I spent my childhood in a home with a sea for a backyard. Our house was in an elevated portion of an area then recently reclaimed from Sorsogon Bay. In rainy weather, with leaden skies and gusty winds, the briny water would creep inch by inch over the sloping, marshy patch of land that separated us from the sea.

Across this watery expanse was Mt. Bulusan. Every morning I woke up to the same vision outside my window: the placid bay, gleaming like a mirror, reflecting on its surface the green sliver of Pinakulan island and the blue hulk of Mt. Bulusan. It wasn’t the most shapely of volcanoes, with a lopsided grin for a crater, but it towered above everything else in my small town. What lay behind it, to a boy lost in thought quite early, was nothing less than the edge of the world. The mountain held it all together–the bay, the sky, our house lapped by water. The giant sentinel in one’s sleep.