The Void of Escapism

23:57. Andre shuffled through the dirty clothes strewn across the floor of his room to his unmade bed, swatting away a fly that had made a few rounds around his tousled, greasy hair. Andre lifted his arm to brush aside a mixture of wrappers and crushed up receipts. He sat at the edge of his bed, his eyes darting to find a familiar blade at the corner of his desk. He reached out, carelessly — a small poke on the tip and out came a drop of crimson from Andre’s cold, pinkish finger, the same force pushing the blade off the table with a soft thud as it landed on the coffee-stained carpeted floor. Andre stared at the blade, it was almost as if the blade was shutting him out for a milder fix to his agony. Andre glanced at his index finger, before scanning the room to find his baseball bat hanging out his duffel bag.

The familiar, though minute, sting said otherwise, and it was too late to go out and play. Andre could estimate minutes like any human being with a substantial level of cognition could, and the growing, tight ache to his chest told him that something more immediate than baseball had to be resorted to. Andre reached for the blade yet again, now with more certainty in his grip on the handle. Andre held onto the blade with one hand, his eyes glancing down to the other.

23:58. His wrist was laced with lines. The same moral quandary each night, a momentary gamble he had almost no control over. 

“Dad, please, you can’t forget Mom,” Andre begged, gripping his father’s sleeves with his coarse fingers, tears blurring his vision as his knees sank to the ground. “You can’t be like them, Mom needs you as much as you need her.”

Andre’s heart pounded against his chest, his pulse deafening to his ears. The wave of trepidation mixed with adrenaline, the restless, unbridled shaking of unease, the cold sweat that trickled down his forehead to the nape of his neck. Two words that haunted him every other night boomed at a volume louder than usual. 

23:59. I wish. Andre violently shook his head, his free hand tugging on his scalp, about to rip his hair out. Andre’s jaw quivered as he abruptly brought the blade onto the dried up scars on his wrist, gradually applying pressure to his skin to make yet another deadly stroke.

Andre’s father stood silent, his foot rooted to the ground. Andre sniffed, wiping his tears away as he felt for the support offered by the barricade of his mother’s bed. With his vision now clear, Andre caught a glimpse of the wall clock, one hand on the number 12, another just before, the last on 7 moving on to 8 at a speed all too fast for Andre to comprehend. Andre’s lips parted, his eyes widening as his throat went dry. Andre’s head spun in a search for a solution to no avail.

“Dad?” Andre croaked a mutter under his breath, his glance edging up his father’s figure in desperation to see his eyes already shut. “Dad, listen to me. Mom is going to be alright, we just have to be patient–”

Andre’s breath hitched as he met with his father’s hazy pupils – the deadpanned gaze of a stranger, all so bloodshot and soulless, Andre’s heart sank to his gut. The clock’s three hands now perfectly aligned, Andre knew his father was gone. 

00:00, Andre released his grip, his blade landing to stain his sheets crimson. The man turned to face Andre in pity, but Andre could not make out a single word he said. The man stood up, and with an impassive turn of the head, his ex-father stepped out of the ward, his indifferent echoes of footsteps drifting further through the empty corridors.

00:01. A solemn beep resounded. The machine that had once so intricately drawn his mother’s life into zig-zag patterns had now given way to a single, muted streak. Andre let out a shriek so raw and visceral, it pierced through the air like how the blade did on his vein. Andre clutched his fresh wound in despair with his trembling hand, as if his mother had heard everything.

Andre had sworn to himself ever since to never forget his mother till his death. That is, if he could bring about his death earlier, Andre had figured it could be easier to fulfill his promise. Yet he still rushed to the toilet to address his wound instinctively, the only thing clear was the immense pang of guilt that hit him the moment he felt multiple streaks of warm, carmine liquid down his elbow.

What would he say to his mother should they meet after, if he was successful in his attempt? That he did not want to forget her so badly, he allowed the world to forget him instead? A string of indecipherable apologies reverberated across the cold tile walls to no one in particular, the tap water rushing meekly against Andre’s open wound. 

12:05. Before Andre knew, it all faded to black.

-

Some part of Andre wished he had not woken up. 

Every day alive meant another day in a world full of escapists, which reeked of his father all around. His neighbor who chose to forget to pay rent to the landlord. The old lady at the flower shop nearby who chose to forget she had been robbed two days before. The abandoned, malnourished stray dog roaming around aimlessly with a tattered collar. Andre’s acquaintance who (probably) chose to forget their hangout to sleep in. Andre sighed, kicking a pebble across the walkway to the main street. He had been waiting for an hour or so outside of the comic shop only to realize he had been stood up in the sweltering afternoon heat. Not that it really mattered anyway, Andre was not the one who initiated the company in the first place. Though Andre did travel for two hours to get to this specific comic shop. 

Andre lived in a world deceptively close to utopia, where a person can choose to forget any single event as long as they wished for it at the very last minute of the day. The one minute that people use to escape their reality, Andre struggled to escape so badly every night. Andre knew he really only had one wish, and that wish was the same wish his father made two years ago. The wish that marked his status as an orphan on the very same day. Andre despised his father, to the extent of him never wanting to end up like him, just not to the extent it would upset his late mother. The hypocrisy comes in where he wishes to forget about what happened in every other minute of the day, only to resort to extreme measures to distract himself from the one time it can realize.

Everywhere Andre looked was a smile he could never conceivably relate to, an overflowing sense of cowardice, a lifeless void behind each pair of dazed eyes. But who was Andre to judge? If they had tried seeking high and wide for the most cowardly person in the universe, Andre would rise to victory. After all, Andre never once tried to bring an end to his misery out of indecision and remorse, perhaps it was brave of everyone else to even wish away their own negative experiences instead.

A more painful watch for Andre was the absence of gratitude. The air of blatant, diminished ecstasy from the most pleasurable of experiences, nobody felt much of anything on a spectrum — rather, a deficit of painful experiences came with a seek for only the better. Nobody seemed content, people were selfish, relationships were fragile like glass sculptures, beautiful on the surface, brittle to the touch. There was never a need for help, and so no one helped anyone else. A society bereft of kindness because there was no existing need for it. Every individual chased the hedonic treadmill with standards of pleasure only rising higher. Nothing could be more meaningless than that. 

Andre yawned, shoulders hunched as he sluggishly pulled out his apartment key, heaving a sigh of lethargy. He looked to the sky to see hues and shades of orange and red painting the contrasting deep evening sky, halting momentarily with his hand rested on the already half-open door, an irresistible invitation to step in. Andre stood still for a few seconds more to take in the mesmerizing sight in front of him, scanning the horizon for the source of light.

Only to see a silhouette near the edge of the building’s own roof garden. Andre squinted, uncertain as to what it was – the sun was radiating from the same point the silhouette was at –, perhaps a huge bird of an exquisite species. That was till a flock of pigeons flew past, and there was no way a bird could be that big at a proximity so close to other birds, did Andre realize it was not only definitely not a bird, it was a person.

Andre never ran faster in his entire life. A shiver down his spine, his thighs operating on sheer reflex as he bolted up flights on flights of stairs. Andre was nowhere close to being certain about his hypothesis on what he saw, but for the sole chance it was true, Andre took the leap.

Andre was greeted with – indeed – a person standing on the other side of the garden fence, away from all flora and fauna, staring into the horizon exactly like how Andre did a couple of minutes ago. Andre trudged hastily towards said person (a brunette with two braids, in her school uniform, her bag thrown to the side of her feet, her books spilling out haphazardly), his every step ending with a crunch from the residual dirt of the garden and the dizziness resulted from overexhaustion. The brunette jolted, hurriedly turning to lock eyes with a man in his early twenties huffing and grunting out loud with an arm extending toward her, the other waving around as if he was about to fall. The brunette whipped her head around and pursed her lips, calmed her irregular breathing in two deep, calculated breaths before taking the step to fall into the abyss. It’s now or never.

“No!” Andre screamed, throwing himself onto the fence, his reached out hand now in close distance with the brunette’s. Andre caught her hand with all his remaining might, the force of gravity pulling both of them down towards the ledge. Andre pulled back to gain his balance, with one hand on the fence. Though, Andre could feel her grip slipping away.

“What are you doing?! Let me go!” The brunette let out an anguished cry, trying to shake away Andre’s now weakened grip, which successfully slid her a centimetre away from the surface of the roof garden. Andre grabbed her arm with his other hand that was once on the fence for support, as he latched his foot onto the fence.

“You can’t just die like that!” 

“People will remember me this way! I said, let me go!” The brunette kicked the air, unfamiliar to the lack of force on her soles, the once serene tranquility that enveloped her began to fade away as she came to her bodily senses. Fear crept in, as worry etched onto her face in the form of wrinkles.

“Seriously, what’s wrong with yo–”

“I’ll remember you.” The brunette perked up her ears as her head shot up in shock, her brows furrowing in bewilderment. Andre took the chance to jerk her up with the last of his peak strength, gritting his teeth as he grunted, pushing the girl to safety.

All who have passed wish to be remembered, in a world where you can choose to forget. 

But his feet slipped out of the shoe he had so stably anchored onto the fence, and saving someone suddenly meant trading his own life for another, the same push now tumbling him over the fence. Andre let go of the girl as she had wished him to, no longer able to defy gravity by himself.

And he fell. And fell, and fell. Andre closed his eyes, at least he found evidence in himself that kindness existed in a world so crude. For once, he was truly happy to have been alive, happy to not have died last night.

A resounding thud, a splitting headache, followed by distant sirens a few minutes later before Andre blacked out fourteen hours after his last. A liquid yet again warm to the surface of Andre’s cheek that reeked metal, maybe this was the best way it could have ended. Through saving another, Andre finally found his undying reason to forgive his soul.