Before the Sun: A Filipino Morning You Might Remember
You don’t remember waking up. You remember being woken by a sound from the kitchen, or a hand on your shoulder, or the particular grey of a room that isn’t bright yet. Before the alarm on anyone’s phone, there was this: a house that stirred before the sun, and a morning that began in the dark so that your day could begin in the light.
If you grew up in a Filipino home, some version of this morning belongs to you. Come walk back through it.
Artwork © Lorelie Defensor 2026
The Room You Woke Up In
The light comes in first through the capiz shells, through the wooden grille of the sliding window, laying a grid of soft squares across the sheets. You lie in it for one more minute, memorizing the ceiling. On the wall, a calendar you never actually consult. In the corner, a plastic drawer-stack — the kind every household had — and a wooden aparador that has held three generations’ clothes.
It is a small room. Maybe you shared it. Maybe your kuya’s side of the bed was already cold because he had left even earlier, or your ate’s pillow still held the shape of her head. There was nothing remarkable about this room, and that is exactly why you can still see it so clearly. It was yours. It was home. Modest, a little cramped, and the quiet center of everything you were about to work for.
Then the smell reaches you, and you know your mother is already awake.
Artwork © Lorelie Defensor 2026
The Kitchen at 4:30 in the Morning
She is at the stove before the sky has decided to be blue. Garlic rice in the palayok, hotdogs curling in the pan, the little blue flame the only warm thing in a cool, dark house. On the fridge, held by a magnet, someone’s test paper marked 100 — proof, taped up like a trophy, of exactly why she is standing here at this hour.
She packs your baon without being asked. She does it the way she does it every day, so ordinary you almost never noticed it — the rice pressed into the container, the hotdogs arranged, the lid clicked shut. Nobody in that kitchen said the word love. They didn’t have to. Love was the smell of garlic at 4:30 a.m. Love was being sent into the world already fed, by someone who woke before you did so you wouldn’t have to face the day empty.
You take the container, still warm. You don’t say thank you, not really — you are young, and running late, and you don’t yet know that one day you would give anything to smell that kitchen again. You just go.
Artwork © Lorelie Defensor 2026
The First Jeepney, Before the Light
Outside, the street is still half-asleep. The sky is that deep blue that isn’t night and isn’t morning — the blue that only people who leave early ever really see. You raise a hand. The jeepney’s headlights swing toward you, cutting bright cones through the dark, and the whole quiet street tilts into gold for a second.
You climb in. You are one of a handful of passengers at this hour — a nurse coming off a shift, a vendor, a student like you with a bag on your lap and a whole day of proving yourself ahead. The engine hums. The shuttered stores slide past. And somewhere between your gate and wherever you are going, you get a few minutes that belong to no one but you: the in-between time, half-dreaming, the baon warm against your side, the morning your mother started for you now carried outward in your own two hands.
That is the thing about those mornings. They looked like nothing. They were everything.
Book cover and background illustration © Lorelie Defensor 2026
Where these Mornings Lead
This is the world of A Series of Seemingly Unrelated Love Stories, the debut novel by author and illustrator Lorelie Defensor, forthcoming from Haribon (HRBN) Publishing. Its narrator, Claire, comes from a morning exactly like this one — a family that wakes before the sun, a mother who packs baon before dawn, an early jeepney to a future the whole household is quietly working for.
The novel understands what these small, unremarkable mornings actually are: the ground floor of a life. Long before Claire chases physics, and love, and everything that comes after, someone is already awake, packing her baon. The grand things — the ambitions, the heartbreaks, the loves that seem unrelated until they aren’t — all of them stand on top of ordinary mornings like the one you just walked back through.
The illustrations in this post are Lorelie’s own — she writes the book and draws its world with the same pair of hands. There is much more of that world still to come. Follow the book’s official Facebook page for sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes art, and meet the author on our authors page. The release date is still a secret — but the world it comes from, you already know by heart.
So tell us: what did your baon mornings look like? Whose hands packed them?