by: Angel Mae Se
Copyedited by: Jewel Winslet Vallejo
Publication by: Rianne Lopez

In the corner of everyone’s eyes lies an often overlooked presence, not because it is silent, but because the world forgets how to listen. Stories are sometimes left to just be words themselves—not a journey in someone’s life. Even songs that were once sung with emotions are starting to only be a beautiful melody—not as a sincere memory. Perhaps, the world really forgets how to listen. If so, what will happen to those voices that pleads to be heard? To the poems that ask to be emphasized? What will happen to those silent chronicles of their lives?

For one person, this kind of scenario is not a distant observation; it is her daily rhythm. Every morning, she ties her shoelaces twice—to check if she did it right. She folds her notes three times, always in perfect halves. She lines her pencil on her desk every morning in perfect symmetry, erasers facing north, tips all sharpened to the same angle. When her teacher moves one out of place, she doesn’t dare speak it out. She waits until no one else is watching—moving like a keen specimen—then quietly puts it back.

This little girl never dares to call it out by name. Most days, she does not even know if naming it would make people around her understand or just make them view her as a freak. Her heart speaks for integrity, yet the world seems to be full of insincerity. The thoughts inside her mind are telling her that things have to be perfectly precise. Not for comfort, but to control the voices in her mind that says, “If you don’t dare to do so, cataclysm will happen along your way.” The hardest battle is sometimes not about fighting the threat of others, but the threat your own self gives.

But what others don’t see is the panic when she forgets if she washed her hands after touching her bag. The shame when she spends fifteen minutes rewriting a sentence because the letters never always look even in her eyes. The tightness in her chest when her daily routine is interrupted; how her heart races out of dread. She sits in classrooms where the lessons move too fast, where interruptions send her spiraling, where every group work means hiding the fear of being touched, judged, or rushed.

Through it all, her only wish was for people to understand that her mind is a storm she has learned to walk through everyday—that her silence is not absence and that her sense of order is not an obsession. Rather, it is her way of survival. Moving forward was her only ace, and though the repeated explanations may seem defective to others, for someone whose ears are open—her stories are finally understood. For a single ear to hear and an eye to see, one’s stories began to light up for the world to see.

The little girl who once used to hide her rewritten notebooks began showing it. Her voice is heard whenever the routine she sets up breaks—even her breath starts to falter. Although some still roll their eyes, a few began to listen. Not because of sympathy, but of respect. For a long time, she finally began to call it pride, not because she’s unafraid, but because she is learning that her difference does not need fixing. Nevertheless, it needs seeing, it needs honoring. And in a world that forgets how to listen, she learns to speak anyway—not loud, but clear.

In every stillness within her, there lies a disability that most people tend to forget. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—a story some share, not as a flaw to be erased, but as a truth to be embraced. A stillness that does not ask for pity. Rather, space. A quiet amidst the noise—where dignity lives, where identity breathes, and where, at last, they are heard.