One Building, Many Ghosts

By: matchazeira

Graphics by: Cassius Klai C. Francisco

I have a confession—Mapúa Makati wasn’t my first choice.

Some days, regret hits me like static across a screen. The last class ends, the hallways grow quiet, and I feel the weight of my own decision pressing down on my chest. I wasn’t forced here. I chose Mapúa myself. I turned away from Saint Benilde. And yet… I can’t help asking: Why did I settle?

The single building towers above me, silent and indifferent, its fluorescent lights flickering like a glitch in a paused animation. I walk past classrooms where projects hum, and screens glow, but the life I imagined in Saint Benilde—bright, effortless, full of certainty—feels like it’s just out of reach. My footsteps echo in the empty hallways, loud and hollow, and I can almost hear the laughter, the energy, the confidence of the version of me I left behind.

I feel it in every project I start and abandon, every video I render only to delete, every sketch I tear apart. The “what if” pulses through me like a broken frame in a timeline, a shadow I can’t scrub from the storyboard of my life. I ask myself: Am I the artist I wanted to be, or just a version of myself that settled?

Somewhere along Taft Avenue, my ghost waits—the me that chose differently, wearing Saint Benilde’s green and white, moving through spaces I never touched. She’s laughing, creating, and thriving. And here I am, trapped in a single building, my reality compressed into one floor, one lab, one cafeteria—haunted by every possibility I didn’t take.

I wonder if others feel this, too. Maybe they do. Students haunted by the universities they dreamed of but never attended, carrying a silent ache in their creative hearts. Their ghosts sit beside them during long nights, reminding them of every choice they didn’t make.

The regret becomes almost unbearable. I feel existential in my own hallways, questioning not just my choice, but myself as well. Who am I if I’m not the person I wanted to be? If my first dream was Saint Benilde, does choosing Mapúa mean I made the wrong choice? The answers don’t come. Only screens glow, papers stack, projects linger, and the echo of my own footsteps answers nothing.

But slowly, the building begins to breathe with me. The hum of the AC becomes a rhythm, and the glow of computer screens a light to guide me, the sticky floors of the cafeteria a map of small victories. I began to see Mapúa Makati not as a compromise, but as a laboratory of becoming. I experiment. I fail. I learn. I create. I exist.

Saint Benilde remains my ghost, but no longer as a dagger of regret. She lingers as a reminder that choices carry weight, that every “no” we utter carves a path for a different “yes.” That the art I make here, in this one building, is mine—messy, imperfect, and mine.

Sometimes, when I leave the building and step into the noisy streets of Makati, I whisper to her: 

“You were my dream. I mourned you. I longed for you. But I chose differently. And now… I am learning to live.”

Saint Benilde will always haunt me. 

But Mapúa Makati—my single building, my endless hallways, my late-night struggles—is where I discovered that even regret can become creation, even lost dreams can teach me how to live.