Once, jacky_ink didn't even like books. Then the world shuttered. Quarantined in her grandparents' house-bored, barefoot on cool tile floors, counting the days like beads-she found a volume she'd bought and never opened. She cracked the spine out of desperation, and something in her life broke open too. Pages became doorways. Chapters, secret stairwells. Reading turned from pastime to lifeline, the one place she could keep moving when the streets outside stood still.

Fast forward to 2025: the quiet aftershocks of those years have settled into a different kind of noise-the soft, insistent whisper of stories asking to be written. To steady her mind, she writes them down. She is a first-year student at the University of the Cordilleras, taking BSHM-HRA (Hospitality Management, Hotel & Restaurant Administration), and a first-time author learning to translate heartbeats into sentences.

She hopes, simply and fiercely, that one day her stories will be the book someone else reaches for on a boring afternoon-the book that opens, and opens a life.