These kids are playing a game in the grass on a nice sunny day. Maybe it’s that game played with rubber bands, hidden in a pile of sand. The object is to pick up as many rubber bands as possible with one push of a stick into the sand. When the sand is empty, the kid who has the most bands wins.
They’re in Tacloban City, in the wake of the typhoon. If they looked, they could see the ruins of the town across the water, but all that’s real for them at the moment is their game. And maybe that’s all they will remember later.
They aren’t old enough to make a time-line of their lives. Time, for them, is a series of isolated events — a smile or a frown on a face, a piece of paper blown by the wind, a search for a lost toy, or a game with rubber bands.
Children have very little past or future. Whatever they suffer or enjoy passes away from them too quickly to become a permanent part of memory. Happy times and terrible events leave scars only in the future shape of their feelings.
What we call the past is mostly an invented story, a tale we are told by others or tell to ourselves. It’s a narrative we use to make a picture of who we are, who we were. Very little of that narrative comes from personal memory- only some disconnected pictures stay in bright reality, like jewels on a personal ID bracelet. 
But down beneath the skin, sunk deep into the sea floor of our blood, what happened long ago leaves scars that shape the way we feel now, like submerged rocks that shape the waves that break above.
Behind these boys at play there is a broken city, stretching off into the distance. They aren’t paying attention to the city, only to the game in front of them in the grass. In future years, they will know what they were told about the typhoon and its destruction. They will understand the result for themselves and others.
As adults, they may not remember the typhoon itself except in disconnected images- this game with rubber bands might be, in their memory, just as bright.. But the hidden psychic scars of that event may bring them to fear the sound of wind and water, all their lives.
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