Because we wanted to earn a bit, and didn’t have anything else to sell, we decided to sell what we had the most of when we were around 7. Stationery. We sold stationery for 1 peso each sheet, 50 centavos for the smaller ones. The Barbie ones were 3 pesos per sheet, higher priced because it was more valuable for us then, and because we didn’t want anyone to buy it. We peddled it on the streets of our baranggay in Malabon. Our total earnings amounted to Php3.50, placed inside a duck-shaped, plastic toilet paper holder. My cousin told me he’d guard it for safekeeping but I never saw it again.

My mom had this gift idea for my brother. She bought a huge spiral notebook, then wrote a ghost story for him. We then made the “book” interactive by creating pop-up pages. For several afternoons, we’d create collages using recycled gift wrappers and draw ghosts on the said book. In one page there’s a holographic Santa Claus, grinning diabolically from the window. In another page, there’s a ghost popping up to say “boo!” from behind a door. She had all these craft ideas when I was younger, like creating tiny pots and pans out of airdry clay, or using leaves as stamps for my very own stationery. We gathered different leaves from my grandma’s garden and she cut brown kraft paper into small rectangles. Using poster paint, we painted on one side of the leaves and used it to stamp unique leafbone shapes on the brown paper. She labelled it with my name after: Rean’s notecards, with a tiny drawing of me, smiling.

I was obsessed with pop-up books for the longest time. I was given a book about how it was like in the Wild Wild West, and I constantly played with pull-out dog from the second floor in that book, chasing after that kid in a cowboy hat. It also amazed me that the barrels outside the house contained different fruits: oranges and apples. The barrels were tiny, and the act of peeking inside it made me feel like a happy snooping giant.

There’s this book with stick figures that I found upstairs, photocopied and bound in red, called “Yoga for Children”. We had this neighbour from Romblon named Florence, around my age, and I’d call her and we’d go inside the bedroom of my parents and try out each pose. We were more bendy and flexible then, and with that kiddie naivete I’d wonder what was so special about the poses we just did, it didn’t feel like much of an effort back then.

At my cousin’s house, they had an endless supply of thick, A4 sized cartons, used for their “bibingka” business. They were brown on one side, eggshell white on the other. She’d get a huge stack, some pens, and we’d get ready for our drawing session. She had some Pinoy komiks like Fantasy and Nightmare, and some Archie comics, which we’d then use as our reference for drawing. I remember telling her how I wanted to draw something like that girl singing Vogue, Vogue because the girl there had long flowy hair which made copying it exciting. She had those pens that change color when you use the color changer pen that came with it. That was the first time I experienced coloring with gold and silver crayolas. My favorites were sea green and gold, so I often drew mermaids so I could have an excuse to keep on using those two colors.