I leave the bridge and walk for a while along the stoned path beside Umali Hall. I pick up a piece of kapok and sit down on one of the hall’s foundations.
This kapok is unlike the cotton I use at home. Silky, it feels like the comforters I covered myself with as I finished my thesis in Baguio. The seed around which it is wrapped feels like a dried corn seed. It even looks like it—a dark brown corn seed.
The kapok takes on the smell of whatever it lands into. As I pick it up, it smells like grass. Now that I hold it in my hand, it smells like the peanuts I ate at home.
I remember Doji’s fur as I roll the kapok between my thumb, index, and middle fingers. It looks like Doji’s fur. It is as if someone cut the hair off one big Doji from heaven, and they all fell from the sky.
I look at all of Doji’s fur around me. Some of them were already melted by previous rains. Some orange bugs seem attracted to the small clover-shaped plants that grow between stones where the kapok have fallen.