Sway Me One More Time

Chapter 05

There were nights when the profound silence grew too loud, thick enough to drown in.

Nights when the simple act of breathing felt like a betrayal to the memory of her parents, or perhaps, to the ghost of their love.

On those nights, I reached beneath the heavy stack of untouched textbooks by my nightstand—the ones that wore dust like protective armor—and pulled out a battered leather journal. The cover was frayed at the corners, the spine cracked from too many devastating confessions pressed into its pages over time.

It was mine.

It was his, in the intimate language of shared secrets.

It was ours, a scarred relic of something tender, unfinished, and now beautifully dangerous.

I flipped quickly past entries scrawled in half-legible ink—regret smeared between lines of longing, white-hot anger folded neatly between tired metaphors—and found a blank page, pristine and ready for violence.

"Geighbryel," I wrote at the top without thinking, the name spilling from my pen as naturally as the exhale of a breath.

Then, as if the ink itself had betrayed me, I dug the pen in harder and scribbled over the letters—again and again—until the ink pooled and bled through the paper's fragile surface. Until the paper thinned, tore, and curled like a wound left deliberately open to the air.

Some wounds, I realized, didn’t bleed crimson.

But they ached loud enough to fill an entire, solitary room.

During the daylight hours, amidst the noise and strict routine of school, it was easier to maintain the delicate pretense.

Prelims had ended—not with the thunderous applause of a triumphant grand finale, but with the quiet, shared exhale of something finally, irrevocably finished. Like the soft, conclusive click of a door shutting behind you after a long, exhausting journey.

The atmosphere in the hallways began its slow, inevitable shift. What was once filled with the dense weight of silence and worry became light again. Laughter returned, not all at once, but slowly, like sunlight slipping tentatively through half-open blinds. Sleep-deprived faces brightened, and the hopeful scent of snacks replaced the sharp, metallic tang of stress. It was as if a heavy, suffocating blanket had finally been lifted from the campus.

But for those seasoned students who had endured this cycle before, it was a clear, unspoken truth that prelims weren’t truly the end. They were only the prelude. A warm-up. A calculated warning. The rest of the semester still stretched out ahead, full of steeper hills to climb—midterms, pre-finals, and finals. Each stage felt heavier than the last. Prelims were just the first, tentative wave in an incoming storm.

For those of us in the SSLG, however, even that short, collective breath wasn’t ours to claim. While everyone else was momentarily catching their breath, we were already urgently moving forward.

Campaign season had begun.

It was late, frustratingly late. Everything had been pushed back—first by bureaucratic paperwork, then by pending approvals, and finally by the dense, packed academic calendar that left us no space to truly breathe. There wasn’t a precious second left for a perfect, meticulous rollout. We had to work with the raw, chaotic materials we possessed.

Every necessary part of the process had to be executed in a rush. From creating the campaign materials to announcing the candidacy forms room-to-room, down to the tense screening of candidates, everything needed to move faster than we were mentally ready for.

There was no sanctioned room to stall. And no legitimate time to slow down.

Our meeting was held late that afternoon, tucked away in the narrow, airless SSLG room on the fourth floor. The air was thick and heavy with the scent of printing ink, old paper, and cheap, instant coffee. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed, flickering every now and then, while the distant, insistent chorus of tricycle horns rose and fell outside the open windows.

The table in front of us was a mess—scattered folders, half-dried markers, brightly colored sticky notes clinging precariously to the edge of someone’s tumbler. Exhaustion hung in the air like a shared, silent secret.

Andrea, our president, sat at the head of the table. Her glasses had slid slightly down her nose, and her eyes—though fiercely determined—were rimmed with exhaustion. She pushed her glasses up.

“I hate to say it,” she announced, “But we’re behind. Way behind.”

Nico let out a cynical, breathy laugh as he leaned back precariously on his chair. “No one’s surprised, Dre. Admin only approved the campaign last week. What were we supposed to do, time travel?”

Andrea continued, her voice firm despite the fatigue. “Campaign season is officially starting, and we’re already behind. Admin only gave us the go-signal last week, and with the division symposium coming up, Nico and I won’t be able to manage the campaign fully.”

Beside her, Nico offered a half-apologetic shrug, spinning his pen like a rotor blade.

Andrea pressed on, “We’ll still check in and help where we can, but the bulk of the campaign—planning, announcements, coordination—will be handled by the rest of you.”

The air shifted as everyone straightened up, the weight of responsibility settling on new shoulders.

She began distributing the roles without delay.

“Rafi, you’re in charge of all social media content. Posters, captions, documentation—everything visual and online goes through your command.”

Rafi nodded, already unlocking his phone. “I’ve got templates ready. Just need to finalize the candidates.”

“Good. In Junior High school, Amie, you take Grade 7 and 8. Harry, Grade 9 and 10.”

Both of them nodded, their pens quickly taking notes.

“Renzo, you’ll handle Grade 11,” Andrea continued. “Also, since you’re the treasurer, track all campaign expenses. We’ll need a detailed budget report for our adviser—printing, paper, everything. Submit the breakdown before Friday’s deadline.”

“On it,” Renzo said, already flipping open his meticulous notebook.

Then her eyes found mine.

“Lue, you’ll take Grade 12. You’re familiar with most of the advisers already, and you’re the most organized when it comes to schedules. Handle the announcements, distribute the forms, and coordinate the screenings.”

I gave a small, efficient nod.

She added, “Same format as last year. One representative each for STEM, ABM, HUMSS, GAS, and one overall representative for the grade level.”

Rafi looked up again. “Do we have the guidelines printed already?”

Andrea clicked a file open on her laptop. “I’ll send it in the group chat, but here’s the summary.” She cleared her throat and read aloud the stipulations.

“Easy enough,” Harry said, trying to sound nonchalant as he slouched in his chair. “Let’s just hope we get enough students who actually want to run.”

Andrea closed her laptop with a decisive click. “If not, we’ll do personal invites. We just need this rolling by next week.”

I stayed outwardly quiet, my thoughts already moving ahead, mapping the complex territory. Grade 12 had eight sections—three STEM, two ABM, two HUMSS, and one GAS. A multitude of students. A multitude of rooms to penetrate.

And I had a strange, cold feeling that someone I was profoundly unready to face again might just be one of the names that appeared on the candidate list.

And just like that, the meeting was concluded. No time to waste. No room to hesitate.

The positions weren’t just ceremonial tokens passed around like paper crowns. They mattered deeply. These representatives would sit in crucial meetings that most students didn’t even know existed. They would voice student grievances, work with administration on complex policies, help plan major school events, and—if they possessed enough moral courage—attempt to bridge the quiet, widening gap between student dreams and institutional reality.

I knew the true weight of that heavy responsibility too well.

Which is precisely why the name that had already started circling among students—echoing through classrooms and group chats like a chant waiting for a leader—made my chest tighten painfully.

Geighbryel Caelum Velezario.

The boy who used to walk me home without the necessity of asking. The boy who once gifted me silence in a world full of suffocating noise. The boy who vanished just before our senior year—and returned like a storm disguised as sunshine.

And now? The boy everyone wanted, fiercely, as Grade 12's overall representative.

It made perfect, agonizing sense, in a way. He had the stellar grades. He possessed the quiet, magnetic charisma. He had the kind of calm, steady presence that compelled people to pause and listen. He had even rejoined the varsity basketball team, sliding back into his role as if he’d never been absent—as if his disappearance had only been a fleeting blink.

Later that night, I sat cross-legged on my bed, surrounded by a siege of scattered papers and folders. My laptop was open, displaying the announcement draft that needed to be posted, and pubmat drafts waiting to be meticulously reviewed. A roll of masking tape rested near my elbow, and my phone buzzed every few minutes with urgent pings from various group chats—students confirming their interest, Rafi sending updated graphics, Renzo asking about final printing costs.

The room was quiet except for the faint, steady hum of the electric fan and the soft, rhythmic tapping of my fingers against the keyboard. I was halfway through organizing the sprawling Grade 12 screening schedule when my phone lit up again.

Another notification.

I glanced at it without thinking, fully expecting another SSLG reminder or group chat ping.

But it wasn’t that.

It was from i********:.

@geighbryel started following you.

I stared at the screen for a second longer than was sensible, the air around me suddenly turning thick and still. My fingers froze above the keyboard, suspended in disbelief.

My chest tightened—just a little, a small, involuntary tremor.

Of all the predictable distractions I had prepared for tonight, he was absolutely not one of them.

I hadn't seen that specific username in so long. Seeing it again, glowing on my phone screen in soft white letters, felt strange. Too familiar. Too sudden. It was a digital breach of the sanctuary I had built.

I didn’t open the app right away. I just placed the phone face down beside me and sat there, blinking at my laptop, maintaining the lie that the nervous flutter in my stomach meant nothing at all.

But deep down, in the place where true admissions lived, I already knew.

This campaign season was about to get exponentially more complicated than I had planned.

I stared at the screen for a moment longer, my thumb hovering tentatively over the notification. My heart beat a little faster—not in panic, but in something quieter, heavier. Like the persistent, low ache of a song you used to cherish that suddenly plays again after a long, painful silence.

Without hesitation, driven by an instinct I couldn't rationalize, I clicked the follow back button.

There was no dramatic pause, no second-guessing, no agonizing internal debate. Just one quiet, determined tap, and the reciprocal connection was established.

Maybe it was the crushing exhaustion talking. Or maybe it was the insidious way his name looked so utterly out of place, yet so devastatingly familiar, on my screen. Like a ghost I thought I’d already successfully buried was now standing at my digital door, knocking gently for an invitation inside.

I didn’t open his profile. I didn’t scroll through old photos or check if he had posted anything new. I just placed my phone down, face-up this time, and forced myself back to the laptop.

But focus was a lost cause now.

My eyes scanned the dense spreadsheet on the screen, but the words started to blur. The mechanical tasks—room assignments, candidate slots, and screening times—all waited, but my frantic thoughts kept circling back to that one quiet, persistent notification.

And just like that, he was no longer merely a memory I kept locked away in journal pages or erased text drafts.

He was here again. Not just in my fiery dreams or the brief, awkward library aisle encounters or the folded letters that had mercifully stopped arriving.

He was here. Online. Visible. A conscious, active presence.

And somehow, that small, silent digital connection was louder than anything else in the entire room.