‘Halo-halo’ moments

The first time halo-halo saved me, I didn’t even know I needed saving. I was 13, drowning in year-end exams and what-ifs. The future loomed like a storm cloud, dark and unpredictable. That’s when Tita Connie’s carinderia became my lighthouse.

It was a Tuesday. Or maybe a Thursday. The days had started to blur together, each one weighed down by expectations I couldn’t seem to meet. I slumped into my usual spot, fully prepared to drown my sorrows in a greasy plate of silog.

But fate, or maybe just Tita Connie’s intuition, had other plans. “Try this,” she said, placing a tall glass of halo-halo in front of me. “It looks like you need some sweetness in your life.”

I stared at the colorful layers. Red beans, white macapuno, purple ube. Crushed ice like fresh snow, evaporated milk swirling through it all. A miniature mountain range of flavors and textures waiting to be explored.

My first spoonful was a revelation. The sweetness hit first—a jolt of sugar straight to my brain. Then came the cold that shocked my system awake. As I let the flavors melt on my tongue, something inside me started to shift. With each bite, I felt the knots in my chest loosening.

The constant chatter in my head—not good enough, not smart enough, not enough, period—began to quiet down. I realized: This is what it feels like to be present. Not worrying about tomorrow’s deadlines or yesterday’s mistakes. Just here, now, savoring each unique spoonful.

As I mixed the colors together, watching them swirl into a beautiful mess, a thought struck me: Isn’t this what life is like? A jumble of experiences, some sweet, some bitter, all mixing together to create something unexpectedly wonderful.

I started going to Tita Connie’s more often. Not just for the halo-halo, but for the moments of peace it brought me. It became my ritual, my pause button in a world that never stopped spinning. “Halo-halo moments,” I started calling them.

Those precious pockets of time where I could just breathe, taste, exist. My friends caught on quickly. “You look like you need a halo-halo moment,” they’d say whenever my eyes would get that faraway look. It became our code for “take a break, be kind to yourself.”

Slowly, I started seeing halo-halo everywhere. In the way my mom’s voice mellowed when she talked about her childhood, sweet nostalgia mixed with the slight bitterness of time passed. In the laughter of my friends as we crammed for exams, the stress and joy all blending together into something bearable, even beautiful. In the streets of our barangay, where the smell of sampaguita mixed with jeepney exhaust, where the old and new Manila crashed and merged like flavors in a glass.

Life, I realized, is one big halo-halo. Messy, unpredictable, but wonderful if you take the time to savor it. Don’t get me wrong. Halo-halo didn’t magically cure my anxiety or make my problems disappear. Mental health isn’t that simple. But it gave me a new way to look at things, a new language for understanding my emotions.

On my darkest days, when even getting out of bed feels like climbing a mountain, I think of halo-halo. Layer by layer, spoonful by spoonful. That’s how we heal. That’s how we move forward. Sometimes, the bitterness of failure sits heavy on my tongue. But I’ve learned to look for the sweetness that always follows if I’m patient enough to wait for it.

Some days, I feel like the crushed ice, fragile and melting too fast. But then I remember—even when I’m at my most vulnerable, I’m still part of something beautiful.

To anyone out there feeling lost, overwhelmed, or just in need of a breather, I say: find your halo-halo. Whatever it is that brings you back to yourself, that reminds you life can be sweet and cold and messy and perfect all at once.

And to Tita Connie, who probably doesn’t know she changed my life with a simple dessert: Salamat po. Thank you for teaching me that sometimes, the best way to solve a problem is to mix it all together and dig in.

So here’s to halo-halo—not just a dessert, but a life philosophy. A reminder that we’re all a mix of contradictions, that healing often comes in the most unexpected flavors, and that there’s magic to be found in embracing the beautiful mess of it all.

Mag-halo-halo tayo. Let’s mix things up. In our glasses and in our lives. There’s healing to be found in the blend.

Askia Khryss N. Roxas, 18, is a STEM senior high school student at Mapúa University.