WE CAN FOLLOW THE SUN TILL THE DAYLIGHT IS GONE

Every day, the street a few floors below my apartment window is filled with people, ostensibly from all walks of life. I look at those who pass by the roadside and – always consequently much to my overwrought amazement – I wonder, what are they up to? Where are they going? Who are they meeting? What did they have for lunch? Who might be getting married tomorrow, or next week, or who just had liberated themselves out of an incarcerating relationship? You know, all the possible random questions that might pop out of your head like a probable mathematical model for a strange-looking origami on any given day. On any day when you’re alone and sitting on a broken chair and have no one to talk with.

It is also on these days where I frequently find myself trying to make sense of the world around me. There was once when I spent two hours in the shower trying to figure out why facial expressions such as a smile tend to be universal in nature, whereas other physical gestures such as kisses or handshakes or bows of varying degrees of posture signal different meanings, depending on the sociocultural or geographic setting. In some places, they might not even exist at all. I turned off the shower, dried myself with a clean towel, sat on the toilet seat for a few minutes, and eventually came into the conclusion that although there the are varying levels of social indexicality found in non-verbal means of communication such as body language, eye contact and sign language, we must take the physiology of the human head into consideration. So a smile, as much as it is a form of expression that promotes positive interpersonal relationships, or a sophisticated biological process of muscular contraction and relaxation, is suprasegmentally a part of the human body that helps keep a positive outlook in one’s life, which is crucial in maintaining good health. A smile is, quintessentially, a tool for survival. That’s why everybody knows how to do it. That’s why everybody has the capacity to understand the meaning behind every smile.

But what is a smile, when there is nothing to be happy about? This city is crammed with people and here I am sitting by the window pane whose edges have turned opaque with dirt and hard water. Here I am watching them pass by as if all that the world has to offer me are potholes and dim lights and cold winter snow, bicycles and Sunday newspapers, fire hoses and telephone booths, brisk walks and the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of white-collared workers at the end of a long day from their offices. I look at all of these from the comforts of my room and I feel alone, more alone every day.

Life is a barren desert, a hollow cylindrical container, an empty cup, and the questions and complexities of the world I live in are my daily dose of hot coffee that wakes up my senses in the wee hours of morning – but only strong enough to do just that. No matter how much I try and keep myself busy or make my life productive and worthwhile, the days in general feel just like an endless and dreamless sleep. The existential questions and mysteries of the world accumulate and drift away somewhere else, like clouds in the sky that form overhead and fall down as rain on a faraway, distant town. Time passes by sometimes, though (when luck decides to strike me a little), when a day feels like a timely refuge to the nostalgic past. Some other times, time passes by and offers me a lofty escape to whatever the distant future might hold.

Time offers me a lot of things. And time is what takes them all away from me.

I sit on the broken chair by the window, and smile.