Confessions of a Misanthrope — Part 1
Lately, I've been getting the feeling that there's something that I should do. Something inside that's urging me to act. But I don't know what I should be doing. How can you even know what to do if you haven't got the slightest idea of what that thing is that's urging you to act? It's like I have a mission that was told to me a long time ago, probably before I was born, but I've since forgotten. Something that God or some spirit or deity told me. My life was probably headed toward the fulfillment of such a mission, from which I've strayed ever since. Or perhaps there was no mission at all. Just my own self-inflicted delusions. Still, I feel an acute sense of urgency, of the necessity of what I have to do, whatever that is. What is being demanded of me? What am I supposed to do with this miserable fucking existence? Who or what gave me this nagging feeling to do something? Why am I here? Why was I born? Why is there stuff, and why not rather nothing?
Such were my typical morning ruminations.
It was towards the end of May, a day like any other. Except that this day was exceptionally hot. It may have been the hottest day of my whole life. I awoke with sweat all over my body as I mulled those questions to myself. I went to get up from the bed, and then I sat back again. I asked myself another question: Is it worth getting up today? It's another Monday. It makes no difference whether I'm at home or at school. Nothing is changed or accomplished by my being anywhere. So it makes no difference whether I go to university today or not. And yet, I felt like I should go on this particular day. It happens like this every single time. Against all reason, I am moved to get up. From this feeling, I got up and went to shower.
I had no rational basis for this decision to get up. It was just that I irrationally felt that there was something that I should do today, or better yet, something that I should experience. I continued ruminating over it as I showered. Though the morning was excruciatingly hot, the shower was violently cold. It was freezing. It was the kind of shower where you can't stand to bathe under the cold water for too long. You feel a kind of emptiness, loneliness, and abject void in the cold embrace of the water. It was a feeling of despair. This is why I hate cold showers. They made me feel genuine anguish. I don't know why. Perhaps I had a traumatic experience with cold showers when I was younger. Whatever it was, the cold touching my skin made me lose all hope for that moment, and so I would rhythmically drift in and out of the range of the cold shower so that I could bathe but not experience for too long the lonely dread of the cold as it bound in my skin.
As I got out of the shower, I realized I was already running late. So I hastily put some clothes on, chucked all the necessary things I needed for the day in my old and ragged Adidas bag, and went running out of the house.
"You're going already? What about breakfast?" my grandmother shouted at me as I ran towards the street.
"I'll eat at school. I'm late." I replied.
"Have a safe trip," she shouted as I was turning a corner. The commute to the Makati campus of Mapúa University from Valenzuela was tiring, to say the least. Not as tiring if you were coming from Cavite, but it was comparable since Valenzuela is said to be the Cavite of the North, situated right at the edge of the National Capital Region. My commute consisted of tricycles, jeepneys, and trains. At the first jeep I rode, I saw the faces of people from different walks of life—students, gas station workers, families going to the province, and teachers riding the 6:30 am commute to school. I have a class at 7:30, and it takes about one and a half hours to reach the campus through this route. I knew I was going to be late.
My thoughts centered on nothing in particular. The people in the commute usually bore me, and I shut off the world through the music I was playing through my earbuds. I listened to anything. From Franz Liszt's Piano Concertos to Nirvana's In Utero. Anything to drown the noise of the busy and indifferent world. I listened on as we drove through McArthur Highway, heading towards the LRT Monumento station. Every day, I took the train from the Monumento station, and from there, I got off at Gil Puyat station and then took a jeep from the station to a Shopwise. From there, the university was within walking distance.
As I alighted the Jeepney at Monumento, I saw the hustle and bustle of the great multitude of students, white and blue-collar workers, teachers, and random tourists, all lined up towards the entrance of the station. Since it was 7 am by this point, the line was long, and, as is characteristic of Philippine public transportation, there were some problems with the next train. So not only was there a line to the entrance of the station, but there was also a line towards the gates, and beyond the gates stood the impatient crowd of sweaty commuters all annoyedly murmuring amongst themselves that they were late, while the various staff and security guards assured them that the next train was sure to come empty and soon. As with all promises, this was broken, for the next train didn't come for another 15 minutes, which means in total I waited for over 30 minutes before I finally got on a train.
As I was waiting for the train, my gaze alternated between several things that caught my eye—LED screens advertising Yamaha motorcycles, commuters on the other side of the tracks, the empty tracks themselves with the occasional trash thrown by commuters, and the security dogs that were sniffing for any bomb that was brought inside the gates. For a moment, I fixed my gaze on the tracks. There was something subliminal about the tracks, as if the tracks were almost dreading to say something to me, but couldn't. I was attracted to the train tracks. I wanted to jump in and dance among the debris until such time as the train could come to save me, like it did for Anna Karenina. Such were my fantasies. I knew there was something quite perverted in them, but I indulged in them nonetheless. However, this fantasy at this moment was different. It wasn't mere fantasy. Something was urging me to jump. Or perhaps it would be wrong to say that it was an urge in the active sense. I felt a sense of fatigue, of an indefinable weariness, such that my greatest desire was precisely not to act, to cease maintaining the tension in my body that allowed me to stand up and act, and fall to the ground like a ragdoll, towards the train tracks. To fully withdraw from the world and from human activity. I was inching towards the tracks when the train suddenly came rushing past me. The security guards scolded me for getting too close. Luckily, no one noticed my intent (or lack thereof), their main takeaway being that I was a clumsy kid who happened to be sleepy too.
I didn't know where and when the train came so near, but when it did, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. A jolt to my senses, as it were. I immediately got on the train, squeezed into the great sea of commuters inside, sweat flowing from their brows, and tried to situate myself in a part of the train where I could comfortably stick myself in a corner and stay there for thirteen stations.
The aircon was probably broken. It was particularly hot inside the train, even hotter than it was outside. Within this heat, I was trapped. It was the heat that was not merely produced by the sun but by the warmth emanating from the bodies of every commuter who was stuck in the same situation as I was. Inside the train, it was not particularly quiet but not particularly loud. There were murmurs loud and quiet, reserved and unrestrained. Around me, people were talking about nothing in particular. Non-topics that had absolutely no bearing on their lives or my life. One guy was talking on the phone about a business transaction. Another was also talking on a video call with his half-asleep wife as he mumbled to her what station he was currently on. Beside me, there were two bald-headed men having a serious debate about which phone brand was more reliable. The sheen on their heads reflected the light inside the train. I was more focused on the slight variations of sheens that were produced as a result of the moving bald heads than on the banal conversations they were having, with ridiculous sincerity, about the virtues of an iPhone over a Samsung.
But what business is it of mine to care? I let them talk their meaningless talk, to describe their meaningless lives, inside a meaningless train ride, towards a meaningless destination. These people disgusted me. It was not the kind of disgust that specifically laid contempt on poor or disadvantaged people. It was just a general disgust towards others. Whether rich or poor, man or woman, disabled or enabled, tall or short, stout or petite, they disgusted me. Why do they stand so close? Why is everyone so stuck to each other on this train? Why this closeness when we are all very distant?
To me, the people on the train, and perhaps everywhere, are an indifferent mass. I treat them as a single entity. A mass of people from whom I'm separated, even if they are proximally very close. They are the mass that represents to me the indifferent world. They are representative of that world. Because of that, they each have no face. Their individuality is mashed up in some kind of oneness, portraying a single blank face, a kind of Leviathan in the Hobbesian sense, where all the people constitute the body and face of the Leviathan, and when viewed from afar, it produces one image, an apparition of a face that is faceless, a blank visage. It is a mass that I am not a part of because I am me. And yet, every once in a while, in this train or elsewhere, an individual, a particular face, seeps through this mass. This mass, constituted by individuals somewhere in its body, remains a mass insofar as it appears as one face. Once in a while, this mass is penetrated by something else, by something other than the mass. Out of the indifferent mass, a face appears, not part of that mass face, but a distinct face, distinct from the mass and distinct from myself. In such a situation, the other person emerges, penetrates through this mass, and becomes for me an object of consideration, of contemplation, of admiration, of hate, of love. Such a person I apprehend first in their particular face. I see them, I feel something for them, whether repulsion or attraction. I consider their face, their gait, their voice, and their gestures. Out of the mass, an other is born, an other person.
One person out of the mass stood out to me on the train today. They certainly won't be the last face I'll see. It was the face of a girl, someone from De La Salle University, apparently. I knew it because she was wearing an ID lanyard from La Salle. She was probably around my age, slightly taller than me. She had medium-length, straight black hair. She wore a plain white blouse with a black pleated skirt, a cheap watch on her left wrist, and a silver ring on her right hand. In addition to this outfit, she wore a small shoulder bag while carrying her large textbooks near her bosom. Her right hand was clinging to her books, while her left hand was tightly gripping the handrail next to the train doors. She was about to get off at the next station. We were currently at Quirino. What first puzzled me about her face was that she seemed distressed. Not in any panic, not in any way in despair. Though, for all I know, she could be in extreme anguish, but that's not what I got from her face. She seemed concerned, in an everyday sort of way. From my perspective, she was a very beautiful girl, her concern giving depth to her beauty as she was mulling over whatever it was that was concerning her. At that moment, she was looking at nothing in particular, just the passing views afforded by the train ride.
But this was not the only thing that set her apart. There were probably a number of pretty and perhaps concerned faces on the train, but they remained inside the mass. What allowed her to cease being a part of this mass and become for me another person was the fact that, for a moment that lasted for God knows how long, a moment that may not even have lasted for two seconds but seemed like an eternity, our eyes met. Frankly, though, this situation was quite far from being clichéd. It wasn't like that. It was something else, something out of the ordinary. It was beyond any words I could describe. Out of her concern, she penetrated the mass and became a face for me to consider. She had black pupils with beautiful eyelashes. Therein, I stared into the deep gaze. What lay deep behind those eyes, I did not know. Various visions came forth as our eyes met—a deep trench under the ocean, a bottomless ravine, the train tracks, the starless night sky. . . I saw something in her, perhaps a momentary flash of her essence, that I can't describe except in these inaccurate and imperfect images. The best way I can succinctly put to words what I saw is to say that they were a depthless depth, a bottomless bottom, a blinding darkness, a non-something. There in her eyes, I saw everything—and because I saw everything, I saw precisely nothing. As she got off, I tried to steal another glance from hers, but she was hurriedly getting off the train. It seems that what concerned her was a matter that didn't have anything to do with me or anyone on the train. Perhaps she was late. Perhaps her concerned look didn't mean anything at all other than the everyday concerns of everyday life. However, at that moment, when our gazes met, it seemed to me that there was something else that was worrying her, something she worried she had to do, but didn't know what. It was a depth feigning superficiality, a bottomless depth feigning a bottom. There was something to her, and I knew it, even if I couldn't put it into words.
As I reached Gil Puyat station, I walked all over the sidewalk, trying to catch a jeepney to ride to the university. At this hour, Jeepneys didn't line up since they were all doing their routes. If I had come earlier, I would've caught a Jeepney easily since they were all lined up waiting for passengers. However, since it was late, all the Jeepneys that usually waited were already filled with passengers. Now I had to catch one that perhaps had a seat or two, rush towards it, and ride it to school. After 10 minutes of walking back and forth like a hysterical fool, I finally caught a jeepney that was semi-empty, but not for too long. It seems that there were like-minded people like me, all frantically searching for a Jeepney that would bring them (however late) to their desired location. In a matter of a minute, we filled that Jeepney to its maximum capacity, and on we went. We were cramped inside the Jeepney. Sweat is flowing everywhere on everyone. I was listening to Moist Vagina when, towards the end of the song, Kurt Cobain was screaming at the top of his lungs:
"Marijuana!
Marijuana!
Marijuana!
Marijuana!"
His screaming drowned out the mass as I quietly gazed at the traffic that lay ahead of us. The combination of the heat, the packedness inside the Jeepney, the traffic, the loud horns raging among the annoyed drivers, and the memory of that gaze gave me a feeling of nausea. I wanted to puke. It was not that my nausea was brought about by a physical cause, but whatever mental strain I felt at that time had poured out into the physical. In other words, the confusion that was created in me made me nauseous, not the heat, nor the sounds, nor the fact that I didn't have breakfast yet. I firmly believe that.
After waiting for almost 30 minutes in traffic, we were nearing Shopwise, where I would alight and walk to university. As I alighted, I was surrounded by a mass of commuters all departing from that single point. We all walked in the same direction, some commuters going inside the Shopwise, some going to the nearby 7-Eleven, and some like me going to the university. By this point, I was not nauseous but just angry. Some irrational anger had somehow welled up inside me. How, why, when, and against whom, I did not know. I was just angry, desperately angry, eager to punch a brick wall, but I controlled myself. As I walked, I was coincidentally listening to Reality Breakdown by No Trend, an American Noise Punk band that espoused very nihilistic lyrics, accompanied by an equally aggressive and nihilistic sound. The song seemed to be externalizing the thoughts I was having this morning:
"Someone tell me what to do
Someone tell me what to do
Someone tell me what to do
Someone tell me what to do."
My anger seemed to find its outlet in this very loud and angsty music. From there, I walked and kept walking. Walking to university, it suddenly dawned on me that everything was pointless, without substance, without aim or origin. I realized the futility of it all. From this realization comes the feeling of fatigue and boredom. Suddenly, everyone around me walking seemed odd, their gait, gestures, voices, their laughs, their petty concerns—all seemed hopelessly futile, lives that were amounting to nothing. Their aimless striving made no sense. I was dumbfounded. This epiphany lasted for a few seconds, after which I recovered my senses and became enslaved once more to the same urge that was forcing me to wake up earlier that morning, and from there, I entered the school.