Kwentong Kolehiyo

To My Cousin

When I was ten, my older cousin killed himself.

I loved my older cousin. He played with my little sister and me all the time. Whenever we fought (which was often) it was him who always convinced us to make up. He was a fan of OPM, and he was fond of singing his favorite songs. He watched cartoons with us, he played with us, he talked to us about things we couldn't tell our parents. The best thing about him was that, even though we were younger than him, he always talked to us like we were equals. I remember that we were planning on watching this cartoon movie together that was going to air on our favorite cartoon channel.

And then one morning, we found that he had hanged himself. He had taken his life in his little room, without even showing a sign, even though he lived in the same complex as us. It made me sad, but there was something off. Of course, I knew that I could never see him anymore. I knew that he would never play with us anymore, never talk to us anymore. But even then, even though I knew I should be sad, even though I felt sad, I still didn't the full weight of what he had done. I just didn't understand. It was different from when my Aunt had died earlier. Even the younger me knew that there was something wrong with my reaction.

Well, people started pointing out why he might have killed himself afterwards. Oh, it's so easy. Hindsight is 20/20, after all. A lot of my relatives even blamed my dad for abusing him, even though my dad was the only one who even cared about my cousin. You see, my cousin's mom worked overseas and his dad was a drug addict. My dad was (and still is, really) a man who insists on controlling people's lives and blows up over every little thing. Even so, he was the only one who reached out to my cousin and the only one to show him love. But in the end, no one full understood why he did it.

The full weight of my cousin's death only hit me a year later, when family friends of ours had visited from another city. It was very early, and my mom had ordered me to fetch something from their bedroom. I walked through the house, with most everyone in the house asleep, the only sound coming from a radio. The song ""Rainbow"" was playing, and I idly thought, ""Oh, it's my older cousin's favorite song"". As I quietly sang along with the lyrics, tears started coming on. Only then did the full weight of what my cousin had done sink in. What did he feel for him to have taken his own life? What was he suffering from? Why did he kill himself? I still didn't understand, but at least then I understood how just how wrong the act was.

I had lived since then with suicide as a reality. For me, suicide was always that choice that I'll never take, that closed door that you wouldn't open because it only leads to everyone you leave behind suffering. Still, the very fact that I lived thinking like that shows that suicide was always on the table for me.

For the past five years, I've lived without making any choices myself. I've lived without any feeling any emotions of my own, with my parents dictating my every move. I lived chasing a difficult goal, doing something I have neither the ability nor passion for to please someone who will never be satisfied. And, for the first time in my life, there's hope ahead of me. But because of this spot of hope, I've realized something very wrong about me. It isn't so much the sadness that gets to me. Sadness can come and go, after all. It's the apathy that kills. I'm introverted, but I can talk and laugh it up when I want to. I used to put up that kind of facade, but I've stopped caring enough to even do so anymore. I've stopped trying and I rarely even come to classes anymore because every little thing becomes so exhausting. The most I can manage anymore is to act like there's nothing wrong with me around my family, and even that act has become so sloppy.

It isn't so much a sadness as it is a constant heavy pressure. Like, waking up a day at a time wanting to die, counting out reasons to keep living and then finding that they get harder and harder to list down. It's slowly but steadily losing the ability to function properly but still not being abe to reach out. It's knowing that there's something wrong but not being able to fix it. It's about the only pleasurable things left to you losing their luster. It's knowing that other people have it worse than you, and still not seeing things any differently. It's edging closer to that choice that you yourself know is wrong, that choice that people don't consider, one step at a time.

When I was ten, my cousin killed himself. At twenty, I think I understand him a little better.

I'm not so sure that that's a good thing.

The Silent Man 
2010 
College of Architecture