The Doors of Escape

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This world to her was but a tragic play
She came, saw, dislik'd, and passed away
-----Inscription on a girl's tomb, Southwark Cathedral, London

Two months ago, someone died. To be more precise, she killed herself. I don't know her, only of her because my friend wrote about her death and I read it. Many days have passed, yet I still think of her at times, of people like her.

This is what my friend wrote in Facebook on May 22. It is, perhaps, one of the most beautiful and most horrifying things I have ever read.

So, you leave us, this world, for a place I do not yet wish to discover myself, your heaven or hell, or nirvana, or whatever better place you thought might be more to your soul's liking.

You were only 28. Your mother called you brilliant, moody, frustrated. You said she didn't know the half of it. Well, now she knows the all too tragic whole. 

Your brother was the one who told me, and asked if I had any inkling as to why you did it. I said yes, and reminded him of how I told him so, forwarded to him the email I sent a year and 2 months and 11 days ago, an email I asked permission from you to write, and you said it wouldn't matter, he wouldn't care enough to do anything about it. He did, actually. He called me, and asked to talk about it, I said that he should talk to you, and soon, and I guess that never happened, did it? 

Your brother admitted as much. He said he didn't talk to you about it because he didn't know what to say. He still doesn't.

Your family wants me to go to your memorial service. I said no, I don't do funerals. If I could help it I wouldn't even attend mine. I suppose in that sense I wouldn't be there, as I'd be dead. Like you are.

Your dad asked for me to do your eulogy, because "the way she talked about you, parang kilalang-kilala mo sya. (It seemed like you really, really knew her.) The days after she went to you, she was really happy" - and I asked if that was what he wanted, to remember you as happy.

Thing is, you weren't. It's why you offed yourself, right? 

Now, why would I want to eulogize about someone who couldn't stand life to the point she killed herself? I don't want to, because you don't deserve anything after this, what I write.

You made your choice, and everyone you leave behind in your wake will have to live with that, including myself, and I choose to rid my memory banks of you, so I will not be riddled with night terrors, waking nightmares, sadnesses brought about by the failure of showing you the brilliance that I did see in you, the beauty of your fractured soul that you did not have the strength to fulfill. 

You blind, tragic woman, you failure at life, you sweet sweet idiot. Wherever you are, I hope you never have peace.

In his book The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss talked about the four doors of escape people use to cope with pain.

First is the door of sleep. As most of us know, sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. It allows us some distance from things that have hurt us. When we feel extreme physical or emotional pain, we often fall unconscious, the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetfulness. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep too heal quickly as I'd like to believe. Oftentimes, the mind stores painful memories behind this door, the ones we are unable to face yet. As the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind shows, "How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot."

Third is the door of madness. At times, the mind is dealt such a blow it creates a new world to hide from the old one. And in this new reality, we can be free of our suffering. Free.

And last is the door of death. The final escape.



Tonight the rains have come and I think of the dead girl, her family, the people she left behind. I don't know her, I don't know her name. I've never met her. Yet I cannot forget. How could they? Does suffering beget more suffering? Did she finally find peace? Too many questions, too little time.
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Vacation

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I woke up that day with a single thought in my head: I wanted to see the ocean.

It was a three-day weekend and everyone was busy preparing for the Halloween parties in Manila including the annual Cream Ball and the Black Party in Malate.

Fuck, my friend Jason even had a Hellcats cheerleader costume made. He was hoping to snag a quarterback.

 
 
 
But I wanted something different.
 
"Come on Brian, let's go to Ilocos," I said, trying to convince my friend to come with me. "Cobbled streets, lighthouses, windmills, beaches, and bagnet; what more can you ask for?"

"Hmmm... Why do you want to go out of town ba?"

"I want to go to the beach. I want to swim, I want to travel. Besides, if I stay here, it's the same old thing. Parties and boys na naman."

"Hahaha. You make it sound like it's such a bad thing. Pero sige sige, punta tayo. (But okay okay, let's go.)

"Yey!"

 
 
The bus left Manila Thursday evening and by dawn the next day, we were standing on top of the 400-year old San Agustin belfry watching as the sun's rays slowly crept up on the nearby town of Burgos.

The sun rises and sets every day, but not all sunrises are the same. There was a golden light, streaked with blood and purple, as if the end of the world had come without intruding on everyday-life.

In the afternoon, we stopped by the town of Burgos to see the Kapurpurawan rock formation. The rock was carved out from the surrounding sandstone through the centuries by wind and waves erosion. It was huge, imposing and white, very white.

Brian and I headed towards the rock for a closer look. We were walking on dead corals that dotted the landscape when suddenly a wave hit us. I fell into the sea.

I struggled to reach the surface to breathe but the current was too strong. I was tossed under the ocean, scraped my hands, arms, legs, feet and back against the corals. Then I crashed into a rock, hit my head and everything went dark.






When I was alive, I often wondered why there are no happy ghosts, but now that I am one, I understand why.

The universe of knowledge opens up to you in death. Every word, every detail now has weight and meaning: the smile thoughtlessly given, the promises made.

You begin to understand each moment of your life clearly, identify all the things you should have done, and shouldn't have. But what's the use, when it's all too late?

When you're mortal, you only have so much information at hand. You never know what other people really think; their desires, wishes, impulses. You never know what is hidden.

All these are revealed in death. The lover who waited in the rain for two hours, hoping you'll come back, the dad who can never tell his son how proud he is of him, the friend who betrayed you.

The people closest to us suddenly become strangers, and all their motivations are suddenly laid bare.

To Draw Death

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British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose The Berlin Stories was turned into the film Cabaret, first met his lifetime partner Don Bachardy when Don was, in his own words "probably, 16."

They marked Valentine’s Day 1953 as the start of their relationship. Don was 18, Chris was 48.

In 1963, they broke up. From his despair, Chris wrote A Single Man which depicted a day in the life of George, a middle-aged, gay Englishman in Southern California whose younger lover died in a car crash.

George, who must hide his homosexuality from society as well as his anguish at the death of his lover.

It was a brave and shocking book in 1964, and Edmund White later called it "one of the first and best novels of the modern Gay Liberation movement."

Chris and Don survived their break-up. Chris continued to write and Don became a celebrity portrait painter whose subjects include Tennessee Williams to Anais Nin. They were together for 33 years.

When Chris became terminally ill with prostate cancer, they both decided to create a visual portrait of his dying. Over a period of six months before Chris' death in 1986, Don charted the final facial gestures of his lover's illness and death with loving cruelty in a series of line drawings.

“Chris was in a lot of pain towards the end," Don said in an interview earlier this year. "But he had sat for me so often over the years, and I knew this was something we could still do together.”

The last of the series was completed when Chris was already dead. Don remained alone with the body, sketching his lover's final farewell.

These drawings make me feel sentimental. They speak of pain and dying, but there is tenderness in each line. Perhaps it is in our deaths where we fully reveal ourselves and in these sketches, we see the portrait of a man the artist loved to his dying day.

Til' death do us part.