The alarm blares. The arm jerks and thrashes about searching for the source of the annoyance—it’s reflexive. Once the high-pitched, Japanese-anime voice—just too cute to be tolerated—has been silenced, the arm quickly retreats to the coziness found beneath the comforter. But the Kawaii Tiger’s done its job: the mind feels the veil of slumber lifting. Somewhat alert, the body senses a command telling it to rise. Though, unlike Lazarus who heard the sweet voice of Jesus inviting him to rise from the dead, it’s less spiritual and more physiological the need that compels the body to rise…
…The hand reaches over to the faucet, turns it; and the water dwindles down to a drop. The hand again reaches, this time over to the towel rack, grabbing a lime-green towel; and the body is dried. Across from the fogged up mirror, an opaque image of a person stands. The hand wipes away the fogged up mirror revealing a clearer image of a naked torso and a familiar face.
I know him. I know everything about him. He hates his widow’s peak, the bump on the bridge of his nose, his thin eyebrows, the red scars populated on his neck and face forever left behind to remind him of the cruelty of adolescence. But more than the topography of his skin is known to me; I know his heart. It trembles when shadow of rejection creeps towards him and mourns when he’s cast aside. It dances when glimmer of acceptance shines on him and rejoices when he’s embraced. Though lately the heart believes, as surely the end of days in upon us, the shadow hauntingly corporeal. And it fears. The heart fears that it’d no longer be able to protect him from a fall, and in turn, itself from getting shattered into many pieces. Yet buried deep within fear, his heart is struggling, each beat yearning for him to dig out of despair, to seek the ray of hope. It’s calling out for him to rise.
But at this very moment the man reflected in the mirror turns his ears away from his beating heart as he has always done. Yes, he chooses yet again to set aside each heartbeat that commands him to live freely and rise truly as Lazarus has. Instead as he continues on with his morning routine his mind recites today’s to-do list. He needs to go to the dry cleaner’s to pick up his coat, he notes, while brushing his teeth. He muses, while fixing his hair, whether he should call her to see if she’d want to lunch together. Adjusting his Windsor knot, he remembers, the check his mom gave him needs depositing…
…Now, you see him on the street heading towards the subway station. You note that he’s stepped out to a brand new day looking spiffy, dapper even. But look around, look at the masses in motion, the law of entropy in action. Take a look even at this queue of people: here, one’s taking a look at his watch as he’s shifting his weight from one foot to the other; there, one’s busily recounting to her attentive friend, as she flings her arms about, what adorable thing the apple of her eye did the night before; oh, there, one’s about to keel over—the poor man sure didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Oh, but do make sure you don’t lose him. There! here’s him passing by the bus queue. Yes, he’s still headed the same direction. See him weave around an oncoming group of Catholic school kids, deftly executed. But turn around, look at that man, the man who’s equally dapper if not more so than him, closing in from behind, nimbly swerving to the left, avoiding a near collision with a school kid—a graceful save—and ultimately catching up… and then, the man, passing him by.
In this little slice of life, a life that’s urban yet isolating, remarkable but mundane, a life that he is a part of, in it, he is neither a lone diamond lodged among coals in a mine, nor a single pebble mixed in among rice grains in a bowl. Although he aspires to sparkle, for recognition’s flicker, perhaps as brightly as the ancient heroes immortalized in the night’s sky, to remain a glimmer in the eye of posterity, for the beauty he hopes to create, for the gift he yearns to give—even though he aspires—he knows the loftiness of his dreams. Mediocrity has always been his curse. And although he dreads the likely possibility of being spat out, to erosion’s indiscrimination, perhaps as to drift like a dust in the wind, to remain only a forgettable irritant in no one’s mouth, for the gift he has taken, for the beauty he has hoarded—even though he dreads—he knows the silliness of his nightmares. Ordinariness has always been his blessing. In this little slice of life, he is just average.
But of all oddities, in his mind, he is a nail, sticking out, sorely needing to be hammered in; he stands out, not as a diamond of his dreams, nor as a pebble of his nightmares, but in forms he deems unworthy. Though he may not like it, in every way, they identify him; these forms have shaped the man he is today. As a photo that sits on a bookshelf reveals, like a fossil evidence supporting evolution, a boy of seventeen, a boy in transition. A boy, whose mirthless smile shrouds frustration, whose vacant gaze conceals anger, a boy, slowly suffocating under frustration and anger—flailing his arms wildly, he is getting buried, deep beneath the cascading sand of an hourglass.
Frustration, stemming from simple acts of ignorance, such as the one, two years before he’s frozen inside the frame… A car screeches, pulling up next to him and his friends sauntering towards the subway station. The windows, of the driver and the passenger behind her, slide down, exposing the faces of four, well-groomed women. An uneasy silence. Then suddenly, as their red lips part, a barrage of cacophony spews out, each meaningless morpheme, a bullet cartridge, formed with a bullet head of the “ch” consonant, on a casing holding gunpowder of all the many vowels in the English language, comically inflected, supported by a rim of the finishing “ng” consonant. With an uproarious sound of laughter billowing out, the car quickly pulls away, ending the assault, leaving behind the carnage. The boys were the victims of their form—and he wishes, once again, for nothing more than to shed his skin.
When his mother, drunk and crying, unveils a secret she’s hidden from her only son, on the eve of his pubescence, she tames his rebellious bent, replacing it with sympathetic obedience—all for the sake of being rescued, this shunned woman rests on him all of her life’s hope; also, when his mother unleashes the truth, she sows in him anger—bottled up, restless, and growing. Indeed, anger, directed towards his sinful father, but tempered and locked up for his mother’s sake, only festers—the wounds never healing, the disease ever spreading. So whenever his mother, noticing a disagreeable behavior in him, something as insignificant as how he sighs, compares him to his father, it is like a scab being picked open, exposing the raw flesh to new pathogens of anger. He’s angry that he has retrograded in his life journey to be nothing like his father; he’s angry that he can’t ever seem to grow into his own man. He is a failure, who is ultimately incapable of breaking away from the form he inherited.
He is a product of the forms—uncontrollable and immutable. So as he descends down the stairs into the subway station, while an echo of angry voice, piercing through the murmurs of shoes clicking and clocking against the concrete, fills the cavernous hall, he, with the white, iPod earphones snuggly nestled in his ears, the volume turned high up, silences the on-folding drama between an irate customer and a fed-up MTA agent safely tucked behind her booth. Like her, he must have a glass wall, because by separating himself from the world, the world that has everything he wants and nothing he needs, by divorcing himself from that world, he can be free from the oppressive hold of frustration and anger, and be left numb. Detachment has become his only weapon of choice.
To be continued...
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