Love is stored between the four corners of your room, and within the shed of the Talisay tree.

Affection is shared when you’ve had enough plus points with your section – or a sudden canceled quiz, and an exempted exam – when most of you flunked, badly.

You would never think love would show haphazardly, but suddenly –love has been promiscuous Yet tender with you for the past years you’ve been staying on this campus, and love came, love changed.

Critical it may be, but this love cares for every revision of your thesis – and even your well-being, you would think this love is over-reacting, that the cost of lived-experience to be told to the next is freedom– well, it happens.

But love prevails and you choose to attend your classes the next day.

Love is, the first heartbreak – your first flunked physics quiz, a calculus exam you pulled an all-nighter for, only to find out that everything you’ve worked hard for is nonexistent in the exam coverage.

Love is a shared-experience, a forever reminder that when the world turned its back on you, you have them – classmates, org mates, teachers that treated you like their first sons and daughters, or maybe even as an older brother or sister. (You would not think that you would laugh with them– you may want to leave sooner, but leaving means leaving them too, and it’s hard to stomach that.)

And maybe love is a free coffee from Sweet Life, or maybe not – maybe love is the little bickers and overnights in your classmate’s houses and maybe subdivision hopping just to finish your mass demo, or your capstone, or your musical that challenges you to be the next big thing.

Love is personified amidst the height of pressure of bearing the name of a Science High School, but love rejoices when it is found in the most unusual places posible.

Love rejoices, for love does not only sips between the fissure of your heart, love fights for your right to be who you are – to wear what you want, to claim your identity– and be a safe space for the next to come. For love is to be changed, and love is to care, to flourish.

So, when you leave – I hope you bear love in your sleeves, and let it sit there, and remember once that you’ve been in a school that rose in the heart of the city, a school excellence and with glad intent– to shape you, me, the young minds of society.