Part 4: The Teddy Bear Diary

I was in a dim cell. No one knew my name, no one knew who I was—except the monsters who saw me as prey in the dark night. Their eyes glowed red, piercing through the shadows like hunters spotting prey.

Then one officer approached me.

"Hija, how old are you?" he asked.

That question was a nightmare for me. I knew the moment I answered, the monsters would grab me.

a book, with a teddy bear imprinted on its cover. My eyes locked on it. I had never seen anything like it in my entire life.

"If you don't want to talk," he said softly, "just write... draw... put anything in that book."

He placed a pencil in my hand. "It belonged to my little girl. She died last summer."

That gave me some comfort, knowing that not everyone in that place was a monster.

He left the book and a bottle of water inside my cell.

I wasn't sure what to do with it. All I knew was that it felt good to hold, and it was new to me, so I was excited to grab it—but I had to wait.

When nobody was looking, I grabbed the bottle of water and drank it to the bottom. Then I slowly reached for the book and pencil.

The smell was like fresh wood. The pages, smooth and shiny under my fingers.

It was my first time holding a pencil, but I knew what to do with it. I used to draw before—using mud on carabao skin.

The first thing I did was doodle on the first page—the monsters in my head.

Throughout the night, I filled almost half the book with doodles. Back then, I used to draw mountains, cities, butterflies. People used to say I had talent. The truth was, everything I saw stayed in my mind like a picture, every detail sharp, and I could turn it into a drawing perfectly. I loved colors, I loved drawing, I loved nature.

But now, all I could see were black shapes and monsters.

After filling pages with monster doodles, I began to imprint my stories. On one page, I drew the sugarcane fields and our house, so detailed it almost looked like a photograph.

Beside it, I sketched the carabaos we once owned. I couldn't believe how naturally it came to me now—so different from the days when I tried to shape pictures out of mud. This time, they felt real.

I got lost in it, filling page after page with drawings—even of the darker memories. Faces appeared, cars, shadowed roads, crowded houses and compounds, piles of sacks, messy rooms. All of it poured out, like a motion picture playing on paper.

It was so quiet now, except for the roosters crowing every morning. Then, while everyone was sleeping, another officer came to me. I could feel his bad intentions. All I saw was his dark desires.

I was different now. My senses had changed. My vision was blurry, but I could see people's souls, their auras. I didn't understand it. Everything felt different.

He reached for the book to set it aside, but when he saw my drawings, he froze. He flipped through the pages.

At the last page, he stopped like he'd seen a ghost. He suddenly ran outside and never came back.

It was the Mercedes-Benz he saw—the one I had drawn, with the plate number FEL-001, as I clearly remembered.

Morning came, and everyone moved in a rush, as if a storm was about to break.

I heard it—the smooth roll of wheels, the gentle stop of an engine. The sound was familiar.

A tall, handsome man in elegant clothes stepped through the doorway.

The cell door opened, and he entered. The perfume, the presence—I recognized him at once.

It was Don Rafael.