He sits on a crumbling stoop along Avenida Rizal, just down from a lotto booth and a street vendor frying fish balls in oil gone dark with the week. Mang Ernesto, maybe seventy, maybe more—he doesn’t keep count. Barefoot. Callused heels pressed to the warm concrete. Toenails thick and yellowed, cracked like the city’s sidewalks. His shirt hangs off one shoulder, more hole than cloth. His ribs make quiet shadows.
He doesn’t beg. He just is.
His world is a rusted tin cup beside him, a rolled-up tabloid he reads slowly, even when it’s two days old, and the stoop—a sun-baked slab of concrete that’s been his chair, his bed, his balcony, his throne—for nearly ten years. He watches everything. Jeepneys coughing by. Young couples walking too fast. Children with schoolbags too heavy for their shoulders and dreams too big for their zip codes. He nods at the taho man every morning. Says “Hoy” to the cigarette vendor. Waves at no one in particular. Some days, he talks—to himself, or to the pigeons, or to the Virgin Mary painted on the cracked wall nearby.
“Buhay pa ako, ha?” he mutters. I’m still alive, see?
Once, he was a porter at the pier. Strong, fast, proud. Once, he had a wife who braided her hair tight and sold lumpia outside Paco station. Once, he had a boy. Ran off. Went abroad. Maybe dead. Maybe rich. Maybe neither. Now he just waits for the sun to hit the right angle. For someone to stop and sit beside him, or maybe offer coffee in a paper cup. But no one does.
By sundown, he stretches his legs with a groan that echoes deeper than it should. Leans back. Looks at the sky through tangled wires. And sighs like the city has forgotten to exhale.
The lights flicker on.
Vendors pack up.
A child skips past, never seeing him.
But still he sits—barefoot, still,
an old man on a stoop,
carved into Manila like a crack in the pavement.