_This story is part of our ongoing series **From the Ground Up**, a collaboration between Narratively and ScottsMiracle-Gro exploring the lives, memories, and connections rooted in the yards, fields, and green spaces we call home._ We didn’t mean for it to become anything serious. At first, it was just grass. A wide, open patch of green that separated the building for the senior high school kids and the one for us first-year college students.
It hosted a big sundial in the middle, framed by trees that filtered the afternoon light into something cinematic enough to make us feel like main characters, because we believed we were. We went there because it was convenient, because it was open, because people passed through. We went there because you could see everything from that spot.
The patch of grass where the author would people-watch between college classes. You never look immediately. Looking too fast meant you cared too much and I didn’t want to look desperate.
Mukhang _single_(_Looks available_).” I finally glanced up, slow and casual, like I wasn’t already constructing a fictional personality for a stranger I would never speak to. Ian sighed beside us, dramatic, exhausted yet weirdly happy in a way only someone forced to witness our nonsense daily could be. She was always unbothered.
We called it “pogi-hunting” — half-joking, half-serious, like naming this pastime after the “handsome” boys we were ogling made it less embarrassing. We would sit there between classes or during breaks, pretending to rest while scanning the horizon for new crushes — boys we would talk about for 10 minutes and then forget by sunset. It was unserious and loud and full of laughter that didn’t care who heard it.
A lot of people heard it — We came there to look outward. None of us admitted it then, but we also came because it felt better than going home. The grass was always warm in the afternoon, heat rising through our uniforms, grounding us.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
