I REMEMBER when I was child, I was told that seeing the sunset in Manila Bay was one of the few hundred things I should do before I die. It was a romantic, nostalgic tale, in a sense, to watch the crisp perfect shape of our sun sinking beneath the capricious waves of the sea. A vibrant mixture of orange and red hues colors the skies amid the fading silhouette of the Mariveles mountain range and the peculiar cross of Mount Samat as dusk finishes its passing. It is a moment that many of us share — as people who have lived and are living in this once great city that we have always called home.
The Manila Bay is beautiful as it was and is. Yet it is now enshrouded by a gray haze from an overpopulated city and streets, leaving this once remarkable expanse as a passing memory for us to long for. Its once clean waters are now polluted by streams of trash and its air, as rancid as a decomposing organism. For some, Manila Bay was a source of life and love, where our parents and grandparents would go for dates, where coastal communities would get their fish, and where we could have escaped from the noise and conundrums of life, away from the city we spent all our days in. For others, it is a dying body of water, left only for the trash to be swept away by its currents and tides. But for all, it will always be the heart of our city. It is a place we should be proud of and a place we should have fixed long ago.
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