Fallen fruit, olden tree, sun-baked soil by Zo Navarro

A piece that attempts to understand one’s childhood, familial relationships, and gender roles and expectations.

First published in Pandan Weekly in January 2025.

​From the author:

In a way, this piece is an exercise in defining, redefining, and examining what heritage, legacy and family mean in the Filipino context and within the context of the Filipino family. It is also an attempt at seeing what heritage is for someone who did not grow up that well-off—somewhere in the poverty and lower middle class, a common reality for most Filipinos. I also decided to frame this in the second-person point of view to put the reader in the shoes of the narration. It is also as if I were speaking to younger, less-knowledgeable versions of myself and telling them what is going to happen, finding reconciliation and peace, and knowing that things will somehow be all right.

I am thankful for the welcoming people in SEA Lit Circle. This is my first time joining a workshop after years of being unable to due to the pandemic. SEA Lit Circle and the people in it reinvigorated my love for writing. I am also thankful for my friends’ support! Before all of this, my friends are my first audience, proofreaders, and collaborators. I would also like to give a quick shout-out to my white cat named Cloud for quite literally staying by my side as I write my afternoons away.

Listen to the author read an excerpt of the piece:

Here is what you know:

You grew up in Quezon City. You were born here. No bone nor flesh in your body belonged to the faraway lands, to the beaches and seas, to the boats that sailed and sought fishes, the plains that nurtured harvest. You were weaned on the cacophony of busy bodies, late-night next-door neighbors’ karaoke celebrations any time of the week, rental-to-rental hopping, air-conditioned malls that were considered new-fangled social places of the time. You grew up in a rented apartment that had two floors and a winding, wooden staircase that was too smooth for a hyperactive child. The second floor had all the rooms, while everyone communed, dined, bathed, ate and lounged on the first floor. You could wake in the mornings to a mayoral re-electionist, who bore the same surname as a senator, looping a cheesy campaign song, parading down an innocent, still-waking street, faces printed on flyers scattered like leaves to confused residents. In the afternoon, you could find yourself in the living room, seated next to your maternal grandfather, whom you fondly called “Tatay,” the two of you rapt at the television broadcasting a household staple game show. Strong storms sometimes battered your shutters, and they needed to be boarded up until the winds’ howling was over. Some nights, you could hear a few roaches or canal rats under your bed. Your childhood was that of living in a rented apartment with a highway right outside the front door, next to a canal from a neighboring factory. The waste flowed through a man-made dam situated a few meters outside the kitchen.

The apartment was turned into a salon now that your family left and moved to the next home. You do not know if the renters saw your childhood scribbles up their walls, if they saw the bed your parents left behind. Your hot summer days born and bred in a tropical country were that of a time playing with street kids. You joined their games and let them teach you how to hit the can a meter away with just one throw of a slipper. You did not know a word they uttered: you were but a child yet to grasp what speech was, but you threw your slipper adorned in cartoons and printed with flowers, hit the can, and your street kid friends cheered. You felt like you belonged here with them, despite the absence of words, despite being their youngest, despite how you felt like they were just babysitting you until you were called to go home. Tatay was old, but he also taught you things. He coached you on how to throw that slipper toward victory. He taught you how to play chess and checkers. He also taught you how to cheat. He taught you how to shuffle cards in a way that somehow offended your mom. He taught you the taste of crumbing pandesal dipped in lukewarm black coffee. He taught you the different sections of the morning paper, even though you were only interested in the colored comics part. He taught you where he liked to hear Mass every Sunday, even though you slept through most of it. He taught you how to hold his hand while crossing the street when his first-born daughter calls you home.

Your childhood was all about the gaming shop your maternal grandfather looked over. And you looked over the children’s shoulders, watched their fingers press buttons on consoles and saw the screen flash a bright, colorful, “you win!” animation. You were swamped in the commotion of it all: pixel graphics of two characters fighting against each other, betting on who would emerge victorious. You eventually tried, small hands that had yet to master how to hold a pencil grasping at the controller. You lost a lot before you won once. But Tatay was there to let you play among the other kids, and even until after the shop closed, as if the last standing customer.

A few years later, once the kids visiting dwindled in number, the gaming store was transformed into a sari-sari store, a place that could be described as a community convenience store. But it was more than just where people could buy their goods immediately and cheaply. It was where people came together. You lounged at the storefront with your grandfather and sometimes observed the variety of customers. There were truckers who bought smokes and mint candy. There were children your age purchasing soda poured into a plastic bag with a straw they could sip out of. Sometimes, mothers came around and inquired about condiments or canned goods. There were workers looking for food and shade against the high afternoon sun during their break. You knew them all, as your grandfather did. He memorized the constant purchases of regular faces, greeted them like old friends. He also had an odd habit of splashing water out the front’s steps, as if to cool the cement absorbing sunrays all day long. He closed the shop whenever he felt like it. Meaning, it could stay open late into the evening, until your mom asked why he was not sleeping yet, until he relaxed, his searching gaze finally allowed to drop at the knowledge no one was coming up to us with an urgent purchase.

Sometimes, Mom was there. The shop was located at the front-most part of the rented apartment. It only occupied a few square meters of space, enough for a horizontal display, shelving system, a chair to sit on and floor for just one person to walk on. It was apt enough for Tatay, and almost too narrow when you were there, a bored kid with nothing better to do but be interested in other people’s activities. Mom lingered at the back, the small threshold that crossed from the store to the living room’s entryway. She sat in the plush faded brown armchair next to that, just enough of a presence to be known.

Sometimes, she was also there when you and Tatay watched that afternoon game show. Once, with the three of you in the same space, the show featured a Filipino celebrity group. The group was composed of young adult women, and on that screen, they serenaded viewers with lively songs paced with a choreographed dance. Everyone was in love. Who was not? Girl groups with astounding vocals were big. The hosts proclaimed that these women had talent and a promising career in the entertainment industry. To you, they seemed larger than life, dressed in clothes that sparkled and beckoned under the show’s studio lights. Tatay agreed with what the hosts said. He told my mom he enjoyed their songs. Mom, on the other end of the room, walked over to where you sat next to Tatay and said, in a way that was strange, that girls belonged to boys and boys belonged to girls. You did not get it. You did not know if Tatay caught that. But you nodded anyway, way too invested and antsy to get your attention back to that all-female group, enraptured in their melody.

Here is what was happening:

Sometime later, a younger brother was born. But, before he was born, you had a pretend-sibling in the form of a doll that smelled strongly of the plastic it was made out of. It was adorned in a floral-patterned dress, hair like yellowing paint, and fake blue eyes too unnerving. As a kid, you faced the doll toward the wall before you slept. But you were also no longer a kid. You outgrew the playground pastures, the neighborhood kids, the afternoon outdoor games, and were into a world of preschool and of sisterhood. Plus, you were so keenly aware of how your parents looked at you, at how your smooth palms caressed the upside of the doll’s head, how you held it, how you cared for it. And you knew what a performance was without knowing the word for it, and so you performed. That is, until one morning you cut its hair, played house too hard, so the doll got deformed and concern took over your parents’ faces. But, to you, it’s all right. Children should not have been set up to be a pseudo-parent. You should have cared, because you were siblings. And you genuinely did. You recommended tales you loved as a baby, and were enamored at how a solo room transformed into a shared space, enthusiastic despite the confusion of how pregnancy worked. Your mind was young, too, but you knew inside your mother’s belly was a baby, and that baby was your sibling, who would become your friend, confidant, a struggle sometimes, but wholeheartedly family. He was a picture of how someone could be so like you, from the same people, but also so different, but still wonderful. But you knew, even without the words to enunciate, you should not have been a stand-in parent, a replacement, or mere entertainment whenever you were the only one present. That was why you resented the doll. You were not being prepared to welcome a brother, but something else.

And maybe it was something else. School was a different world, but no matter. You went from preschool, to nursery, and then changed schools to start elementary. Tatay was always there. It was mostly Tatay who picked you up when the school bell rang in the late weekday afternoons, bodies crushed in the midst of rushing children, dragged with their uniforms and heavy bags. But it didn’t matter, because despite the changes, there was a sense of familiarity. Tatay picked you up, and it was as if you knew you were ready for home. Maybe, in a way, he raised you. He also prepared your meals, helped your parents get you ready in the mornings, waved you goodbye before departing to start the day. Eventually, he was also with your brother, and it was an ever-present reminder that there was something you still knew despite the changes being too big, too daunting, for a child around the age of six. They were there, and you were anchored. That was enough. That was more than enough.

That was why when your mother started appearing more after school to pick you up, when you started waiting longer in school grounds, when you started visiting the library more frequently than before, you started wondering. Where was he? What happened? Was he okay?

Your mom or dad—whoever was available after work to come get you and your brother—would answer in the most honest way they could to two children. “He’s resting,” they said, or “he’s sleeping.” Sometimes, they said that he’s still watching a film at the cinema, which was possible. Senior citizens received discounts for certain film screenings, and Tatay lived his days to the fullest viewing his beloved films on wide screens and darkened theaters. My brother and I would understand it. We would go home hand-in-hand, one of us on the left of our mother or father, the other one on the right. We’d spend the afternoons eating snacks they bought for us at the convenience store. Then, we’d go wait in line at the jeepney terminal for a ride home, seated with our shoulders against older, taller people’s stomachs and sweaty pits. If it was our mom with us on the commute home, she’d try to hail a taxi, but only if we were ever so lucky to catch, much less even afford the fare, of one. So, you rode home, watched your school disappear like a blimp in your eyesight, and your brother took his overdue afternoon nap while on the road, sleepyhead barely keeping himself alert.

Here is what you do not know:

Your mom lies. Your dad lies. Your brother does not know any better. He is as clueless as you are. Tatay is not at the cinema. Tatay is not at home resting. He is not sleeping, either. That is, if your concept of sleeping is temporary and not a double-edged meaning of a permanent rest. He is getting old. You haven’t noticed it before, but he does. Remember when you made a house plan for your adulthood that included Tatay in the picture? Remember the childhood naivety of thinking he’d live that long?

Well, he won’t.

Elementary happens, and then high school, and you learn how to go home alone. It is okay. It is not a big deal. It is bound to happen, because you are also getting old. In high school, at the school fair, a girl brings you over to a marriage booth hosted by two other students, surprised that both attendees were in uniform skirts. You are thinking of what your mother said to you in passing while watching television with Tatay. You think about Tatay, and how he’s doing, and how his hour-long walks are reduced to twenty minutes. The entire fake ceremony lasts less than that.

During your last year before graduation and the summer before college, you think you love a guy whom you just have a toxic, manipulative, codependent relationship with. It takes so long to feel like yourself again. It takes so long to realize those late-night texts do not mean love. You are just seeking comfort, someone, anyone, because Tatay is slowly fading in the background ever since the day he stopped dropping by your elementary school to pick you up, disappearing with your old school’s building into a foggy, dream-like memory.

You try so hard. Why are you seeking reprieve? Why do you try so hard to love a man? Why do you tell yourself he likes you and you like him, knowing very well it is not like that? You try so hard. You just do not want to give anyone else more problems. Because, what is being a lesbian but a problem in the eyes of your mother, your father, your aunt, and all the adults and relatives in your life? You hear their words before they are even uttered. It is in their stare that ghosts your shoulders every time you leave for school. It is the way they tug your uniform into place, checking, rechecking, and then tugging again. We are all aging and busy, and here you are chasing looks after girls? Shame on you. Your parents are knee-deep in debt to pay for your school and you’re just here, curious in class about a beautiful seatmate? You are wasting money. You are a waste. You try so hard. Your grades are perfect. Your social standing in school is amicable. You do not have a record in the disciplinary office. You stay with the smart people. You go home right away. You are scared. You are convincing yourself that things will go well if this one part of your life will stop going awry, if you were just normal, and it is somehow your fault everything is falling apart.

Tatay does not last the pandemic. He does not last your entire four-year study at university. He does not even last a day for the mourning period, with the staff urging to dispose of the body immediately to avoid contamination. The body, they say. The body! That is someone who housed a beating heart.

There are parts of you now that can no longer reconcile with your past. You cannot remember Tatay, either. You can feel him leaving your memory as he left the living. You see your face reflected in the crematorium’s glass walls. Then, you see your mother’s red-rimmed eyes, too. She’s gaining her own creases around the corners of her face. Her back now curves with a peculiar weight. You think to yourself about your imminent death, and the imminence of your mom’s death, and how someday, this too will be you.

Someday, you will pick at your skin the way your mother picks hers. You will be gnawed to death by an unseen threat, the hairs at the back of your neck always prickling in anxious anticipation. This threat does not exist.

What exists is the subspace of what Tatay used to occupy. You search for him in the mornings before work, expecting him to be standing by the sun, waving you goodbye, smelling of the oranges he’s peeled for sweets after breakfast. You swear you hear his shoes crunch the gravel and cement and dried leaves and crushed fallen fruit behind you. For a few weeks, then months, then years, you will be visited by a phantom ache of longing, a specific yearning for a meal only a once-living grandfather could make.

What exists is this grappling existence with your mom. Someday, you might be able to tell her it is not your fault, or anyone’s fault, that a man died of old age. You will see him in her tempered outbursts, during twilight evenings and she wakes up dreaming he was coming to get her. She is willing to go. You cannot go with her. Not anymore. You have to tell her that you are not just her daughter, or just an offspring she can bring anywhere, everywhere, to her liking. You will have to tell her that what’s written in the stars for you is different from hers, yet still so similar. It’s like celestial bodies refracting a thousand times before reaching Earth, the visible light seen here just a portion of its magnanimity.

What exists is the reality of time passing by, of age becoming more real, and how you are closer to the age of thirty when you used to be close to eighteen. And it’s okay. You hope it is also okay for your mom, despite how you two argue for hours on end when you come home with a haircut that makes you look like a boy, wearing clothes that makes her pray to God that you would not turn out to be one. God, you also used to pray, you hope to turn out to be true to yourself. And, this God, you used to pray for forgiveness and understanding for your mother, from your mom. You see in yourself her rage, that same one you see in her dead father. There is a certain shattering heartbreak indescribable to this sensation.

Despite it all, you want things to be okay without even knowing when or how it will happen. In the end, your grandfather’s resting place now nurses the soil from which flower buds grow. You fall from her shade, your mom breaking, hollowing bark against the testing winds, the same ones that shake you from her branches. You wonder if you two will be all right, or if the heel of Tatay’s shoe will crush you gently, like the oranges he loved to peel on your way out of the house.

Zo Navarro (they/she) is a 25-year-old non-binary lesbian residing in Quezon City, Philippines. She writes about feminism, activism, and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She also loves to write about the beauty of mundane, everyday life experiences. Zo is also a contributing writer for SeaGlass Literary, a youth literary magazine, and an organizer of Paraluman Zine PH, a zine highlighting Filipino sapphic experiences through writing and art.

Instagram: @zo_zonlines

Twitter/X: @zoeniche

Medium: zonlines.medium.com

Portfolio: zofoliocreative.carrd.co

Thank you for reading!

Pandan Weekly is a bi-annual zine and weekly email series produced by SEA Lit Circle, a community of writers and readers from Southeast Asia and the diaspora. At SEA Lit Circle, we inspire each other to write fresh, compelling work that’s true to ourselves, and we encourage each other to read and be more open to new works, stories, and perspectives within and beyond the region.

Subscribe to Pandan Weekly’s newsletter by leaving your email below.

We’d love to feature your writing. We want the works you wish someone out there would resonate with; works you write for fun, for your peace of mind, or for you to understand the world or yourself better; works you wish you had grown up with—works that beg for connections, or empathy. Check our submission guidelines through the link below.