It was the week before the last day of class. Everyone in the school was running around- here, there, upstairs, downstairs. Everyone procrastinated the whole year that they only had one week to finish their requirements- the students pass their projects to get their final grade, the teachers give their final grade to the projects.
The noise the people collectively made created a buzz that almost seemed like they were bees in a gigantic beehive on the first day of summer. But it was far from summer, the whole place was cold and barren. The morning was gloomy, and color gray, the kind of gray you see in the smoke that comes out of the muffler of a very old car or jeepney. All around the place the noise created a steady din it was almost like silence- like you were deaf. Everywhere, the people were moving too fast that they looked like streaks of black paint smeared on gray canvass. The trees were so still they looked like they are statues of people long dead.
If you try really hard, hard enough to notice, you will see gaggles of teenage girls talking about what they were going to wear to the dance. While you will hear packs of boys, oozing with hormones, talking in their voices that every so often, as all pubescent boys do, pitch to a shrill. The boys will laugh at themselves while the girls giggle at the boisterous sight. No one was ever still in the school, yet somehow, no one really ever moved.
The place was dead. It was dead for a long time. But nobody felt it. Or nobody cared. Whichever, the place was devoid of that, which we call “Life”. And, as if to complement it, the breeze reeked with the unpleasant odors of the city.
Its death was not sudden. It was a slow death. In fact, it was very slow that it was more like torture. It would have welcomed a car accident or a lightning bolt or even the guillotine (if only it was possible). But the school died a slow death, and the pain numbed the senses of everyone that was in it. For the people in it, the hollow feeling was more than commonplace.
He felt like he was watching the muted blue screen of a television. And while he stared, its glare was reflected by his cold face. The wind was mushy and unpleasant, this he noticed. He watched the old woman by the sidewalk waiting for a jeepney. He saw how the cloud covered the sun and how his classmates talked with their hands in their pockets. He knew. He knew that it was unbearable. He knew that he had to pack his things and drive south (or north, or east, wherever the road leads).
She was on her way home when he saw her. She was wearing a pink shirt under a black coat and was carrying a bag full of dirty laundry. He loved the pink shirt. Secretly, he was in love with it ever since he saw her that first day in Math class. He loved it because it looked good on her.
She waved hi to him as he passed by on his car. And because she was wearing her pink shirt, he had to stop and say goodbye:
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“A week away from here,” he said “I want to say goodbye.”
“Say goodbye then,” she said, matter-of-factly, “but will you take me with you?”
“I was thinking the same thing.” He answered.
Just like that, she threw her bag of dirty laundry in the backseat of his car and hopped in the passenger seat. He presumed that she knew where he was going. But nobody knew really. They were bad at planning. They drove north, and south, sometimes northwest then southeast or down and up and in circles.
Whenever they needed anything, they stopped in gas stations along the road. There they fill the car with more gas. But mostly they went in to buy iced tea or coffee and occasionally, if there were available, french-fries. They had been doing this for two days when he realized he was tired of drinking stale drip coffee and eating moist and soggy french-fries.
“The fries and the coffee taste like where we came from,” he said.
“It is like we went away only to realize that we’re going to eat the same food and drink the same water,” she said.
She was a member of the school’s dance troupe. Everyone liked watching her dance during school programs. And exactly for the same reason a lot of people didn’t like her- for such is always the case when you are in a dead place. Everyone thought they knew each other, everyone thought they knew her. But what they didn’t know is that when she dances alone in her room- that is when she was most beautiful.
He wrote poems on his notebook. Poems he did not let anybody read. He was that person you see at the back row corner seat of your classroom reading a book. Or he was that guy who you find in the school yard scribbling in frenzy. Nobody truly understood him. In fact, most of the other students avoided him. He always had this desperate look on his face- like a boy who lost his favorite pen. It may be because he is a boy still looking for his favorite pen.
At first glance, you would think that they look good together or that they are parts of a coherent whole. But they did not complete each other. Not much because they needed completing but because they were always searching and that is their fault. It is their doom.
Sometimes, they were convinced that even together they still felt lacking. That whatever they accomplished ended up revealing more defects. And that what they became together asked more questions than it could answer.
On some days, the world had too many wholes, that it needed the breaking apart. For while every person strives to reach that which makes them feel whole, the world breaks them apart into smaller pieces. The world can’t stand wholeness. They did not know this or they refused to know.
But they had tried. You could not blame them for not trying, because they had tried. And when they tried, it was spectacular. And it was not easily breakable. They fit like letters on a mailbox, like an oddly flavored milkshake after waiting for each other on a parking lot. They were strangely beautiful; they were like a work of art. They were what the painter would have written or what the poet would have sung.
They both know they wanted to escape but didn’t know where to go.
She wanted to escape the people that loved and hated her. She wanted to dance in a room to herself. Everyone was dull and predictable. It was uninspiring. So she had to go away: without delay.
He was an observer, and what he observed he wrote down on his notebook. He wanted to understand everything, and he despised uncertainties. He lived for secrets you hide beneath the passenger seat of your car or hidden inside the breast pocket of your pink colored shirt. He was somewhat of a pocket himself, a pocket without a shirt, which is why he is always looking for something- searching for his favorite pen. And so when, in the vastness of his world, he found something that resembled his pen he rejoiced like the way a child dances around after opening his birthday gift and finding out it was exactly what he wished for.
She was his secret sleeping in the passenger seat- so innocent and refreshing. This is at least up until she woke up and complained about how cold it is. She touched the soft flesh of his fingers on the gear stick- she was holding his cold hand while he drove; out of pity or frustration she leaned towards him and gave him a cold kiss on his right cheek.
She didn’t like his eagerness to look at the mountains and the trees as they passed them. But he had faith that the trip could fill a void inside them, and in the process, could help them discover something within them they did not know were there before. But the epiphanies and revelations did not come quick. Unlike in the movies, lives were neither fixed nor broken in a span of two hours and thirty minutes. Things weren’t as ideal. Ideal was not even expected. Ideal was a dead end. So there was nothing else to do but turn on the radio and search for that music that will make you forget, and that was what she did. She searched for music that was familiar, music that made her dance. However, she didn’t find what she wanted to hear. So she turned to him with a look that’s almost wanting and peaceful at the same time, instantly he knew that she was expecting him to say the things she wanted him to say. But while he knew she was expecting something, he did not know what it is.
The despair on her face killed him. In a moment of panic, he smiled a smile neither he nor she recognized. He knew she was in despair; the reaction came naturally. Nobody knew what it meant. And she did not ask.
“Look at the stars tonight.” he said, the first thing that came into his mind while he tried to struggle with a sort of guilty feeling. He always turned to the stars when he didn’t have answers. “They look like they are chasing us.”
“Words, bloody words.” she said in a caustic tone. Although, it was also just the first thing she thought of while she struggled with despair.
He didn’t hear her or he purposefully didn’t hear her. They drove on and passed through valleys, curves, hills, avenues and boulevards. Until there were no longer trees and thus neither boulevards. Until there were no longer paved roads and thus no longer avenues, Until there were no longer ups and downs, nor lefts and rights. There was nothing not even radio. There was a vast nothingness.
They drove on. While he drove she watched him, her eyes didn’t flinch nor wink. She stared at him because she thought he was beautiful. She stared with her eyes that searched and waited. And when she got tired she slept.
When she slept he looked at her and knew that he had to stop on the side of the road. He watched her while she slept. He watched her curl up her body into a ball in the passenger seat. He watched her blushing fingers warm her cold toes. He watched her mouth open like a baby asleep. He watched her lips curl outward and begging. He watched her eyes that were shut intently. This was the reason he can’t quit smoking cigarettes.
He smoked his cigarettes while he looked at her. He didn’t understand what he felt, but he is sure it was not lust, yet as intense, and it was not anger yet as merciless. But the way she placed herself within the car, it was so extremely aesthetic, and for that reason alone, he wanted to make out with her. And so after he put out his cigarette, and threw the butt outside the window, he leaned towards her, careful not to wake her up and disturb the harmony that is her, and kissed her half-open lips. He sighed a heavy sigh. And he took a deep breath as if it was his first. Everything was so brutally beautiful it was maddening. It was so maddening; the exasperation is like the scream of a banshee- deafening and morbid. It was so loud, it woke her up.
When she woke up, she saw him petrified by the realization. A drop of tear fell on his right cheek.
“You are crying. Why?” she asked. She wondered because she didn’t understand, she was asleep and just woke up.
“You make me die,” he told her; he knew well all her dancing didn’t fill the void.
The car in the middle of the road, the moon over it, the mountain over the horizon, and the lone star in the night sky- everything stood still. The universe needed it. And their kiss was epic and tragic, and fifty million words do not suffice to describe it. It is one of those moments you would spend your whole lifetime describing but without luck. But neither the mountain nor the car nor the moon and star shed a single tear. After the pause, everything moved on like nothing happened- just like before. She was a shirt but she didn’t have his missing pen. Maybe because he can’t accept that he is a pocket or that the search will never fill him. He was waiting for coffee that will never wake him up and French fries that will never be enough.
A week away from where they started, their tears kept on flowing. As the day went by, the sound of the tears falling on the ground more and more resembled the roar of a thousand waterfalls.
“Our tears remind me of a storm,” he said, “listen to it.”
“Yes, and our faces look like rain clouds,” she said.
They both smiled at their realization. Their smile was so warm it made the windshield fog. Her smile was one that will make a poet faint, while his will make a plumber look for a castle under the kitchen sink.
It was something you see everyday but never noticed. It was a divine moment, deeply thought, but never rational. It was never ideal. Ideal was not even expected. And unlike in the movies, everything was neither fixed nor broken.
END
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