Sometime after my lunch break, I burst into a manic fit of shits and giggles. It happened out of nowhere and I had no idea what I was laughing at or why. I couldn’t calm down and I couldn’t focus and I got scared. Once my laughter subsided into snorts and snickers, I dragged Kristel out of her work station and we went to the poolside to smoke and gripe about our jobs and our lives.
After lighting our cigarettes with a borrowed lighter, I began to babble about how I suddenly found myself frozen and unable to write, as though I just ran out of words. Kristel told me she felt something similar to that when she started work. “On my second day at work, I suddenly got very depressed. All those articles just got to me and it felt like I could never write again. I was practically crying when I hailed the cab back home. I mean, I’m an artist, but what am I doing with my life? When Sylvia Plath was our age, she was writing Colossus–one of her greatest poems. And here I am, stuck with mechanical writing about wheelchairs.”
I took a deep drag of my cigarette and exhaled. “Oh God, I hear you. I’m supposed to be a writer but my novel remains unwritten while I’m churning out articles on the mundane.”
“And great songs.”
“Well, I should hope so!” Although I really think Kristel is better at writing songs than me. She writes poetry, I do prose and guitar riffs.
Suddenly, I got reminded by this Nick Hornby book my dad just bought me called It’s A Long Way Down. I asked Kristel if she’s ever read it and she shook her head. “It’s about these four suicidal people who happened to be at the same suicide spot at the same time. By far one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read,” I explained. “It’s witty and quite easy to read, but there are so many moments where I want to jump up and down and scream, ‘That’s me! That’s me!’ I’m the dude who thought he was going to be somebody but ended up being nobody. I’m the mother who spent the last nineteen years of her life doing nothing but take care of a son who can’t walk, talk, or recognize her. I’m the TV personality whose career went up in smoke because he got involved in a sex scandal. I’m the violent teenage girl from a rich background whose sister is missing and presumed dead.”
Kristel nodded. “Nick Hornby’s really good at that. You’ve read How to Be Good, right? It starts out really funny but a few pages down, it becomes depressing because he touches on relevant issues. You know how after the girl has an affair and she leaves her lover in the hotel room? On the drive home she said that if her life were a film, something would happen or she would meet someone that would make her a completely different person. But instead she stops for tea and donuts and nothing happens. Life’s never like the movies. I feel just like her, I keep making pop culture references to my life. Right now it’s like we’re both in Reality Bites.”
“Except in the movie, Winona Ryder ends up with Ethan Hawke and suddenly everything’s okay even though she never finished her documentary. In real life we won’t meet a cute guy whose kiss will magically solve all our problems. In real life, the guys who kiss us are the problems.” I must have sounded bitter when I said that last sentence, because I am.
“True.” We both smoked our cigarettes in silence before Kristel spoke again. “We’re in that stage between Reality Bites and reality. But this is just a temporary thing. We’re still following the same path we set for ourselves. We’ll be real writers someday. Right now, we just got a little derailed because we need the money.”
“Yeah.”
“When our band gets famous, we’ll write books about our first jobs. Then we can throw ourselves off the top of a building and people will remember us forever.”
I laughed. “Like Kurt Cobain.”
“Or we could do the Kool Aide thing, all of us. Lace it with cyanide.”
“What we’re talking about. This is so…”
“..bourgeois,” we both said.
“We’re so vain. We make pop culture references to ourselves!” I exclaimed. And we burst into laughter and sang the last verse of Bourgeois Suicide.
“Bourgeoise suicide
Drank some cyanide
I finished the bottle
Drowned in my tub of lies.”
And I felt a little bit better after we sang. Among all the songs we’ve written, Bourgeois Suicide is the most meaningful and important because it shows exactly how hopeless and lost we both feel. There are people in the world who are unemployed with families to feed. But instead of being grateful there we were, smoking by the swimming pool, unhappy with our jobs and unhappy with our lives, even though we have everything a human being needs to survive and more.
Bourgeois or not, our problems are real. The depression weighing both of us down is real. There’s nothing glamorous about being depressed. Everyday I keep asking myself why the fuck I can’t be consistently happy. And everyday the answer eludes me. The worst feeling in the world is to be unable to stand each waking moment of your life. But it’s something we need to conquer every day of our lives, even though there are times when it seems like there’s no point in doing so.
I think about suicide more than I care to admit. Last night, I figured out why people kill themselves on days when they seemed the happiest. Happiness is my vacation and depression is my home. The happier I am, the more depressed I eventually get. It’s a vicious cycle. Every time I go on a trip, I don’t ever want to go back home. Not because I hate it there (I have a very lovely room), but to go back to Manila would mean facing the harsh reality of living through one day after the other. When people know they have limited time on earth, they usually do everything they can to make each day the best day of their lives. I think that’s why people kill themselves on days when it seems like nothing could go wrong. Because tomorrow, or the day after that, the happiness just might shatter and it’ll feel like nothing can ever make them smile again. And who wants to die on a day like that?
No, this isn’t some stupid cry for help. I realized long ago that no matter how bad things get, I’d never commit suicide because I’m too afraid. Not because I might succeed–but because I might fail. Fortune tellers tell me I would have a long life and with my luck I’d probably tie the noose wrong, or survive an overdose. Do you realize how humiliating that is? If I survive a suicide attempt, nobody will ever take me seriously. They’ll think I’m just doing that for attention, to get back at the people who hurt me or whatever. I’ll never get another job because employers will think I’m too mentally fucked up to do my work properly. There won’t be any grief to water down everyone’s anger, sadness, and confusion. I don’t even want to think about how expensive the obligatory psychiatric treatments will get. My family, friends, even people I don’t know very well–they’ve been nothing but nice to me, even though I probably don’t deserve any of that kindness. I think the least I could do is to spare everyone the trauma (or the embarrassment) of knowing someone who tried to kill herself and lived.
Those were the thoughts that were running through my head, but I didn’t want to dwell on them any longer because I had articles to write. Shitty and pointless as it might seem, life must go on. One fucking day at a time.
I tossed my cigarette butt over my shoulder. “Shall we go back in?”
“Yeah.”
And with that, Kristel and I walked inside the building, arms linked, bracing ourselves for the work that lay ahead, for the silent tears we shed at night, and for the strength we need to gather to keep ourselves and each other afloat.
A few weeks ago, I received a Friendster message from Jen, a classmate I haven’t seen nor spoken to since third grade. She moved to Canada after grade three and although we wrote each other letters for a few months, we eventually lost touch. Thank God for Friendster! She messaged me to say that she’d be in the Philippines for a few weeks and would I like to hang out with her and maybe go to the beach with her and her cousins? I replied immediately with a “Yes!” and this is how I ended up in Boracay with awesome new friends during election weekend.
The Nightlife
Jen and I spent the whole morning lying on beach towels, getting a tan. Normally when I go to the beach, I just jump into the water and randomly get dark. This was the first time I’ve ever laid on the sand for hours with the intention of soaking up UV rays and I suppose it’s something you need to try at least once in your life. It’s not particularly exciting but I’m never energetic in the morning anyway, and the sun was too good to spend those hours sleeping in the hotel room.
One thing I discovered is that if you’re a rich tourist from a first world country, you can go to Boracay island with nothing but the clothes on your back and a fat wallet. Anything beach-related can be bought there–bikinis, towels, flipflops, sunscreen, even normal clothes. If you really want to get the beach look pat-down, you can even pay a local to braid your hair or give you dreadlocks. I passed by several tattoo parlors and was tempted to inquire about their rates, but I restrained myself from doing so. I could have blown the rest of my money on a tattoo but my parents would eat me alive the moment I get back and that’s never a good thing.
Another thing I learned during this trip is that it’s not always a good thing to travel with someone you have a crush on. I tend to get really neurotic, which makes me tune out the scenery because there are times when the only thing that’s on my mind is, “Notice me! Notice meeee!” In my desperation to get noticed I paid a local kid to teach me how to skimboard after lunch, thinking that I could impress him by looking cool and doing handstands and stuff. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that a) people are good at making difficult things look easy, b) I have no sense of balance, c) I can’t stand on a moving object to save my life. Technically, I already know how to skimboard but my body couldn’t do what my mind was telling it to. I kept falling on my ass and embarrassing myself the whole time.
I would definitely go to Boracay again, but not necessarily for the night life. It’s one of the best beaches I’ve ever been to–the white sand was heaven on my toes and despite the heat of the sun, the water stays ice cold. I love that I can walk around town in a bikini top and a skirt without looking out of place; it’s just too hot in this country to be fully clothed. The company, however, was what made the whole trip an indescribably wonderful experience. I’m extremely glad I got the chance to rediscover an old friend and find out that we get along very well even though we haven’t seen each other in over a decade. Things like that don’t happen to people on a normal basis.
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