It was still dark when Rowena Tiamson left the house, the sky a blanket of charcoal above Dagupan. The air was quiet, the kind of silence that feels too still, as if the world itself was bracing for something terrible. She slipped out gently, not wanting to wake her mother, who was curled beside her on their worn sleeping mat. Before she left, she did what she always did—kissed her mother lightly on the forehead and whispered, “Uuwi ako agad, Ma.”
She meant it. She always meant it.
Rowena was twenty-two, with soft eyes, a sharp mind, and a voice that moved people. She sang in church. She sang in cafés. She sang anywhere that would hand her a microphone and a few coins. Her classmates called her the girl with music in her soul. But behind the melody was a quiet burden—poverty, struggle, the weight of being the youngest of six in a home held together more by love than by walls.
She studied Mass Communication by day and worked by night. Her dream wasn’t fame, or riches. It was a house. A simple one. With real floors. A bed for her mother. A roof that didn’t leak during the monsoon rains. “Kapag naka-graduate ako, Ma,” she once told her, “bibili tayo ng bahay. Promise ko ’yan.”
But that promise would never be fulfilled.
Hours later, before dawn, Rowena’s body was found discarded on a dirt roadside in Barangay Parian, Manaoag. She was face down, her wrists bound with packing tape. Her head was wrapped tight—so tight that she likely choked before the bullets came. A scrap of cardboard was laid over her back, scrawled in crude, angry strokes: “PUSHER.”
She had no chance to explain. No chance to say who she was. That she had a tattoo of a music note on her wrist because she loved singing. That her entire life revolved around God, family, and a future she was trying to build note by note, peso by peso. That she had no vices. That she still slept beside her mother every night. That she’d never even tried alcohol.
They didn’t ask. They didn’t care.
She was already guilty.
Her mother, Teresita, saw it first on the news. The body of a young woman, unnamed. A music note tattoo. The moment the image flickered onto the screen, the air was sucked out of the room. Teresita screamed so hard the neighbors came running. She didn’t need to see the face. She knew her daughter’s hands. She knew the shape of her shoulders. She knew—because a mother knows.
They buried Rowena in the only white dress she had—the one she wore during a school performance. Her choir mates sang at her wake, though their voices broke between sobs. And in the corner of the room, her mother sat still, her eyes hollow, her hand gently stroking Rowena’s hair.
At night, the house is quieter now. Not the kind of peaceful quiet—but the kind that aches. The kind that echoes.
Teresita no longer hears her daughter humming while doing chores. No more lullabies before bed. No more rehearsals in the kitchen. But sometimes—on the nights when sleep won’t come, and the roof creaks under the weight of memory—she swears she hears it.
That voice.
Faint. Tender. Drifting from somewhere she cannot reach. Singing a song she once heard Rowena practice for Sunday Mass.
“Lead me, Lord… lead me by the hand…”
She cries, not because it hurts—though it always hurts—but because it is beautiful. Because it is still hers. Because it survived.
Rowena’s voice lives on.
Not in recordings. Not on stages. But in the silence after grief. In the ache of a promise that tried so hard to be kept.
And though she never built her mother a house, she left behind a song—unfinished, but unforgettable. A melody that refuses to die.
And somewhere, out there in the dark, that voice still sings.
Juan Luna Blog
It was still dark when Rowena Tiamson left the house, the sky a blanket of charcoal above Dagupan. The air was quiet, the kind of silence that feels too still, as if the world itself was bracing for…
