Hello, Neighbor

Chapter 11: Return Points

A tricycle passed by adorned in ribbons and carrying piglets. All probably for the games. A man walked around with a live python for photo ops. A marching band paraded through the muddy street like they were heading to battle instead of the barangay hall.

I felt...almost present. There was something comforting in how none of this made sense and yet everything fit.

Ate Katie waved to me from her food stall, hair tied up, apron stained, a halo of steam rising behind her from the wok.

Pablo stood beside her—again—smiling too much, saying too little. He handed out styrofoam plates while she barked orders with practiced ease.

Katie and Pablo started the food stall as a one-time favor during the barangay fiesta 10 years back. The original vendor dropped out last minute, and Katie—ever the organizer—volunteered to fill in. She roped in Pablo because, according to her, "He owes me for burning the garlic that one time in 2012"  What was meant to be a temporary fix turned into a quiet tradition.

"You're late!" she called, tossing me a suman.

"I'm fashionably late," I replied, catching it midair. "Or tragically early for next year."

Katie smirked. "Tragic fits you better."

Pablo laughed quietly and passed me a fork without being asked.

They moved around each other like clockwork—familiar, frictionless. You wouldn't know they'd once had a spectacular falling out over a scholarship, a train ride, and a letter that was never mailed.

Back in college, they were that kind of intense: two halves of the same dare. Everyone thought they'd end up together. But then she left after graduation for abroad. He stayed behind to take care of his family. Things cracked. Then faded. And yet... here they were.

"You two ever going to stop pretending you're just stallmates?" I asked, nudging Katie with my elbow as she stirred her pancit.

"Says the girl chasing ghosts," she shot back, not unkindly.

Pablo just smiled—soft, like he hadn't stopped hoping.

I looked at them then—not as Ate Katie the responsible one, or Pablo my boss—but as people who had made a quiet kind of peace with not quite arriving. They hadn't rekindled. Not really. But something held them there, side by side, year after year. Maybe habit. Maybe tenderness. Maybe neither had stopped waiting.

And I thought—what if Redmond and I became that kind of story?

What if he kept glitching in and out of my life like a faulty light switch, and I just kept standing under it, hoping for one more flicker?

What if I never learned how to hold him? That idea of repeating their mistake—of losing something before it can even begin.

"Better check the stage," Pablo said, breaking the thought. "It's almost time."

"For what?"

"Something," he said. "Always is."

I gave them one last smile and turned away, trying to shake off the thought—but it followed.

Some love stories burn out.

Some just... smolder forever.

---

By evening, the whole place shimmered.

String lights tangled above the trees like constellations lowered to eye-level. A stage was set up near the chapel where local kids performed a chacha remix, their steps half-practiced and full-hearted. Elders danced anyway, barefoot, drunk on gin and sentiment. There were games in the basketball court just across the chapel: pabitin, basagang palayok, even a poetry contest where someone drunkenly dedicated a verse to their neighbor's carabao.

I wandered through it like a ghost in my own life, smiling, clapping, letting it wash over me. Normal. Festive. Solid.

Until—

That distinct scent I'd been waiting for returned.

Not gentle. Not floral.

Flooding.

Like the memory of a place I hadn't been yet, like night blooming suddenly in the middle of firelight.

I stopped walking.

The crowd didn't.

Voices blurred. Lights smudged. The world leaned.

And then, at the very edge of the stage lights—between two parols strung with blinking LEDs—I saw him.

Redmond.

Standing completely still.

Unmoving in a sea of motion.

Hair damp with sweat or rain—I couldn't tell. Shirt half-unbuttoned like he'd arrived mid-run or mid-century. His eyes locked on mine. No one else seemed to notice. Or maybe they did and forgot a second later.

I couldn't breathe.

He walked toward me slowly, parting the crowd like a dream. As if they bent around him. As if time did.

For a second, he shimmered.

Glitched.

A flicker at the edge of his jaw. A shadow doubled behind his feet. But he kept walking, face unreadable, like he'd returned for something vital.

He stopped a foot in front of me. My throat tightened.

"I told myself," he said, low and steady, "that if I saw you again, I wouldn't speak first."

I blinked. "Then don't."

He smiled—and in that smile was heartbreak, mischief, and the storm I didn't know I'd been waiting for.

The fireworks began then—of course they did—

Exploding above us in careless bursts. Everyone looked up.

Except me.

Because with the scent of gunpowder layered over sampaguita, the world had finally tilted back into its impossible shape.

And Redmond had come back with it.