I will rest here awhile. His face! His face! Once radiant to his followers, glowing with prophecy and profanity, now plastered on international summons and headlines. That face! The face they worshipped, the face they swore was incorruptible, even as the bodies piled up and the numbers rose. Burned into the nation, burned into my role, burned into every question I avoid with a smile.

Convicted? No. They say convicted, I say “allegedly.” But what comfort does this narrative bring when the idol of a nation is suddenly reduced to a case number?

And last night, they spoke of him as if of a fallen deity. They recalled the glory days of threats and theatrics, and I, his companion, nodded dutifully. He raised me once, called me his confidant, called me his brother, called me his ally, while in my own palms there echoed the very statement which brought his demise.

It would have been better for that man that he had never believed himself untouchable. Who? Who but he, he whom they treated as god? Who? Who but I, I who now step lightly away as they transform his miracles into evidence?

“Do what you must,” he said to the country, to his critics, to the world—and so I did. I moved forward. Quietly. Strategically. He knew, perhaps, that the betrayal was inevitable. He knew, yet kept my plans a secret.

“Friend,” he said. Friend! He called me his friend. The man I betrayed called me his friend. How history must have laughed! Why did the earth not swallow me when I smiled beside him, knowing that the day would come when I must do so without him?

Friend! Ha! Ha! Friend! Ha! Ha! Ha! The world will know me as the friend, the friend who held his hand in public but washed mine clean in private. A pledge of alliance, a symbol of survival.

“Do you think, Mr. President, that you can hide from the devotees of your fallen god?” Not in the plazas for they still chant his name. Not online for their memes are eternal. Not in the heavens for they have placed him there themselves, canonized by comment section scriptures.

What hope for the companion? What hope for the friend? Not even in neutrality can I escape, for they will call me traitor, actor, opportunist, and all the names a Judas earns for refusing to fall with his deity.

There is no hope for him, they cry. And for me? No hope for innocence, no hope for clean hands, only the hope that history forgets the details. Unfortunately, in power, forgetting is a skill. And in politics, memory is optional.

There is no hope for the god they worshipped, and no loyalty left for the Judas they resent. No hope, no hope, no hope.

- Josias Je Rellora

(Layout by Phoemella Jane Balderrama/FEU Advocate)