When I open my eyes, I find myself in front of my mother’s childhood home. A wooden house, elevated from the ground, with an open yard of dry, hard soil. Potted plants are scattered all around, vibrant green and yellow in the orange glow of the sun. There is an outdoor stove whose smoke smelled of charred banana leaves and wood. I look around, and I expect to see her in this setting, young and free, with missing teeth and wearing a dress that is well-kept and neatly ironed, despite the yellowing patches of age.



In this timescape, I am yet to be a spark in her belly or even a dream in her young mind. I know what I must do. I meet her just as she is leaving home for the market before she goes to school. The top of her head barely reaches the middle of my torso. She is so unfamiliarly small. She looks up at me and smiles, unafraid. It is as though she already knows me when she slips her tiny hand into my bigger one. I am a stranger, yet she skips merrily enough as I walk with her, helping her carry the bilao that her Nanay had asked her to bring. I draw her to my side, away from the street filled with passing jeepneys and tricycles. She kicks rocks along the street, making a game of it, and she tells me of her dreams.



She dreams of going to the beach. She hasn’t been yet, because she is too busy with school and helping her Nanay at the palengke. What a simple dream it is, and my heart clenches as I look at her big eyes and her chubby cheeks. She tells me she dreams of better times where she won’t have to sell vegetables under the sun and rain. The way she speaks of these mundanities, it would seem like she was dreaming of candy castles in the sky. Her greatest dream is a childhood spent playing, wearing proper shoes instead of tsinelas, and better dresses that aren’t hand-me-downs from older, more well-off cousins. I stop to kneel and hug her, and the way she hugs me back tightly reminds me of my task. This is my one chance to get it right, to save her where no one has, not even her God, before. So I let her bony arms circle my neck. I tell her that she is free to do as she pleases, free to make her life her own. She doesn’t have to live for anyone, save anyone, except for herself. I kiss her forehead, and I stand and tug her to the sorbetero. Her eyes sparkle with excitement. I buy her an ice cream cone with three scoops instead of just one. As I watch her devour the sweet treat, I know that she will be everything she wants and more. I will make sure of it. Her grin is my wonderful reward, sweeter than any ice cream I can buy.



When we reach the market, I shoo her off to her waiting Nanay, waving goodbye. I am happy and content to watch this little seedling of a girl bloom into a wonderful specimen of grit and determination. It is only right. She has given me so many seeds of her hopes and dreams to the point she has none for herself. The thought makes my chest ache with both gratitude and resentment. But now, I have returned them to where they rightfully belong. I watch her live the life she never got to live. I slowly disappear until the only sign I was even here is the smoke clinging to my silhouette. Where I used to stand, there is only now simply a space in that busy market. Other people mill around, caught up in the petty dailies, unaware that someone not from their time has been here minutes before. They all continue in that orange Lucena sun, with the barking of dogs and vendors accompanying the jeepneys’ horns.



She, that little girl, will forget about me even as she finishes her ice cream. As she counts the money from the vegetables that her Nanay had sold, she will not remember me, who bore her smile and her eyes. But I am sure that she will remember my words, the seeds of hopes and dreams I have returned to her. Her life will change drastically. For the better, for good. Without me.



My mother often told me that she would never change a thing in her life, if it meant that she would have me. She’d gladly endure everything again and again—from the hard days at the palengke selling vegetables in both sun and rain, to not going to law school so she could instead provide for me after my deadbeat father left us. She said that I made her complete; that without me, something would always be missing in her life. And what a burden of responsibility it is for a little girl, to be her mother’s reason for living, to be the anchor that tethers her mother to this cruel, suffering world. I no longer go to church, but I still wear the burden of guilt better than most penitentiaries. I hide my resentment and guilt by telling her with a light-hearted tone that she only said these things because she already knew me in this life. She would never know what she was missing if she never had me. Perhaps, if she never had me, she could be a girl and a woman instead of a mother. And every time I say that, she would hug me and kiss my forehead. She would tell me that she knew me in every life. She would choose me and find me in every other universe. I struggle to believe that, like how I struggle to believe in God and my mother.



Perhaps this disbelief is less a rejection of God and my mother, but a rejection of myself. Who am I to deserve that kind of love? What have I done to deserve it, when all I’ve done is be a sinner, a load to carry, a chain around the ankle? When I bring up this topic to my mother, always insisting that she should have chosen a life without me to drag her down, it wasn’t just because I wanted better for her. I wanted so badly to never have been born for me, too. I never asked to be born. Never asked her to suffer for me. And yet the guilt remains the same, seeing her lose herself to make me. But I suppose leaving this unsaid is better, if only to preserve her image of me and herself. In her eyes, we are mother and daughter. A holy tandem. I am a child who is selfless for her mother the way her mother is selfless for her child. She’d never realise that my bringing up this conversation isn’t as noble as I make it out to be. She’d never realise that her daughter, whom she sacrificed everything for, is capable of this ultimate and wretched selfishness.



She created me. She gave me life. She is my God. And if I am broken beyond repair, what does it say about her? What does it say about this woman who formed me with her own body, who counted my fingers and toes, and kissed my cheek? She knew my name before I even breathed my first gulp of air. How can someone like me tell someone like her that her decision to create me was a mistake? How can I say something like that without showing her that I’ve lost my faith, that I believed there was no way of saving me? My God, my mother herself, cannot save me. How do I seek absolution from a God whose flaws mirror and even rival my own? I want to beg her for forgiveness. I want her to beg me for mine.



So when I opened my eyes and saw that portal of a golden afternoon life, I stepped in with no wavering breath and shaking knees. I had only a few tiny seeds of hopes and dreams left, seeds that I inherited from her, and seeds that I will see that they return to where they rightfully belong. My mother will never take them back. She has long since given them up for me. But in this timescape, that little girl is not my mother yet. She will take them. She has to. There is nothing left for me. There is no saving me. These seeds I have itch and dig into my palm, trying to water themselves with my blood, only prolonging my inevitable descent. What can hope do but make the march to hell a little bit more bearable? I’d still end up in hell. But she, this tiny slip of my not-yet-mother, has more of a chance at paradise. After all, her act of choosing to have and love me has always been her downfall and greatest sin. So I am going to make sure that she will be saved.



So I meet her and cross the street. We talk. I tuck her fly-away hairs from her face and behind her ear. She looks at me with big doe eyes sparkling in the sun. I kiss her on the forehead, I count the missing gaps in her front teeth and the dimples on her cheeks. I hold her sticky hands as we walk, transferring my last seeds of hopes and dreams into her palms. And when I start to disappear from that busy marketplace, I expect to see her smiling child’s face one last time. And then nothing after.