Written by Joann Kimberly Zerna
The walk begins where the campus loosens its grip on land. Past the last buildings, the path bends toward the shore, and the salt in the air reaches me before the sea does. I slow my steps as the boulevard opens, letting the quiet rhythm of waves and wind settle around me.
Beyond the buildings, the sea waits—not dramatically, not insistently—with the calm of something that has learned to endure being overlooked. Morning light spreads across the water, breaking into small, shifting glints with each movement of the tide. A lone fisherman casts his net along the Rizal Boulevard, his movements slow, precise, honed by years of repetition rather than urgency. Nearby, a child bends over a tide pool, marveling at a trembling crab. No one rushes them along. In this city, gentleness still has room to breathe.
Silliman University has always stood beside the water. Not near it nor facing away from it, but beside it, in quiet companionship. The sea is written into the rhythm of the place—morning stirred by waves rolling onto the shore, quiet glances drawn toward the horizon, and the blue hush that settles over the campus at dusk. Its presence hums beneath conversations, beneath footsteps crossing the boulevard, beneath the laughter of those who still seek small wonders along the water’s edge.
Here, the tide no longer carries the same weight. Its retreat is slower now, hesitant. Where once marine life flickered at the edges of vision—silver flashes of sardines, darting crabs, the gentle arch of starfish clinging to rocks—there is space. Too much space. The sand remembers what the water forgot to bring back. Tiny shells lie scattered like memory shards, each one a fragment of abundance now absent.
Progress has left its signature here. Wider paths. Firmer ground. Concrete that promises permanence. The sea responds not with anger, but with absence. Coral dulls quietly beneath the surface, fish move elsewhere, and shells lie scattered where they once thrived. What disappears does not announce itself, it simply stops returning.
At certain hours, the boulevard fills with people who no longer wade into the water. They watch, pause, and scroll on their phones. Few remember how the ocean once fed them, taught them, and mirrored them. The sea has become something to look at, not something to enter. It reflects faces without holding them. It offers beauty, but no longer abundance.
Once, livelihoods rose and fell with the tide. Hands read the water like a map, nets traced patterns older than memory, and buckets of shells weighed heavy with daily labor. Fathers measured the surf, waiting for the right moment to cast a line. Now, those rhythms falter. The younger generation is told to look elsewhere, to work where the water does not reach. In chasing progress, inheritance fades, and tradition becomes memory.
The sea absorbs this without protest. It absorbs oil when it comes, debris, light, sound. It absorbs the weight of decisions made elsewhere. Afterward, it grows quiet in a way that feels unnatural—like breath that has been held too long. Silence settles where movement once lived. A gull calls out, circling over the boulevard, its cry unanswered by the absence of other wings.
At dusk, the water darkens and the horizon blurs into a thin ribbon where sky meets sea. Campus lights glow behind it, orange against blue. Somewhere beneath the surface, marine life retreats—finding narrower spaces, thinner chances. Survival becomes careful, almost invisible. A fisherman pulls in his net and hums softly to himself, as if reminding the sea it is not alone.
Still, the sea stays. It stays for those who walk the boulevard at night, unaware they are being shaped by the edges of water. It stays for students who carry the memory of this shoreline long after leaving, even if they never learned its losses by name. It stays because staying is what it has always done, even when altered, even when reduced. The song says it clearly: Silliman beside the sea. But belonging asks for more than words. It asks whether we are willing to move at the pace of what sustains us. Whether progress can learn to pause, whether arrival matters more than preservation.
The shoreline keeps its record quietly—of what was taken, of what remains, and of what might still be carried forward. To walk beside the water is to remember what we owe the shore: not only its beauty, but its patience, abundance, and steadiness that asks nothing of us but our care.
The sea does not ask to be improved. It only asks to be remembered, to be allowed to live.