Truth with no noise

When I was nine, a 16-year-old boy in our neighborhood jumped off a 5-story building. I wasn’t his friend or anything; we just occasionally bumped into each other when I headed off to school each morning.

Of course, his sudden demise got me curious. And I remember my mom saying that he jumped to his death because he was very sad and extremely lonely.

Various stories made the rounds in our neighborhood: Some people said he killed himself because of financial problems; others said he was having trouble catching up in school and was afraid of disappointing his parents. I didn’t believe any of the stories.

I remember that on the day of his funeral, right after my mom explained to me the process of cremation, I told her my theory about everything, about his truth and why he did it, that it was more than just being sad and lonely.

I told my mom that every person is born with a self-destruct button, and that maybe something happened that made him push it. And it may not have been clear to most people why he did so, but maybe for him it was clearer than anything he had ever experienced, the only thing of which he was sure: his truth.

I also remember being mad at a particular woman—his aunt, I think—at his funeral. She kept saying that he was a happy kid and would never do that sort of thing. I was mad because no one really knew him but himself. He was his own person, and people couldn’t just reduce him to a word and label him just to make an illusion of familiarity.

He was a happy kid: His aunt said it every once in a while; she said it as if everything that he ever amounted to—his life, his achievements, his failures, his dreams, his feelings, his truth—was just being a happy kid. She made it sound like an insult.

What his aunt and most people don’t understand is that the truth doesn’t make a noise. It doesn’t make its presence known. The truth sits inside every person, creeps inside their soul and fuels their veins until it’s the only thing that’s pumping their heart and keeping them alive. And maybe his truth was jumping off that 5-story building.

And maybe the truth is that people never really cared about him, at least not until he jumped. No one bothered to ask him how he was doing, why there were dark bags under his eyes, or why he occasionally released a breath that he wasn’t even aware he was holding.

No one bothered to ask him why he looked like he was drowning on dry land, and yet they had the audacity to reduce him to just a happy kid.

He was anything but happy. You are who you are until you are not. You are happy until you are not.

After the funeral service, my mom and I headed home. On the way, everything clicked and made sense. I held my mom’s hand, gripped it in fear of falling like he did, and all I could think of was that what killed him wasn’t falling off that building. And it made me cry my heart out.

He was in so much pain before he made the plunge. He was in so much pain that breathing was actually more painful than constricting his own windpipe.

His truth pushed him to self-destruction. His truth didn’t make a noise.

Carlene Jeremy Sabino, 20, is a fourth year PR major at Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila.