By Cynthia Shank
They scatter across the semester like quiet confessions no one planned to leave behind. Crushed against benches, left on tabletops, tucked in amphitheater corners. In front of Katipunan, one half-filled cup waits like an unfinished thought, abandoned before it could be drained all the way through.
At both Portals, sachets and cups gather in clusters, clinging to the steps the way strangers-turned-friends cling to each other. Here, stories curl into the air alongside deadlines and tambay laughter, rising only to vanish, leaving the ground littered with proof of how much we all needed a pause.
Down by the port, the seawall remembers them all. The hearts exhaled in salt air, grief disguised in small sips, and laughter turned fragile in the glow of streetlights. Most came here for relief, some for escape, and others because there was nowhere else to go. The tide takes the echoes of the conversation, but the cups stay, washed into cracks like tiny memorials to nights we won’t admit mattered.
But cups don’t just belong to places; they belong to moments. The unfinished group project at 2 a.m., the heartbreak hidden in a lukewarm drink, the nervous chatter before an oral exam. Each empty cup holds a fragment of the semester, a trace of what it cost to keep moving.
Each cup lasts minutes, but its ghost lingers longer. They are coping mechanisms disguised as waste, fragments of stress burned down to the last drop. They are rebellion small enough to crumple into a pocket, heartbreak small enough to throw away, exhaustion small enough to fit into a paper cup and swallow again tomorrow.
By the time the sweepers clear them out each morning, the day is already sowing new ones. Fresh reminders that student life is not only written in lecture notes and org reports but also in the wrappers of our coping, the stubs of our silence, the traces we leave behind when the weight grows heavy.
A semester in empty cups is not a story about caffeine, not even really about coffee. It is about survival. About the ways we carry pressure in small, combustible rituals. About what is left when the buzz fades, when the sugar is gone, when the cup runs dry.
They may look like nothing more than trash, scattered and forgotten, but they are records of what it took to endure.
A semester in empty cups: fragments of survival, scattered where we walked—proof that being here was never easy, but we were here.
