Right now, i’m on board a jeepney and have just passed SM Marikina. I’m on my way home. The sun isn’t scorching hot, the sky is overcast but the weather’s far from cool. The dust and the carbon monoxide stirs the air into a poisonous mixture. I’m wearing a yellow longsleeved shirt that goes down to my knuckles. It’s my favorite kind of clothing. Makes me feel embraced and unneeding of a human embrace.
Right now, they’re drilling the gravel road. I don’t know their cause — whether to slow the traffic, to fix the hydraulics, or just to release people’s taxes. Whichever way it really goes, the highway dust will remain the same as well as the senselessness of traffic. The highway will not change its role of being the mere passage where i spend hours of my life daydreaming in public while fixing the ends of my hair, oblivious of everything in the world revolving.
Last semester, suicidal thoughts dominated my road trip thoughts. In the whole more-or-less an hour and a half trip, I would decide whether i should hang myself or jump off a building or shoot myself. That wasn’t just because I was taking Physics and Calculus, no. Those were the (coincidentally) rainy days and I didn’t feel I was even anywhere. Sorry for being vague, but its is the vagueness of those days that holds the very sense of those days.
And yes, “vague” is what I feel now. It’s as if every color in front of my eyes has the same hue, every sound is indistinct from one another, and the gray warmth is all around my arms and body and i can no longer tell my skin from my clothes. If a murderer runs into this jeepney right now and threatens to kill us all, i wouldn’t even flinch. The weather is too gray and hot, aggravated by my shirt, and it’s too much to feel anything, given the episode this lunch time.
My mask was melting and dripping from my chin. I hate to say that i do wear a mask, but hell, if i’m not wearing a mask, then how is it supposed to happen that my face feels suddenly bare? That i feel splashed by a drum of ice water? As if suddenly, all of my mischief are running to me, shaking me, walking me up from an incubus that i’d designed for myself? This fun is not fun anymore. It’s nice to play with fire, but see, the rest of your house is being burned.
Was I just being brave? Or too brave? Being too brave to step out into a world that’s filled with daggers and spears? What was i thinking, that eventually, by dangerous pleasures and erasing the lines of traditional morality, i’m going to achieve happiness? I’m not saying that I am guilty of any of my mischief, it’s just that, the fun is not fun anymore. I’m sober from last night’s drink-all-the-alcohol-you-can party. Yes, sober is the right word. Drunk from shallow happiness that costs me my name and my dignity (if there’s such). It is easy to say, it’s just a game, bitches! but nobody sees the cold and painful color after the blind bliss has ended and the new day – sobriety – has dawned.
I’d bet that behind every date-rape smile of people in their pictures, when they’re looking for fun, has an equivalent blank face on some nights when the realization of being alone in life and unloved hits them like mushrooms. In my case, I write monologues like this. And if i weren’t in the cafeteria earlier today, when i read the user comments that just totally pissed me off, i’d cry — not in despair, not in pity for myself, but in anger towards the whole world. Life is neither fair nor unfair — there’s no fair or unfair in random shit. It’s innocent.
It’s out of the blue that a man named Hitler was born. It’s also out of the blue that Marx happened to be conceived by a woman who didn’t consider abortion. It’s even out of the blue that we all lived. Gets? The world right now is just a product of great inventors and theorists and sly men that held power…out of the blue. Well some of you may be historians or political fanatics, and with disdain, say that, “Imperialism doesn’t happen out of the blue, Mia! And it will definitely defeat itself and we’ll fall into Socialism.”
I’m no political theorist, but I have a clue on what Imperialism is. It’s the dominant economic/political system that explains the misfortune of all misfortunate people. It’s a label for the collective ends of all the “misdoings” of randomly born “bad” people. (I subscribe to Hobbes, by the way, and the quotation marks are inspired by Machiavelli.) “Imperialism” is a term coined by geniuses who tried to make sense of all the randomness, by looking at events through a timeline, then writing a manifesto about it. Describe how’s the weather so far, and exclaim that the stink today is caused by the shit that came out yesterday. The whole place is being polluted, let’s clean the shit!
I once asked where all the hierarchy came from. I was told, History. How does history happen? Life, aka randomness. But no. Too vague an answer. Gullible people are born to be gulled – hierarchy explained.
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