Marlon’s World

It is when the night falls that loneliness becomes more unbearable. After all the laughter that I’m expected to churn out, the witticisms that are required of me, the smiles and the occasional blushes that have in time been obligatory, I end up dark, lonely and miserable in front of my desk and my stack of books that tell all stories but mine. No one sees this. No one sees how I suffer. The visage is always deceiving, for even I lure myself to thinking that everything is okay.

Solitude can be magnificent as it leads me to think things over. But it is also depressing – nay, it’s probably even fatal – whether when I sit down in a quiet nook or when I converse with a variety of people. I may appear cheerful, aggressive, loud or pensive, but the emptiness is unbelievable: it is as if life passes in front of me in slow motion, and people just walk by without taking notice. Everyone’s playing the same game. Speed is ironically vital; there’s no turning back.

The romantics have always painted how the life of the young bourgeois is. Those from the outside think that it’s all flak. No, it’s not. When you’re struggling to fit in and the only way to do so is to drink the same poison as they are drinking, or wear the same clothes as they are wearing, or act in the same way as they are acting, or desire in the same things they are desiring, you end up pitying yourself, questioning if there’s anyone who thinks otherwise, hoping that people finally take a second look without preconceptions or rejection or lies.

It is thus that I have come to realize how absurd life is. I would like to believe that optimism still works, but the truth is, everything we do is bound to be futile. I always am sad whenever I meet new acquaintances who, after a few hours, would be forever gone. It’s true. No matter how many “Catch you later” or “See you soon” I say, I somehow know that it will be the last time I see them. It’s the irony of meeting new people. We all want to hold on to them, we all want them to linger. We want to spend silent minutes and noisy hours with them, as if every moment were perpetually the first. But we simply just can’t. We move on. We forget. We let go. We mix up all those faces and features and voices in a cloudy and putrid mass of recollections. We go back to being strangers.

Then I begin thinking about all my chatmates. Whether I am in my legitimate identity or an assumed one, I always feel connected to whoever is online, never mind that everything is absurdly virtual and ephemeral. I wanted to meet a chatmate from Italy or from Argentina, or a “fan” who said that an article I wrote was excellent, but I just know I can’t. They are not interested to meet me, I’m sure. They are interested in the identity I have created for them. And I cannot begin to imagine how it would be when the day comes that I wouldn’t be able to access my Messenger, lose my password, or meet an untimely death without being able to say goodbye or ask if those many unnamed virtual personas had really loved me. I would just be a registered concept, an idea that was too good to last.

Material things provide for temporary solace. Good food. Nice clothes. A night in a pub. A bottle of rum. But when I come home, wasted, sweaty and drunk, loneliness begins to well from within. It is thus that I come to know that the life I have aspired to have for so long is but an excuse to live and that in the process of working for that ideal, I have committed myself to not being at all free.

I gathered somewhere from the Internet a good quote: it is only when you stop playing that you begin winning the game. This is me right now. I want to stop playing, get out of the court and be the spectator.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.