I Pray We Heal

A while back, I had written about someone at my hostel who apparently needed some help but had refused to voice out about it. Someone in the comments of that post had said something about fear of opening up to the wrong person (I'm paraphrasing) and I understood what they meant and their reasons behind it, but something happened today to my next door neighbor that got me a little bit scared and made me say a silent prayer for him in my heart.

He had texted me on WhatsApp that he needed a loan for something very important and that he was ready to submit his school certificate as collateral for the loan. I didn't ask him what he needed the loan for, simply because I felt it was none of my business and I didn't even have the huge amount of money he was asking for so why ask for details.

_{This is a screenshot of him offering his documents as collateral, and me telling him that I didn't have the money and wouldn't even need a collateral from him if I did. Unfortunately all of this text was written using pidgin English, so some of you won't be able to understand it properly.}

But the moment I saw that he was ready to go that far and offer his certificates as a form of collateral, I knew it was something serious and immediately went over to his room to check on him, just to make sure it wasn't something that had to do with life and death.

When I got to his room and asked what was wrong, I noticed him avoiding the question and just beating around the bush. He started to tell me about how he had gotten dressed that morning, placed his documents in his bag and had gotten on a public transportation with absolutely no destination in mind.

It was after he got off the bus that he realized where he was and that he had no reason for being there, so he immediately got on another vehicle and returned back home. I got even more scared when he told me about that because although I'm not a medical professional, I know that whatever it is that is troubling him, is starting to mess with his brain.

Unfortunately I couldn't help him with the loan and he too didn't want to go into details as to what was bothering him, so I ended up leaving after staying with him for a while.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of people like this guy out there, who are going through a lot but refuses to talk to anyone for various reasons, maybe because they feel that as a man, you should man up and deal with your problems yourself.

It's sad, because I've gone through (and I'm probably still going through) the same thing. I just hope and pray that we all heal from the things we don't talk about.