As my uncle’s new white SUV cruised up the mountains of Mindanao, I stared out the window and was greeted by a familiar sight. Out the window, across the road and out into the open sky was the sprawling green hills contrasting against the blue canvas of the heavens. This was no new sight to me at all despite the fact that I have never been here before and have never taken a road trip through these specific mountains. In truth, it reminded me of Cebu City’s backyard – the winding and curving roads in the mountains of Cebu’s province.

My mother once told me to pray whenever we took a long road trip – even more so when it was during the night. The nights in Cebu’s provincial roads were as dark as pitch, with nothing but the road illuminated by your headlights and the metal walls of your tin car separating you from all the secrets that hid behind the night’s black curtain. As a child, I always prayed silently to myself during these trips through the night. The thought of white ladies, ghosts and aswangs hiding in the century-old trees of Carcar made the hairs on my little brown arms rise and stop my breath. I closed my eyes shut, clung to my mother’s arm, and waited desperately to get to the safehaven that was wherever we were going that time.

Now as a teen on the brink of semi-adulthood, I barely pray. I jump into the car, pop my earphones in, take in the sights for a couple of minutes and zonk out. Mother still urges us to pray and we do together but even she forgets sometimes. I sometimes wonder what happened to us through the years. What happened to the family that prayed together every time they hopped into a vehicle? I look around at my family and notice the minute changes. The brother that counted road signs with his sister sits silently beside her now, not talking. The father that told jokes about the different people and things they saw as they darted through the road still cracks the occasional cringey joke but he becomes silent after a while when nobody laughs anymore. The mother that always, always protected her daughter’s eyes from the horrors she thought she saw in the night closes her own eyes this time, only opening them occasionally to play Candy Crush. The daughter with wide curious eyes and imaginative brain? Her eyes are still curious but they look elsewhere and her brain has grown – slowly losing that child’s imagination she used to hold dear.

And as she looked out the familiar mountains that weren’t really familiar at all, she imagined what these green mounds would have looked like in the years before – when she was younger and even before that, when her own mother was younger. Would they have looked the same? It was there she got her answer. Time changes things eventually – slowly chipping and eroding away at mountains or even people, leaving behind changes big or small but still change nonetheless. And now as she would traverse through the night in that white tin car with her family with her, she would not be scared of ghosts out in the road anymore. Because they were there, inside them all.