Penance of resting
The text from my mother pops up above all the other notifications: “Uuwi ka ba sa Mahal na Araw? (Are you coming home for Holy Week?)”
I stare at my phone, the glaring white text stark against the dimming light outside. I type, backspace, and type again. “Hindi muna, Ma. Dami ko pa need tapusin. Bawi ako sa susunod. (I can’t go home, Ma. I have a lot of things to do. I’ll make it up next time.)” I hit send before I can change my mind. My chest sighs with relief, but tightens as I feel a familiar, sullen guilt.
I am sitting in the freezing corner of the university library, wrapping my jacket on top of my head. On my laptop screen, a Facebook post announces the upcoming Holy Week break. Soon, the panting of the morning joggers and the deafening honk of the cars in Katipunan will fade. The campus will empty out, and the city will be told to pause, reflect, and rest. But I cannot rest.
For most students, a long weekend is a hard-earned breath. I hear my blockmates casually talking about their upcoming family trip to Siargao or to Thailand. I don’t resent them for it. Many of them are simply pausing a life of quality education and comfort they have known since childhood. And there is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being a novice trying to master that prestigious education that was not built for people like me. Their downtime is my only window to close that gap. While they have the luxury to briefly forget about academics, I feel the crushing need to study more, to read more, to practice more, to prove that I am not just a lucky admission mistake. I have to prove I deserve the space I take up in this university.
When Maundy Thursday rolls down the calendar, I know exactly what my day will look like. I will be sitting alone in my dorm, having a month’s worth of reading laid on my table. But to observe the “no-meat” rule, I will most likely eat a sad, plain boiled egg. Back home, Holy Week has a specific scent—the sweet, earthy aroma of biko simmering on the stove, its sounds crackling as the low murmur of the neighbors’ pabasa fills the air. Here, my true penance is being paralyzed with the guilt of unproductivity. The salt in my egg is the only flavor I can taste. It is the taste of choice: to prioritize the “scholar” over the “son,” and to let the food prepared by my mother go cold in a kitchen hundreds of miles away.
There is a heavy cross that you carry when you are a scholar after all, compounded by the reality of being gay, and a first-year student. You constantly feel that your presence comes with conditions. Society—and sometimes, yourself—tells you that you have to be “beyond” to be accepted. You feel the drowning rush to build a curriculum vitae, to master readings, to be well-versed, to be flawless. On most days, being “ordinary” feels way too close to being unworthy of existing. If I close my laptop on Good Friday, I am not just resting; I am intentionally falling behind.
Usually, “home” is a two-hour cardio—fighting for a space in the jeep, the long bridge from LRT-1 to LRT-2, and the slow creep of traffic that defines what it is like to journey all the way to the south. It is a commute that drains the battery of my phone and the soul from my eyes, yet I crave it. I miss the transition from the quietness of my dorm to the noisier, encouraging voices of my family. By choosing to stay, I reclaim those two hours of travel back into my laptop. But sitting in my dorm silently, the time I saved feels empty. I have traded the warmth of my family for a desk lamp, and now I wonder if the bargain was worth it.
But as the library closes and the cold aircon hums its final drone for the day, something changes. I look at my Google Docs, the cursor blinks endlessly, demanding me to do more. Then, I look at the text message from my mother that I was not able to see due to my phone being on no-disturb mode. “Padalhan na lang kita pagkain. (I’ll just send you some food.)” A simple, absolute provision.
Maybe the holiest thing I can do for the week is not to punish myself with another 100 pages of history readings. Jesus did not die just so I could hustle myself into an early grave just to prove that I have the right to exist. I am realizing that my obsession with catching up is making me miss the life I am already living.
I am a scholar. I am gay. I am here. That in itself is already a miracle I seldom give myself credit for.
This Holy Week, I will not go home, but I need to find a way to come home to myself. The hardest resurrection is not about saving my soul from transgressions. It is about closing my laptop, eating my boiled egg quietly in my dorm, taking a deep breath, and seeing that I am enough—even if I am doing absolutely nothing.
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Mark Lawrence Marquez, 19, is a student-journalist of the Ateneo de Manila University, taking up learning science and design.
