folded neatly and forgotten.

But something had already shifted in me—quietly, without permission. The way water shifts before a wave.

*****

After that first look, I started seeing him everywhere.

Not in a mystical sense—no omens, no signs. Just ordinary places made suddenly sharp by his presence. At the plaza, where old men played chess under the shade of trees that looked older than language. At the sari-sari store, buying instant noodles and a sachet of shampoo. Near the barangay hall, crouched in the heat, helping an old woman fix a wheelbarrow.

He always moved like the sun didn’t quite touch him. Not hiding, just... resisting absorption. His voice, when it came, was softer than I’d expected—like he didn’t trust it entirely.

It was at the tindahan, over lukewarm C2 and a pack of SkyFlakes, that we first spoke beyond pleasantries.

“You’re the one who sits by the santol tree,” he said, not as an accusation but as a fact gently laid down.

“I write,” I offered, then immediately regretted it. It sounded too much like a confession. Too easy to misunderstand.

“Poems?” he asked.

I nodded. He looked genuinely curious. Not mocking. Not trying to impress. Just... interested, the way some people are with constellations they’ll never name but still love to look at.

The next day, I left a book for him at the tindahan: The Captain’s Verses, Neruda. I had underlined the softest stanzas, the ones that left bruises shaped like questions.

A week passed.

Then, one afternoon, he appeared beside the santol tree, a little hesitant, holding the book like it might hum.

“I didn’t know poems could feel like that,” he said. “Like... you’re being told a secret you already knew.”

We talked.

Not all at once. Our conversations were puzzle-shaped: a corner here, a piece of sky there.

He told me about his father, who was a fisherman. About the night the waves swallowed their boat like it was made of tissue. About the days after, when silence was heavier than grief, because there was nothing to bury.

He told me about his plan to buy a motorcycle. Not for vanity. Just to feel, for once, like he could leave whenever he wanted. As if movement was proof of control.

And then, one twilight as the lamplights flickered on, he told me about the seminarista.

“He used to call me bro like he meant it,” Joever said. “But he’d look at me like I was... something else.”

He didn’t say more. He didn’t have to.

We sat there, in that stillness between confession and denial, the air thick with things we didn’t name. The world around us kept spinning, casually cruel. The sari-sari radio played “Just Once” by James Ingram. A dog barked, was ignored. Someone shouted “Halin dira!” at a tricycle.

But none of it mattered.

Because Joever looked at me like he wasn’t sure if I was real.

And I felt the terrible, beautiful ache of wanting to be.

*****

Joever invited me with a shrug, like he wasn’t sure I would say yes. “It’s just my cousin’s birthday,” he said. “Lots of food. Probably too much gin. Come if you want.”

I wanted.

The party was in a small house near the edge of the barangay, where the road stopped pretending to be paved. A tarp sagged in the yard, tied with string to two bamboo poles. There was lechon on a makeshift table, its golden skin glistening under cheap colored bulbs. Kids darted between adults, their laughter wild and unsupervised. Someone passed me a glass already half-full of gin and calamansi. I took it without asking who it belonged to.

Joever moved easily in the crowd, all nods and tapped shoulders, like he belonged to everyone. But now and then, his eyes would find me—across the grill, near the cooler, behind a line of women belting karaoke—and something in his gaze would soften, fold inward. As if I was the secret he was trying to keep even from himself.

Later, when the sky had fully darkened and most of the older guests had either fallen asleep or passed out, he pulled me gently toward the beach.

There was no moon, only a smear of stars. The sea was dark and vast and unspeaking.

We sat on a bleached piece of driftwood, our bare feet disappearing into the foam. My pants were already damp at the hem, but I didn’t care. The wind smelled of salt, and birthday cake, and the kind of closeness that couldn’t be planned.

Joever leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His voice came low, almost fragile.

“Do you think the sea ever wants to leave?”

I blinked. It wasn’t a question you answered. Not really. It was a thought wrapped in metaphor, and I could feel it pulling at something inside me—something I hadn’t dared name since I got here.

Our shoulders touched.

It was such a small thing, really. But it felt like being chosen. Just for a moment. As if we existed outside of everything—expectations, assumptions, danger. Just skin and skin. No armor.

I turned toward him, not quite breathing. His face was tilted slightly, his mouth parted—not in invitation, not exactly. Just openness. Like he didn’t know what he was about to do either.

The space between us was shrinking.

And then—
Laughter. Shouts from behind us. Someone called his name.

Joever turned his head, smiled, and stood up.

The spell—if that’s what it was—broke with a whisper, not a shatter. Nothing dramatic. Just the quiet sound of something slipping away before it could be held.

He offered me his hand. I didn’t take it.

We walked back in silence.

When I got to my room, I sat on the bed, damp and slightly shivering. I stared at my notebook but couldn’t write. Not yet.

Because I didn’t know how to describe a moment that didn’t happen.

Didn’t—but almost did.

And in that almost, I felt more exposed than if he had actually kissed me.

 

*****

At first, I told myself he was just busy.

That maybe his signal was bad. That maybe he lost his phone. That maybe—maybe—he just needed space.

But even as I typed out those justifications in my journal, I knew they weren’t true.

Joever stopped replying. He stopped lingering. At the sari-sari store, he nodded like I was someone he'd once borrowed a pen from in high school—familiar, but no longer relevant. On the street, he turned his head too quickly. The lightness in his smile had been replaced with something tighter, like he was holding his breath around me.

It was not cruelty. It was worse.

It was the practiced politeness of someone who had decided that forgetting was safer than remembering.

And then the whispers began.

At the tindahan, I heard one woman say, not even trying to lower her voice, “Ang manunulat nga taga-Manila.” The way she said manunulat—like it was both compliment and curse—made my skin crawl.

Another replied, “Daw indi lalaki. Daw indi babayi.” Then laughter, small and brittle. Like breaking glass under sand.

I stopped going out as much. The santol tree felt too exposed. Even the market, once a place of anonymous noise and scent, now felt rigged with invisible tripwires—eyes that lingered too long, greetings laced with too much or too little warmth.

The town no longer felt like a retreat.

It felt like a fishbowl. And I was the thing inside it that didn’t belong.

I retreated into my room, into my notebook, into the only place where I still had control of the story. But even there, the words betrayed me. I rewrote the beach moment half a dozen times—once as a poem, once as a letter I never sent, once as a memory twisted into fiction.

But none of it landed right.
Because the truth was: it didn’t happen.
And you can’t revise what never truly began.

I scribbled until the page looked wounded. I underlined a line from Neruda and stared at it for hours:

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines.”

But even that felt stolen. Borrowed grief. Someone else’s heartbreak.

Mine was quieter.
Mine didn’t even have a name.

*****

I stopped trying to find Joever. Or maybe I just stopped trying to be found.

Instead, I found the sea.

Not the postcard version. Not the one tourists photograph with filters and captions about healing. No—this was the sea with chapped edges, with foam that carried scraps of memory, with wind that smelled like rust and old salt. The sea that didn’t ask questions, but still made you feel like you were being answered.

I walked there in the mornings, sometimes in slippers, sometimes barefoot, not caring about the sand that clung to my ankles like small insistences. I brought nothing but myself and my silence, and in return, the sea offered me stones.

I started collecting them—not obsessively, but attentively. Some were smooth, others jagged. But one in particular stood out: flat, grey, the size of my palm. Cool to the touch no matter how long I held it.

It didn’t shimmer. It didn’t crack open with metaphor.
It just… existed. With a kind of patience I couldn’t understand.

In my notebook, the rock appeared again and again. Sometimes drawn in the margin. Sometimes mentioned in passing. Sometimes personified so deeply, it startled me.

I wrote my final poem in a kind of trance—early morning, sea breeze slipping through the screen, the smell of instant coffee lingering untouched.

It ended with a single line:

“I named the rock after no one, and still it answered.”

I closed the notebook slowly, like tucking in a child I wouldn’t see again.

Then I took a length of faded twine from my bag and tied the covers shut. Not tightly. Just enough.

I didn’t know what I’d made—whether it was a manuscript or a burial. Whether it was a story or a soft confession to a silence too wide to echo back.

But it was done.

And that, for now, was enough.

*****

I didn’t leave.

Not because of some sudden revelation or reversal. Not because Joever came back with apologies or because the town stopped whispering. None of that happened. Things stayed as they were—just quieter.

I stayed because leaving started to feel like running. And I was tired of running from things that hadn’t even tried to chase me.

Instead, I learned to live within the pause.

I began attending early morning mass at the old church—not for God, exactly, but for the rhythm. For the way the wooden pews felt cool against the back of my knees. For the murmured prayers that rose like steam from mouths that weren’t asking for miracles—just continuity. A decent catch, a child’s cough gone by morning, one more day with rice in the pot.

The old women didn’t ask questions. They only nodded, smiled. Called me inday one morning, dong the next. Like they were trying out names to see which one fit. Like they understood that some people are just shaped differently—and that maybe that, too, was a kind of blessing.

I walked home slowly now. Past the plaza. Past the tindahan. I no longer flinched when I heard laughter behind me. No longer mistook kindness for danger. I didn’t expect Joever around corners anymore, and in that absence, I found a strange kind of safety.

That afternoon, I returned to the santol tree.

It still stood, unmoved. The bark was rough where I used to rest my spine. The shade was cooler than I remembered. I opened my new notebook—this one blue, the color of dried seawater—and wrote without fear of what the words might mean.

A line came, then another. Then I stopped.

Not because I was afraid. Not because I was empty.

But because for once, the silence was enough.

The wind shifted. A page fluttered, then stilled.

I closed my eyes, not to escape—but to feel more.

Somewhere, a rooster crowed. A child sang.

And beneath the santol tree, I breathed.

Still here.

Still unnamed.

Still whole.

*****

The sun had lowered by the time I packed up my things beneath the santol tree. No audience. No crescendo. Just light softening on cement and the sky turning a deeper shade of waiting.

I walked back to my room—bare, familiar, still mine. The same rusted fan. The same window always slightly stuck. But everything looked different now, not because anything had changed, but because I had. Or maybe because I hadn’t, and that was finally okay.

I sat by the open window, the rock from the beach resting near my hand. It didn’t glow. It didn’t speak. It just stayed. And for once, so did I.

“In Balasan, I found no lover. But I learned to stay when the world whispered stay. And this time, I listened.”