June, my first year at De La Salle University, and the afternoon light was the kind that flattened everything—soft, even, nothing casting a shadow.
I had expected the “centennial tree” to be enormous. It wasn’t. The buildings around it were far taller, and yet its roots pushed up out of the ground in long, old ridges, and its canopy spread wide and full in a way that made the rest of the campus look like it had just arrived. Somewhere nearby, a sprinkler ran. The air smelled like wet concrete and cut grass.
I didn’t know then that I would spend eight years learning the feeling of that place—the echo of my own footsteps in the white corridors of St. La Salle Hall, the wind in CADS (Cory Aquino Democratic Space) that pressed against you stronger than any wind should in a covered space.
Slow change is often difficult to locate. It is the kind you notice when you have grown taller than your mother—not on the day it happens, but some ordinary afternoon, standing beside her, when you realize you have been looking down for a while now.
The Vaugirard scholarship covered my tuition and gave me a stipend large enough to rent a room near campus—enough that I never needed “baon,” never had to take on part-time work. My family could not have arranged this for me. We could not have paid my way in.
Without it, I would not have been admitted past the gate. I remember reading the award letter at the kitchen table. I read it five times before I told anyone.
This scholarship allowed me to stay for eight years: two years in senior high school, six in college. Eight years is long enough for its air to become the air you breathe without thinking. Long enough that I no longer remember what I was afraid of on that first afternoon beneath the tree.
Most people who finish a degree here will tell you they came out as a new person. Most of them mean it. But most of them found that change inside a world they had already belonged to—homes where the places, the brands, the overseas trips had always been on the menu of things you could talk about.
They left as sharper versions of who they were. I came in from a different table.
When I go home to my family, I am one kind of person, with one kind of vocabulary. When I sit with my classmates, that person and vocabulary are replaced.
It happens without my noticing. I was home one afternoon, laptop open on the living room table, in the middle of a Zoom group meeting—English, Taglish, the half-joking way we talk to each other about deadlines and slides.
My mother came into the room and asked me a question. My answer was ordinary. But the way I said it was not the way I had been speaking on Zoom all afternoon. Softer. Shorter. Tagalog. In the voice of a son.
Two personalities in two different worlds, inside one body.
There is also a calculation that I have never quite learned to stop running. When my classmates invite me out—a new restaurant in Taft, a new café, a “barkada” lunch somewhere—I say yes or no only after running through the math in my head.
What is left in my stipend that week. What I still owe in rent. What I have already spent.
My stipend is enough that I can usually afford to go, but not without doing the silent mental calculation first. I say yes too, often enough, and the math is invisible from the outside. But it is there, and it has been there for eight years, and I have never once walked into a meal without it.
That is what the scholarship gave me that the brochure did not list. It not only placed me inside the school, it also placed me inside on terms that most around me did not share.
I was in the room, but I was not of the room.
And I was not, anymore, quite of the room that I had come from, either.
I know what people say about us Lasallians. That we are insulated. That the campus is a world unto itself.
In some way, they are not wrong. Outside the gates, Taft is chaos—engines roaring, car horns, the constant overhead thunder of the LRT. Step inside, and the noise falls away almost at once. But I have come to understand that it was not only the city being kept out.
Every morning I walked through those gates, something else stayed behind, too—that other version of me who did not yet know he was allowed to take up space.
I was the one who left him at the gate. To learn to take up space, I had to leave behind the self who never thought he could.
I strolled through the white corridors of St. La Salle Hall just the other day—after my last exam, my footsteps echoing the way they always did. In CADS, the wind pressed against me the same way it had when I was 16. And then the centennial tree, where it always was—the same spread of branches, the same light coming through, the same roots pushing up through the ground.
I stopped beneath it. I stood there for a breath. Then I walked on.
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Brent James Pasague, 24, took up political science and accountancy at De La Salle University on a full scholarship.