i used to patronize the sari-sari store two blocks from our old house. not the way the word gets used now, clipped and a little cruel, the tone teachers use on slow kids. just — i went back. every day almost. they knew my name when i walked in.
kuya jonas ran that store. i wasn't close to him at first, more like someone i clocked the way you clock weather, a fixture you don't think about until it changes. i was maybe eight or nine when i actually started talking to him. i'd go buy a piece of tinapay before school and he'd already be sitting on his overturned crate with a ballpen and whatever scrap paper he could find, usually the brown manila paper his nanay used to wrap fish in, sometimes just cardboard flattened out from a box of milo sachets. he drew jeepneys mostly. basketball players mid jump. once, when i was staring too long, he flipped the paper around and asked if i wanted to learn how to shade a tire so it looked round instead of flat. i said yes even though i had zero interest in drawing, just because i wanted him to keep talking to me.
he was good. i mean actually good, not just good for the neighborhood. proportion, shading, the whole thing, self taught, no internet tutorials, just years of copying komiks covers until his hand understood what his eyes saw before his brain caught up. teachers pulled him out of class to paint murals for buwan ng wika. once he drew lapu-lapu on the covered court wall, full mural size, and the barangay captain brought the mayor by just to see it. i remember standing there in my slippers, so proud of him it embarrassed me, like i had any right to be proud of somebody else's talent.
he never got past that mural. there was no money for review centers, no scholarship that reaches a kid whose talent is "just drawing," nothing that could've turned a hand like his into a future that paid. his tatay drove tricycle. his nanay did laundry for three houses on our street, including ours, actually, which is maybe part of why i felt like he half belonged to us too. talent doesn't pay for rice, so kuya jonas took over the sari-sari store when his lola's knees gave out, and somewhere between counting shampoo sachets and giving tingi change, the manila paper just stopped coming out. i didn't notice right away. you don't notice someone's hands going still. you notice everything else first.
what i noticed first was that he got quiet, sometime around when i was in third year high school. not sad quiet. flat quiet. the kind where a person is still answering you but you can tell part of them left the room already. he started disappearing in the evenings. sabungan, we thought, or barkada drinking, harmless enough for a guy in his twenties with no wife and no exit. i didn't think much of it either, honestly, because i was busy being sixteen and self absorbed the way you're supposed to be at sixteen.
then one afternoon i caught him behind the store trying to steady his hands enough to count coins into the register, and he couldn't. his fingers kept sliding off the peso coins like they were wet. he laughed when he saw me looking, this thin, apologetic laugh, and said "tulog lang," sleepy lang, and went back inside. i believed him because i wanted to. that's the part i think about now, how much of what happened i let myself not know because knowing would've meant doing something, and i was sixteen and it wasn't my house to fix.
by the time i was a senior his ate had started locking the cash box separately, keeping the key on a string around her own neck instead of hanging it by the door like before. his eyes stopped tracking you all the way when you talked to him. he'd laugh half a second too late, at the wrong part of a joke, like he was hearing it through water. i'd pass a certain house two streets over on my way to school, where the light stayed on too late and too blue, and there he'd be sometimes, sitting on somebody else's crate this time. not drawing anything. just sitting.
i won't pretend i knew the specifics of what happened in that house. i was a kid watching an adult come undone from a safe distance, like watching a storm from inside a jeepney with the windows up. what i know is he'd become a regular somewhere else. the same loyalty, the same daily showing up, just aimed at something that was quietly taking him apart instead of something that used to make him proud.
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it went on for close to two years before his family did what families here do when there's no money for anything with a proper name attached to it. no therapist, no facility with a clean brochure. just an uncle showing up one saturday with a borrowed van and a pastor's number saved in his phone, the kind of number that gets passed around post to post like a rumor of a cure. kuya jonas went to a live-in rehab outside the city that ran on donations and scripture, the kind that doesn't cost money up front, just costs your whole self eventually. when i heard he was going i remember feeling something so close to relief it embarrassed me too. i didn't think past that feeling. i didn't ask what "recovery" would actually look like once he came back. i just wanted the story to be over, the good way.
he came back eight months later and for a while, i swear, it looked like the good way. he was thinner but steadier, his hands didn't shake anymore, he looked people in the eye again when he talked to them. and the first week he was back, he did something i hadn't seen him do in years. he drew again. sat on that same crate with a ballpen and a torn cereal box and sketched a jeepney from memory, and when he saw me walking by he waved me over and gave it to me, said "pasalubong," like it was nothing, like his hands hadn't just remembered how to be his hands again. i went home and put it on my wall and told my mother he was going to be okay, really okay, and for about a month i actually believed the story had a good ending.
then the drawings stopped again. not all at once. first it was once a week instead of every day, and he said he was busy with bible study, four nights now instead of two. then he stopped bringing his crate outside at all, said the pastor talked about how idle hands invite the enemy back in, said drawing was "just another distraction he used to hide behind," his words, not mine, and he said them so calmly, like he'd rehearsed them, like someone had helped him rehearse them. he started leaving pamphlets by the register instead, stacked next to the tingi cigarettes, and every time i bought something from him he'd slide one across the counter the way he used to slide extra rambutan to kids who were short on change.
i went with him to a service once, mostly out of curiosity, the way you'd revisit a place you used to know just to see if it still feels the same. it was loud and warm and full of people who looked like they badly needed somewhere warm to be. mga tita whose husbands had left. mga kuya with track marks hidden under long sleeves even in that heat. mga lola whose pensions never arrived on time. the pastor had a voice like a hand pressed gently on your shoulder, the kind of voice you don't realize is steering you until you're already turned around. he talked about seed faith, about how what you give away comes back to you sevenfold, about how doubt was a door you leave open for the devil to walk through. the offering basket went around twice that day. i remember thinking, watching it move down the pew, that i'd seen this exact motion before somewhere. i just couldn't place it yet.
kuya jonas gave twenty pesos both times the basket came around. i only really noticed because of the fold. the bill was soft and a little grey at the edges, folded the same precise way he used to fold change for customers, corners pinched together, one crease straight down the middle. a habit left over from years behind a counter, from thousands of transactions, muscle memory outliving whatever it was originally for. and it hit me, sitting there in that plastic chair with a hymn still ringing in my ears, that i had seen that exact fold before. handing balut to tricycle drivers buying on credit. handing bets across a table during the sabungan years, before the quiet ones started. the fold hadn't changed even once through any of it. only what it was buying kept changing names.
nobody forced him to give what he didn't have. nobody held a gun to his head, not the dealer, not the pastor, not anyone. and honestly that's the part that makes it hardest to be angry at any one person in this, because there isn't one clean villain to aim it at. there's just a boy who could draw better than anyone i've ever known personally, born into a house where that gift had no path forward. there's a system that never once gave him anything worth being loyal to that didn't also, eventually, ask for something back. no scholarship reached him. no rehab that didn't require a conversion reached him. no version of "get better" that wasn't secretly "get devoted to something new" ever reached him. he went from a boy with a gift nobody could afford to grow, into a man addicted to something that dulled the ache of that loss, into a man everyone called "saved," rehabilitated by an institution that just handed him a cleaner looking version of the same ache and told him this one, finally, was holy, and that if it ever stopped working the fault would be his faith, not theirs.
i still have that jeepney drawing on my wall, from the one good month, the pasalubong month, when i let myself believe the story had turned a corner for real. i look at it more than i should. i think about the twenty pesos more, though. how it moved through his hand the exact same way whether it was buying shabu two years earlier or buying grace that sunday. the fold never changed. only what it was buying kept changing names.
maybe it's faith. i'm not the one to say. i just know he used to be somebody people counted on without having to ask twice — a name you knew, a hand that gave you extra rambutan when you were short. and now he's still that, in a way. still shows up every week without fail. still gives what he doesn't have to spare. still lets someone new convince him this time is finally the one worth being loyal to.
