The shake that never left me

BAGUIO CITY — The afternoon of 9 July 2026 brought a sudden reminder to the people of Baguio. A magnitude 4.5 earthquake rattled the city, lasting only three or four seconds but instantly stealing the breath of everyone who felt it.

For many, it was just another tremor, something to talk about over coffee before moving on with the day.

For me, it reopened a wound that has never healed.

The quake came exactly one week before the anniversary of the 16 July 1990 Luzon earthquake, the magnitude 7.8 disaster that changed my life and forever altered Baguio.

The moment the ground shook, I was no longer in 2026.

I was back inside a dark movie theater on that late afternoon in 1990, watching a Charles Bronson film when the building began to convulse. The lights went out. Dust filled the air. People screamed as they pushed toward exits they could no longer see.

I thought I was going to die.

Then, in the chaos, someone I never saw grabbed me by the collar with astonishing strength and threw me toward a breaking exit. I stumbled into daylight just as the theater collapsed behind me.

To this day, I do not know who saved my life.

I had barely caught my breath when something heavy struck my back.

I turned, expecting to see a piece of concrete or timber.

Instead, I found myself staring at the severed head of an elderly woman, her face frozen in what must have been the final seconds of terror.

That image has never left me.

Still in shock, I searched for my mother and brother through streets that no longer resembled the city I knew.

Baguio had become a landscape of devastation.

I passed bodies pinned beneath shattered concrete, heard the cries of people trapped inside collapsed buildings, and watched survivors wander in disbelief through clouds of dust. The smell of broken earth, the sounds of grief, and the sight of lives erased in an instant became memories that no passage of time could bury.

Thirty-six years have passed.

Baguio has rebuilt. Hotels rose again. Businesses returned. The pine-lined streets regained their familiar rhythm.

But survivors carry a different city inside them.

The visible scars disappeared long ago. The invisible ones never did.

Even the smallest tremor still stops me in my tracks. A sudden scream in the street, a child crying, or the distant sound of panic can instantly transport me back to that afternoon in 1990.

People often measure earthquakes by magnitude, duration, or damage.

Survivors measure them differently.

We measure them by the memories they awaken.

The earthquake on 9 July lasted only seconds.

For me, it never really ended.

Because every tremor carries me back to the day a stranger gave me a second chance at life—and to the countless people who never had one.