I write under the pen name Procopio Kulaspiro.
I took the name Procopio from the Bonifacio brother who was executed in the shadows of the mountains, a revolutionary whose name is often left off the monuments and out of the speeches. He is the forgotten one, the brother who lived and died in the periphery of a greater storm. In this city, I feel like a footnote in someone else’s history—an unemployed man in his thirties, a quiet casualty of a world that only celebrates the loud and the successful.
And then there is Kulaspiro. In our tongue, a Kulaspiro is a nobody. It’s a person who is unknown, someone acting foolishly, or the pasaway—the stubborn, unruly one who refuses to follow the script. To the recruiters on LinkedIn and the strangers in the MRT, I am a fool for trying to find meaning in the haze. I am the pasaway who won't just "get over it" or "fix" himself according to the timeline society demands. I am a ghost acting out a life I’m not sure I still own.
I live in the heart of Metro Manila, navigating a mind that feels like the EDSA traffic at 6:00 PM—congested, loud, and moving nowhere. I am drowning in a depression that makes the humidity feel like lead, and I have failed at this blog more times than I have succeeded.
But there is a strange power in being a Kulaspiro. There is a stubbornness in being the "unknown" one who refuses to finally disappear. If acting foolishly means I still have the heart to hit "publish" on a rainy Tuesday, then I will be the biggest fool in the Metro. If being pasaway means I am still breathing when the darkness tells me to stop, then I will be the most unruly soul in the city.
This space isn't a success story. It’s just the diary of a footnote who refuses to be erased. I am still here, swaying in the heat, being stubbornly, foolishly alive.
And maybe, in this hazy city, that is the greatest revolution of all.