The Room Next Door

I never really knew Eric. He was the kind of neighbor you saw often but never truly saw—a blur of dark shirts and headphone wires, slipping down the stairs with his phone in one hand and a plastic bag of instant noodles or soda in the other. Always alone. Always in a hurry, although to where, it was hard to tell. The only time I ever heard his voice was through the thin apartment walls, and even then, it was muffled—low, staccato bursts of frustration or joy, probably shouted into his headset during one of his online games.

My daughter knew him. She told me he had a girlfriend, Amy, and that they’d been together since high school. Met during orientation week at  Silliman University. The kind of couple that seemed inseparable until they weren’t.

Apparently, Amy had once been my daughter’s classmate in her creative writing class. That was Amy’s first course. In just under two years, she shifted three more times—Broadcast Communications, then Architecture, and finally Fine Arts. Each shift was a new attempt to find herself, but something always seemed to fall apart. Orphaned at an early age, Amy was supported by an elder brother who worked abroad and paid  for her schooling. He  had been patient through the first few changes. But patience, like money, runs out eventually. When he threatened to stop paying her tuition, Amy dropped out and returned to her home province—dragged by the combined will of her brother’s frustration and her own sense of disorientation.

I never met her. By the time I moved  to Dumaguete to be with  my daughters, she had already gone. After she left, Eric rarely came out. When he did, he looked dazed, as if sunlight had become foreign to him. I tried once or twice to catch his eye, thinking a simple “Hi” might be something, anything. But he avoided eye contact, fingers glued to his phone, face set like stone. So I stopped trying.

The night it happened, we had no warning.

It was past midnight when someone tried to force open our door. The lock held firm, and I—sleeping on a foldable bed right beside it—jerked awake, heart pounding. Before I could even shout, the door rattled again, hard.

I stood and pushed back with my shoulder, shouting, “Who is that?”

A voice—panicked, young—stammered, “Sorry! Sorry! I thought—this was Eric’s room—sorry!”

Then footsteps, fast and clumsy, retreated down the corridor. My daughter sat up in the dark, confused and bleary-eyed. Her phone, silent on the windowsill, buzzed once. Then again.

It was Amy.

The messages were short. Repetitive. Please check on Eric. Please. I’m scared. Something’s wrong.

The guy who had tried to break in returned, face pale, breath short. He was one of Eric’s gamer friends. He said Amy called him, too. She couldn’t reach Eric. He had messaged her something strange. Something final.

Without another word, my daughter leapt out of bed and ran to Eric’s door. The boy followed. They knocked. Then pounded. Then shouted.

No answer.

By then, my gut had already twisted into a knot. Something wasn’t right. Something was wrong.

We screamed for help. Our voices bounced against silent walls. Not a single neighbor stirred. Not even the ones directly across our unit. I stepped outside, barefoot and trembling, and yelled into the echoing hallways.

“Help! Please, help!”

No one came.

It was like the building had gone deaf overnight.

A few moments later, my daughter and Eric’s friend returned, breathless. They had gone downstairs.

“He’s there,” my daughter said. “He’s…”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to.

I learned later that they found him hanging from a leather belt, looped over a steel bar just below our unit. His head slumped forward, feet inches from the ground, his shadow contorted by the hallway light.

The police came later. So did the paramedics, though there was little to do. I watched as they lowered his body, careful but mechanical, like they were handling a broken appliance, not a boy barely past his twenties.

My daughters cried quietly. The boy who found him sat on the stairs, rocking back and forth. No one asked us questions. We weren’t really part of Eric’s life. Just echoes in the apartment next door.

In the days that followed, people began to talk.

“He was always quiet,” said one.

“Personal problems must’ve pushed him over,” said another.

“He was addicted to games. Lost touch with real life.”

“He found out he could not graduate this year. Must have devastated him.”

They all had theories. None of them helped.

What I kept thinking about was how long he had hung there before someone found him. Just below our floor. A meter or two from our front door. While we slept.

While the building slept.

Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if my daughter had seen Amy’s message sooner. If Eric’s friend had reached him sooner. If I had tried harder to speak to him. If any of us had noticed the signs.

But what signs?

He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t violent. He wasn’t the type to scream into the night. He just faded—bit by bit—until something inside him gave up.

A  week  later, the caretaker returned to clean Eric’s apartment, this time with his family. I offered to help. The place was a mess—unwashed dishes, piles of dirty laundry, unopened soda cans. I remembered reading that a cluttered space was often a silent symptom of depression.

On his desk were unopened cans of energy drinks, a worn-out keyboard, and a notebook of drawings —unfinished, but full of strange, surreal figures: faces without eyes, trees with open mouths, a shrouded figure in a sky painted red.

I never did get to see the body up close. My daughters, fearing my blood pressure would spike, kept me inside. “Stay here, Ma. Please,” they pleaded, their voice trembling.

So I waited. I sat on the edge of the mattress, hands gripping the sheet, while the world beyond the door shifted.

In the morning, I went to work. My shift started at noon. I thought I could power through. Just edit a few articles, answer some emails. But I broke down mid-afternoon, sobbing quietly in my cubicle, overwhelmed by a grief that wasn’t mine. I didn’t know him—but he could’ve been my son. I could have been the mother that lost him.

While we were sound asleep above, he was there, just below us, quiet and alone, planning his end. What was he thinking in those final moments as he stepped quietly down the stairs, belt in hand, heart in pieces? What despair could be so heavy, so full of terror and stillness, that death became the exit?

And what were we dreaming upstairs—my daughters and I—while just a few feet below, a life was unraveling?

The next few days were heavy and strange. The occupants across from us moved out almost immediately, spooked. Another neighbor, who had already been planning to leave, sped up their timeline. Within two weeks, our family of three was the only one left in the apartment compound. My daughters talked about transferring. The landlady cried and pleaded when they told her. “Please don’t leave,” she said. “I’ll fix the place. I’ll fix everything.”

I was oddly firm. “We’re staying,” I said. “We’re not running from this.”

The apartment was convenient, and after all, what did we really have to fear? Ghosts? Grief?

The caretaker—a gentle giant of a man named Charlie—sprang into action as if fighting a ghost war. First, he strung up two hammocks under the overhang—near where Eric had hanged himself.

“I thought…maybe this helps,” he said, scratching his head. “So people sit here. Make it happy again.”

Then came solar lights—installed on the gate and the ground floor. And finally, Charlie showed up one afternoon, hauling a huge roll of barbed wire.

“What’s that for?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I’ll put it around the fence,” he said solemnly. “To keep the bad spirits away.”

I stared at him. “Barbed wire to scare away…spirits?”

He nodded. “Or anything that tries to come in again.”

I chuckled inwardly. I almost laughed. But I didn’t have the heart. Poor Charlie. He meant well. He was trying to fight something no one understood.

Then the landlady called a priest.

He arrived on the third day, swinging a brass censer that reeked of frankincense and fervor. During the blessing, he declared: “I cast out all evil spirits! I drive them away from this place!”

I was at work and missed the ceremony. That night, my daughter– visibly annoyed—commented, “Is it just me or was he scolding the ghost?”

She later described the whole thing as “weirdly aggressive,” like the priest believed Eric had done something evil and invited something dark into the place.

We did have a good laugh that evening, though, as we ate a pot of bland soup. Apparently, the priest had forgotten to bring enough salt for his exorcism and ended up emptying our salt container, sprinkling every last grain into the corners of the apartment complex.

But the absurdity didn’t erase the ache.

A week later, the two hammocks swayed empty under the new lights, and the barbed wire sat coiled in a corner, half-installed. The compound was silent again, unnervingly so. The neighbors who had heard us screaming that night later admitted they had bolted their doors, thinking we were being robbed.

That, too, stayed with me. We cry for help, and the world hides behind deadbolts.

It made me think. Depression doesn’t scream. It whispers. It slinks behind closed doors and lit-up phone screens, hides inside stooped shoulders, long silences, and pulled-up hoodies. We don’t always see it. We can’t always name it. And sometimes, we don’t realize we were standing right next to it—right above it—until it’s too late.

It’s strange how the death of someone you never knew can undo you. How it burrows in your chest and refuses to leave.

I never spoke to Eric. I don’t know what games he played, what music he liked, or what he dreamed of. But I know that something inside him hurt more than anyone saw.

But I know this: That night, while he stood in the dark and tied a belt to steel, three souls slept soundly above him — warm, safe, unaware.

Maybe that’s the most haunting part. The way life and death can live so closely, separated only by wood and concrete, and a silence we never meant to keep.

Would it have made a difference if I’d said hello that day outside the gate? If I had mustered the courage to look him in the eye and say something—anything? Maybe. Maybe not

Maybe it’s not about what we could have done, but what we learn to do next.

Because life doesn’t warn us. It just moves, with or without us. And sometimes, it leaves a hammock swaying gently in the place where someone once stood, unseen.

_______________________________

Maria Teresa Q. Torres, 60, is a retired teacher, technical writer, and former NGO worker from Aklan, now based in Dumaguete. She has served as resource person for the Creative Writing Workshop of Museo it Aklan and has been a trainer in several writing seminars in her home province. She is currently dabbling in children’s stories and sci-fi adventures for young adults, featuring her four grown children– Lean, Miguel, Isabel, and Kim – and their beloved dog, Babur, as story characters.