The Night We Forgot to Lie
When Lia was twenty-three, she learned that loneliness could sound exactly like a refrigerator humming at two in the morning. Not dramatic crying. Not tragic music. Not rain outside the window. Just silence so steady it starts sounding alive. She lived alone in a small apartment above a laundry shop in Makati, where the walls were thin enough to hear strangers fighting about money and burnt rice and cheating husbands. Every night she would sit by the window with instant coffee she never finished, watching headlights pass below like people constantly leaving her behind. By then, she had already mastered pretending. Pretending work did not exhaust her. Pretending she liked going home to an empty room. Pretending she no longer checked if her ex had seen her stories. And most importantly, pretending she was okay with being forgettable. Then one Thursday night, the city lost power. The entire street disappeared into darkness all at once. Air conditioners died. Electric fans stopped spinning. Somewhere downstairs, someone cursed loudly. Lia sighed and opened her window for air. That was when she heard singing. Not good singing. The kind of singing people do when they think nobody can hear them. Loud. Reckless. Slightly off-key. She leaned farther out the window. Across from her apartment, on the rooftop of the next building, stood a man holding a flashlight under his chin like a child telling ghost stories. "Hindi ko kayang tanggapin…” he sang dramatically to the night sky. Lia laughed before she could stop herself. The guy froze mid-song. Then slowly looked up toward her window. “Hoy,” he called out. “Tumatawa ka?” “Medyo.” “Aray ah.” “Sorry. Sintunado ka kasi.” He placed a hand over his chest like she had wounded him deeply. “Excuse me. Emotional singer ako.” She should have closed the window after that. Instead, she stayed. And somehow, so did he. His name was Eli. Twenty-six. Freelance illustrator. Insomniac. Professional over-sharer according to himself. Over the next hour, they talked from rooftop to window while the entire neighborhood sat in darkness around them. They talked about useless things first. Favorite midnight snacks. Why instant noodles taste better when sad. Why people suddenly become philosophers after 11PM. Then somehow, like strangers often do in the dark, they started telling the truth. “I think,” Eli said quietly at one point, “people get tired before they get happy.” Lia stared at him. Because somehow a man she had met forty minutes ago accidentally said the exact thing she had been feeling for years. The blackout lasted three hours. When electricity finally returned, the street lit up again in sudden color. Reality came back too quickly. Cars moved. People shouted. Air conditioners hummed alive again. Lia expected the moment to end there. But the next night, Eli appeared on the rooftop again. “May concert ulit mamaya,” he announced. And for the first time in months, Lia found herself smiling before sleeping. It became their thing after that. Nightly conversations across buildings. Some nights lasted five minutes. Others stretched until sunrise. They talked about childhood dreams. Their greatest embarrassments. The people who broke them. The versions of themselves they missed becoming. And slowly, without either of them noticing, they became important to each other. Lia started buying extra coffee because Eli always forgot to eat breakfast. Eli started leaving small sketches taped near her door downstairs. Once, he drew her apartment window glowing in the dark. Underneath it he wrote: “Parang lighthouse ka sa gabi.” That scared her more than it should have. Because people do not casually become lighthouses to lonely people. One rainy night, months later, Lia came home crying quietly inside a Grab after learning her company was laying people off. She walked upstairs exhausted, mascara ruined, hands shaking. And there he was. Sitting outside her apartment door with a paper bag of McDonald’s fries. “I had a feeling bad day mo,” he said softly. That was the exact moment she fell in love with him. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just slowly enough to feel terrifying. After that, loving Eli became the easiest thing she had ever done. He filled spaces inside her she thought would stay empty forever. The silence in her apartment no longer felt heavy when he was there. Even grocery shopping became fun somehow. Even traffic became survivable. For the first time in years, Lia stopped feeling invisible. Until the night he told her he got accepted for a two-year art residency in Spain. The words sat between them quietly. “I haven’t accepted yet,” Eli said carefully. But Lia already knew. People like Eli were never meant to stay still. And loving someone sometimes means realizing you cannot ask them to choose you over becoming who they were meant to be. So she smiled. Even when it felt like her ribs were breaking. “You should go.” He looked at her for a long time after that. “Anong klaseng tao ka ba?” he whispered. The kind who loved you enough to lose you properly, she wanted to say. But instead she laughed softly and wiped her eyes. “Yung tipo na ayaw marinig sintunado mong kanta habang buhay.” He left three months later. The night before his flight, they sat on the rooftop together for the first time instead of talking from afar. The city looked endless below them. “You know,” Eli said quietly, “before you, I thought loneliness was permanent.” Lia looked down at her hands because she knew if she looked at him too long, she would ask him to stay. After he left, the nights became quiet again. Painfully quiet. But not empty. Because somehow, loving him changed the shape of her loneliness forever. And years later, whenever the city lost power and darkness swallowed the streets whole, Lia still opened her window instinctively. Half-hoping to hear someone singing badly somewhere in the distance.