Life was beautiful
She tilted her head back and gasped just in time to start breathing again. But, it hadn’t been an easy time for Jem to begin with, following the car crash that took her husband and child almost a year ago. Naturally, it was difficult to get any of her life together after that. And if not for the kind-hearted soul of her baby sister, Jem, for all her genuine sobriety, would have already hung herself much sooner.
“Diyos ko! Anong ginagawa mo?! Are you all right in there? Jem, please…” screamed her sister when she heard the ruckus inside her room. “Please! Open the door…”
Had she known Jem’s plight inside, it would have sent her running to the neighbors and asking that they break the door down. But she didn’t. For all she knew, Jem had just broken another family portrait of theirs, just as she’d done last week. So she was left screaming like a banshee, rapping helplessly on the locked, heavy wooden oak door.
Inside, Jem’s attempt had gone disastrously wrong. The beam on which she had tied the wire collapsed, and sent her sprawling inches above the floor, which, unfortunately, wasn’t enough to get the job done. The fall snapped her spinal column, but not her neck — leaving her paralyzed in agony. She tried to speak, but found that she couldn’t, and could only moan out a few syllables. What a life, she thought, closing her eyes. She couldn’t even accomplish killing herself.
Jem tried her best to move with the blood gushing down her neck; and wondered with a heavy heart when and how this pain would finally subside into the sweet release of death. Hanging herself with barbed wire was a bad idea, she thought. She bit her lip hard enough to keep from wailing but the inevitable tears were uncontrollable. Slowly, silently, those all-too familiar drops of salty liquid escaped her eyes, and trickled down as they mixed with the cut on her neck — forming a lighter, thinner speck of red.
It was only a matter of time now, she thought.
Maybe if Jem hadn’t sent them out to buy carrots that day; maybe if she had just settled for celery, maybe that bus would’ve hit another car instead; and maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into this pitiful aftermath of depression and ruin. Maybe… just maybe, for nothing ever mattered to her in the past, except the two of them; and since they were gone now, she had set herself to portray life as absolutely nothing — a searing, pathetic whiff of emptiness. And it certainly made no difference that there was much love prior to the accident; she was what she had become, and nothing — not even her baby sister’s desperate cries outside — was ever going to change that now.
And yet she was surprised that a lot of memories still found their way back. She had become wary of such, of course, and most of them were actually buried deep within her. Months after her family’s death she had a hell of a time keeping her emotions from meddling with her own sense of reality. And it was certainly more than just a fleeting sense of fancy.
Was there only love, hate and misery to look forward to? By then, the physical agony from her botched hanging had taken its toll on her and the survival instinct soon got the better of her decision to die. In her suffering, she suddenly felt anger towards her sister who, for some reason, still hadn’t called on the neighbors for help. Ultimately, she discovered a new belief in life’s possibilities. Hope, however futile it may be, lingered on.
“Ate Jem! OK ka lang ba? Buksan mo na pinto, please, please…
It was all she could bear. Jem swallowed hard and felt her throat muscles twitch. She struggled desperately to free herself from the noose but found that her strength was sapped; drained to the core. With a surge of adrenalin she made one final effort to loosen the wire’s grip by leaning back, but it only succeeded in tightening it even more. The pressure broke her windpipe completely.
Jem wheezed, looked upward to heaven as a couple more tears trickled down her cheek and she saw her child happily bouncing on his daddy’s knee. She closed her eyes for the last time. Her troubles were over.
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