Who Should Be Blamed For This?
November 11th, 2007 by sunshadowI have been in distress lately for
miscalculating my budget and depleting my funds. Still full of myself
as though the universe has conspired against me, I went into a
restaurant to get my favorite Okonomiyaki dinner. Oddly, the thing is
less satisfactory than normal, and oddlier still I was able to finish a
plateful of the thing.
Waiting for my order, I tried to amuse
myself with the paper on their shelf. I hardly have time to catch the
news lately and often find myself discovering old news. I came upon this:
An 11 year old school girl from Davao, killing herself with a nylon
rope. I have already been peeved by irresponsible drivers ( A Colleague
had just had an unfortunate accident trying to get off a colorum FX )
and by another attempt of the government to cull freedom of speech (
the Censorship of the Neo-Angono artists mural ) but this takes my
breath away and not at all in a pleasant way.
I had no idea
pre-pubescent children can actually feel despair. As a child, in fact,
as always, I often find myself confused and adrift a river whose
current rapidly carries me nowhere. I remember bouts of unspeakable
sadness, loneliness, bemusement but never hopelessness.
I have
had a friend take her own life. We were not really that close. But the
circumstances surrounding her mortality still leave me feeling as if my
existence is a part of a dream that has no end. We both were from the
Art Club in high school. I remember her painting an anima sola figure
which our moderator found obscene. She used to live nearest my house
and would often go home together after high school dances. In college,
we would, albeit seldom, bump into each other around the AS building in
UP. One cloudy sem break, after taking care of completing school
requirements, I saw her, Rhea, attired in black, at the University
Shopping Center. Pleased to see an old friend in such depressing times,
I went off the jeep and asked her to have lunch with me. She was on her
way to SM North Edsa to buy a "funeral dress". I went shopping with her
and at the end of the day, asked her to hang out at home with me. I
showed her my art works, stuff that had not much meaning but to fulfill
some academic requirements. She pondered deeply on some of them. The
thing that made an impact was her insight on something that I named
"metamorphosis", about the life cycle of a butterfly. This was nothing
to me but a visual representation of what seems to be a scientific
process. To her, it was something more significant. Four days past, a
couple arrived at my door, frantically looking for a college student
named Tala who apparently spent the last day in the life of an already
dead girl. At four o’clock one Halloween morning, she was found lying
on her bedroom floor, dressed in freshly purchased clothes and shoes,
blood oozing off her head from a gun shot. This would be first of my
intimate encounters of other people’s deaths.
Still, I have no
personal acquaintance with the young Marianette Amper of Davao. But her
passing made me reflect on the absurdity of our priorities. While we
bitch upon our petty annoyances, a waif of a girl sees out her light
deficient window, and finding that her hopes of having a new bike, bag
and jobs for her parents as things that can only be found in dreams…
in Heaven or even, perhaps,in another lifetime.
