Patron Saints Of Nothing Jun Quotes

Kuya Jun had a way of making people pay attention, of making them realize that others existed outside of themselves and getting them to care.

We all have this same intense ability to love running through us. It wasn't only Jun. But for some reason, so many of us don't use it like he did. We keep it hidden. We bury it until it becomes an underground river. Until we barely remember it's there. Until it's too far down to tap. But maybe it's time to dig it up. To let the sun hit the water. To let it flood.

So we’re just going to act like this didn’t happen? Like Jun didn’t even exist?” After a beat, she turns around to face me and crosses her arms. “If that’s what’s best for his family, then yes.

I was so close to feeling like I had Jun's story nailed down. But no. That's not how stories work, is it? They are shifting things that re-form with each new telling, transform with each new teller. Less a solid, and more a liquid taking the shape of its container.

It’s the photos that hit me the hardest, though. A woman cradling her husband’s limp body. A crowd looking on, emotionless, as police shine a flashlight on a woman’s bloodied corpse. A couple, half on the ground and half tangled in their moped, their blank faces turned toward the camera and sprays of blood on the pavement behind their heads. Sisters gathered around their baby brother’s body lying in its small casket. A body with its head covered in a dirty cloth left in a pile of garbage on the side of the street. Grayish-green corpses stacked like firewood in an improvised morgue. There’s even a short video of grainy security cam footage in which a masked motorcyclist pulls up next to a man in an alleyway, shoots him point-blank in the side of the head, then drives away. In high definition, I see the victims’ wounds, their oddly twisted limbs, their blood and brain matter sprayed across familiar-looking streets. In every dead body, I see Jun. I want to look away. But I don’t. I need to know. I need to see it. These photographers didn’t want to water it down. They wanted the audience to confront the reality, to feel the pain that’s been numbed by a headline culture.

In losing the story that we had told ourselves about Jun, we've lost him all over again, in a new way.

After Jun ran away from home, he started living on the streets. At some point he started using.” I stare hard at my untouched cup of tea. A lump forms in my throat. “Overdose?” Mom shakes her head. I look up. “Then what?” “He . . .” She trails off and looks around again as if to make sure Dad isn’t within earshot. Then her eyes land on mine and soften. “He was shot.” She pauses. “By the police.” “The police?” She nods. “Why would the police shoot him for using drugs?” She takes another deep breath. “Duterte.

What happened with Jun,” I start, “made me realize how little I know about Dad’s side of the family, about that side of myself. I mean, we see your relatives in Ohio almost every summer, Mom, but I haven’t seen Dad’s family or been to the Philippines in almost a decade. I don’t speak Tagalog. I can’t even name more than a handful of cities in the country. But all of that’s part of me, isn’t it? Or, I mean, it should be. It’s like I only know half of myself.

Jun really was the only person I’ve ever talked to about these kinds of feelings. We used to share all kinds of things back when we used to write each other letters. Actual letters—not emails or texts or DMs. Now that I think about it, Jun should also be graduating this year—assuming he went back to school. I wish I had a way to find out what he’s up to. But I don’t. I messed that up a long time ago.

He’s gone,” Dad repeats after some time. “That’s it.” And then a nervous laugh escapes his lips. I try to process the information. Jun is dead—his life has ended. And here I am, sitting in my living room on the other side of the world, a can of Coke on the coffee table, playing a video game on an enormous, wall-mounted flat-screen TV, college on the docket.

Why is this hitting me so hard? Yeah, Jun and I wrote each other. But then we didn’t. I don’t know a single thing about his life in the last few years. He never reached out to me, and I never bothered trying to find him. I only knew that he ran away because my dad casually dropped that fact over dinner, like, a month or so after it happened. All of us—including me—were just like, “Oh, that’s so sad,” and then went on with dinner, went on with our lives.

It strikes me now that I’ve never truly confronted that question before, that I never had to. But I’m left to wonder, did my parents’ silence—and mine—allow Jun’s death in some way? Was there anything we could have done from the US?

Jun is gone. And apparently to most people he was nothing more than a drug addict. A rat transmitting a plague that needed to be eradicated. It all still feels so absurd, so unreal.

Palimos?” I hear her say through the glass. “Palimos?” “Do not worry, Jay,” Tita Ami says, “she cannot see you. The windows are too dark.” I think of Jun, of all his letters I left unanswered. All his words that mourned how people ignored those in need.

That seems like a lot of work,” I say. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to move into a new house?” She stops short and glares at me. “This is where we have always lived. This is our home. We try to improve it, not abandon it.” The last time my family visited, she and Tito Maning kept making passive-aggressive comments like this about Dad in front of everyone. Though Tita Chato would defend him, he never called them out on it. He’d just look down like a dog that’s been reminded of its place in the pack as the third-born. As a little kid, I didn’t know what was going on between them and nobody bothered to tell me. It was only later, from Jun’s letters, that I came to understand how they resented Dad for leaving.

There was a time when I thought getting older meant you'd understand more about the world. But it turns out the exact opposite is true. I don't know anything about anything, let alone why Jun had to lead the life he lived, why he had to die the way he died.

I don't say anything. I was so close to feeling like I had Jun's story nailed down. But no. That's not how stories work, is it? They are shifting things that re-form with each new telling, transform with each new teller. Less a solid, and more a liquid taking the shape of its container." -Jay

And if we do not live according to what we feel is right in our hearts, then what is the point of any of this?" -Jun