Rewriting a Story Already Ended

PART 3 — PAHINA (BARGAINING)

From the Silakbo Series — 5 Stages of Grief

Play “Pahina” by Cup of Joe. Let every lyric feel like a scribble in the margins of a love story you wish you could rewrite.

If anger was glass that cut me open, bargaining was the ink that tried to write over the wounds. Pahina. Every day felt like I was flipping through a book I didn’t want to end, scanning for the one chapter where I could have changed the ending.

In this stage, my mind became a library of alternate versions of us. I lingered on the margins, scribbling questions that had no answers.

What if I had held her tighter? What if I had fought harder? What if I had been braver, softer, kinder?

The brain is cruel — it replays the same chapter endlessly, convincing you that a single edit could’ve saved the whole story.

Pero sa totoo lang, bargaining is like underlining a sentence that’s already been printed. The ink smears, but the words never change.

Margins of Hope

There were nights when I would scroll through old photos, not to remember, but to bargain silently with the past. Kung hindi ko i-delete, baka may chance pa. Kung iwan ko yung pictures, baka magbalik siya. The denial bled into bargaining — the refusal to accept finality transformed into little negotiations with the universe.

And in church, the bargaining deepened. The pews became witness to my whispered trades: Lord, ibalik Mo lang siya. Promise I’ll be better. Promise I’ll never let her feel alone again. The prayers weren’t prayers — they were contracts drafted on fragile faith. Every candle I lit flickered like a clause waiting for approval.

The Act of Rewriting

Bargaining is rewriting your story even when the ink has dried. I would imagine alternate scenes: us choosing each other in spite of distance, me showing up with enough words and actions to make her stay. I wrote chapters in my head where we still went to church together, where her voice still filled my mornings with gentle greetings, where I still belonged in the safety of her presence.

But every imagined rewrite was also a reminder — it was fiction. A draft I could never publish.

There was one afternoon, vacant hour sa academy. I opened my iPad, half-hoping to see her name light up my screen. Walang dumating. Instead, I pulled up an old thread of our conversations and scrolled endlessly, as if reading a book I had memorized by heart. I found myself typing words in the empty chatbox, then erasing them before sending. Bargaining not with her, but with myself: If I can just frame the right sentence, maybe she’ll come back. Yet no words left my screen. Only silence. Only blank space.

“Bargaining is writing on the margins of a finished book — hoping that by adding lines, the story might somehow change.”

In every page I turned, I searched for an edit that could undo the ending. But the pages were already bound, the ink already set. And still, I lingered, whispering what ifs into the spine of a story that had long closed.