Words by Ashe Villena and Alicia Salva
Graphics by Bianca Del Rosario
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Alicia: “God Loves You, But Not Enough to Save You!”

On one of the walls of the walkway above Aurora Boulevard and Katipunan Avenue, there’s a line from an Ethel Cain song called “Sun Bleached Flies” graffitied. Scrawled in black ink, it reads “God loves you! But not enough to save you!” I had that song on loop the month my Grandpa died, the artist’s voice and the slightly off-key piano filling the awful silence in my apartment and the gaping void in my head.

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I found out that he passed on a rainy Thursday through a simple message from my sibling: “Can you call Mom, please?” After the call, I sat at my kitchen table, feet up on the chair and chin resting on my knees, unable to control the tears trickling out of my eyes. My Grandpa Fred and I were never close. I don’t think I ever had a full conversation with him, aside from the obligatory hellos and goodbyes. But I thought about how hard he worked in a country that perpetually labeled him as foreign, how the white doctors put off his concerns for months, and how he passed away on a surgical bed, alone.

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Ten days later, I received news of another death, this time from a GoFundMe link posted on social media by my classmate from middle school. After a frantic search through my old photos, I found a picture of her and I with some other friends on Halloween dated to seven years ago, squeezed together on a couch with wide smiles. I remember studying the pixels on my screen, trying to remember the last conversation we had but failing to do so.

Suddenly, one of the highlights of my college experience, my semester abroad, became one of the worst times of my life. I was completely alone, sixteen hours away from my family in the United States, and learning about funeral preparations from my phone screen. Assignment due dates slipped by, messages went unanswered, and dirty clothes piled up in all corners of my apartment. I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to tell people that I wasn’t falling behind on purpose. It was just the overwhelming weight of both grieving and being alone.

The next line in Cain’s song is “So, baby girl, good luck taking care of yourself.” It seems a little dramatic to say that music saved me, let alone a song from an album about a girl who gets murdered and cannibalized. But maybe, after hearing it over and over enough times, I could eventually drag myself out of bed, click “play again” on the song, and keep trying.

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Ashe: Panghihinayang

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Thinking about grief is difficult for me, but not in the sense that it’s uncomfortable. It’s in the sense that I come up blank.

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I believed it was not my place to talk about such a matter, for how could I claim to lose those whom I never truly had in the first place? My grandparents and aunt passed before I was even born. Acquaintances, gone too young, were fleeting butterflies—briefly in contact when branching out, never intertwined in the deeper roots of my life.

I thought I felt numbness, then it hit me: You don’t think of feelings. Grief should be extracted from the deepest of one’s entrails, not off the top of one’s head. Sadness, mourning, and countless simple English words are right on the surface, but I am unsated with wading. I dive deep, with nothing to bog me down nor save me. I drown in cold water, but it is what I deserve for never being doused. It is only then that I get those who curse in Filipino when flailing in contrast to their usual composed English. I get those who resort to gesticulating when they are grasping for straws. Now, I get why the word that encapsulates my feeling of grief felt like it was at the tip of my tongue.

It has always been at the tip of my mother tongue. My grief is panghihinayang.

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Panghihinayang means regret, but regret is too shallow of a translation to express what this makes me feel. Panghihinayang is when I barely even grasp something before it already slips through my fingers. Panghihinayang is when the threads snap before they even begin to weave themselves into a lifeline. Filipinos feel panghihinayang over what could have been, not what once was.

I randomly stumbled upon Canadian artist Gail Sibley’s oil pastel artwork, “Farewell (For Ray)”, and it evoked within me panghihinayang, not just in the piece itself but also in the process of making it.

My life after loss is translated through the haphazard, smudged pastel strokes: raw, messy, spontaneous, and layered upon itself, over and over. It goes on and on, until vague human outlines emerge atop—a bleary backdrop for these figures. When traces of past people loosely connected to me bring themselves to the forefront, the noise of busyness is muted. I hear only the small voice of panghihinayang buzzing in my ear and reminding me that people will inevitably remain the most important layer at the end of it all. 

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Nonetheless, it is underneath all the layers that lies one of the most striking points of the work: a scrawl of “It’s so fucking dark in here.” When you dive into the depths of your being and encounter something as raw as grief, all pretentiousness gets thrown out the window. What is left is humanity, and my humanity reveals one thing: its hollowness, with the lack of enough memories and opportunities to make thereof with people gone too soon. The light in my life is not enough to illuminate their faces slowly dissipating from my memory.

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At this point in my life, grief is not an enemy. Grief is an unpretentious acquaintance who kills the mood when he passes by but otherwise gets buried until he’s in the shadows. He reminds me of a childhood friend from a lifetime ago whom I vaguely remember. He reminds me of family members whose superhero stories were never my salvation to experience. He reminds me of panghihinayang.
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Ang tunay na pighati ay panghihinayang.

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Alica and Ashe: Threads of Grief

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I am Alicia, a Filipino-American exchange student who has already ended her semester in the Ateneo.

I am Ashe, a born and raised Filipina who is currently a sophomore in the Ateneo. 

We grieve over threads cut too soon before they are woven. We grieve over subconsciously keeping someone in the backseat of our minds—only for them to be slammed to the front when the car crashes.

At first, everything appeared almost pitch-black, be it under the dim orange lighting of the Aurora-Katipunan walkway or the “so fucking dark” base layer of the pastel canvas. Then, we learned to sit with the colors. We saw that momentary dimness does not doom us to perpetual darkness.

Despite the looping “not enough” at the start, the “good luck” that follows motivates us to keep holding on until the end. For all our panghihinayang on the surface, the “It’s so fucking dark in here” underneath challenges us to seek light in the present.

This is not a complete romanticization, in the same way that grief is not absolute morbidity. It is in this paradox that we find how our grief is real. We are bound amidst brokenness by our experiences that remind us of life moving forward as much as they remind us of death in the past.

Wherever you are, wherever you come from, grief is a bridge that connects people with each other, and art is the block that builds its foundation.

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Ashe Villena is a BS Psychology sophomore at Ateneo de Manila University. Forever a humanities and social sciences girl at heart, she channels her time off the academic (and gala) grind through her affinity with writing — from literature to pop culture and everything in between.

Alicia Salva is an international exchange student from the United States, majoring in English and Sociology. She spent the first semester of AY 2024-2025 in Ateneo before returning to the States last December.