move

i was trying to re-learn how to drive when i wrote this one year ago. i didn't write this for me but it pretty much sums up what i feel right now.

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So this is how a bullet feels.

When I move, certain things appear blurred. The trees, the billboards, the lampposts, the sidewalk vendors.

The more I speed up, the less real these things become. It makes me dizzy sometimes. Like whirling inside an artist’s head, yes, that’s exactly how speeding makes me feel. As if the street is all so suddenly a moving spectacle: a mass of shiny tinsels moving in circles, a riot of colors chasing after their shapes, a barrage of shapes multiplying in slow motion, a parade of scribbles and doodles and lines that don't make sense.

But I do know they make sense, despite certain conspicuous differences in appearances. That smudge of emerald and chocolate is a tree. That whiff of white is a billboard. The recurring diagonal lines are the sturdy lampposts piercing the heavens. And that heap of redundant shapes is a heap of woman flesh selling cigarettes on cue. Ah, those few hallowed moments of fantasy, they ebb and flow, you know, so you have to enjoy them while they last.

You know you’re old when all things make sense to you. It’s not because you’re wiser, really, just older. Unlike the normal process of abstraction, fantasies do not necessarily give you the right, sensible, ready-to-eat answers. They give you, instead, more questions, things to chew over and over, which are, most of the time, more enlightening and gratifying than the answers in the pipeline. Answers give concrete directions; questions give endless possibilities. Supernatural promises. Deeper wonderments. Like when I move, I always wonder how I look like from the eye of a tree, a billboard, a lamppost or a street vendor. And if they wonder, too, who among us has really moved: they or I.

I wonder, too, if motion is an illusion, a concept used to describe the sudden absence of stillness, of the familiar constancy, of the perceived normalcy. Like darkness, just like darkness.

On second thought, maybe to move is to be actually at rest. If you take into account the earth’s incessant revolution since the beginning of time, it would be easy to argue that even when you stand still, you still move. When you’re stuck in a traffic gridlock, you still move. When you’re pinned behind your desk for hours, you move. When you’re flat on your back and strapped to the hospital bed, you move. When you sob soundlessly in one little corner, you move. When you while away in some forgotten forest as you contemplate about your life, you move.

Maybe the only way to achieve perfect stillness is when you move with the earth. You see, there’s always a good reason to be tired.

So when people pat you on the back and nudge you to move on, what do they really mean? To stop swimming in your own thoughts and join them? How should you respond when you’ve been on the move all your life without your consent, and all you are asking right now is for the world to slow down a bit? If you could get off once in a while, what wouldn’t you give?

Of course man has never stopped tinkering with the possibilities of this, of literally leaving the world we know behind. According to an Inquirer article, all it takes now is $35 million and you’re off, literally. Imagine being your own satellite, the blurb said. Who says money can’t buy happiness? There, your own weight wouldn’t hurt you; the law of gravity doesn’t apply in most regions. I even doubt that your wristwatch could still dictate your daily destiny. There, fashion is functional along with everything else. There, you’ll realize that the things that used to exhilarate or agitate you down here are minuscule and hardly visible, even insignificant. When you think about it, $35 million is such a small price to pay for having liberty in its purest form at your beck and call.

Of course the harsh facts will always find a way to kick you in the shin and pull you back to the gritty realities of life. First, the moon and the stars are more like the cosmic versions of predators that feed upon wayward astronauts than the diamonds in the sky you read in romantic poetries. Second, what are the chances that you or I would find $35 million lying on the sidewalk? Nada. God, I can’t even afford to cross continents yet, what made me think I could skywalk one day? So, to hell with space traveling. Besides, the earthbound thrills still work for me. And the nothingness or somethingness of movement still affords me that unbearable ecstatic energy.

Imagine such great power within my grip. The power to make rapid strides and be somewhere else in a matter of minutes, even seconds. I’ve never been allowed to move this fast before. I had asthma, and every form of physical activity used to be life threatening for me. Even as my condition improved, my frail form would not withstand a hostile environment. Things are different now though. I got fat, but that’s beside the point.

Strange thing, motion is. When I move, the whole world becomes smaller and smaller. As if distances are suddenly nonexistent. The great ideas that once moved mankind become nothing more than shapes and colors. As if they’ve always been just shapes and colors. And I, I become something else. I become the machine and the machine me. I become an invincible four-wheeler—constantly buffeted by the uneven asphalt and hazardous street life, but finding ways to drive on and move with the earth in spite of it all.