A Rock Star Two Seats Down

Saturday, October 15, 2011

HE MIGHT be a rock star in an effort to stay on low profile. His hand is over his head as he stares hard at his black Crusader Yearbook 2012 package. He has his head down and does not seem to be moving.

I am tempted to go near and poke him with my pen just to make sure. He has clean cuts all over -- his sand-brown shoes, faded blue jeans, black and thinly white-striped three-fourths sleeves and a curt amount of Afro hair. He looks up, puts his hand under his chin, and stares off into deep space, probably drowned by the overwhelming contents of graduation memorabilia; posterity you cannot undo if you get it wrong. He might be stirring his imagination thinking of what he will be after all this ridiculous time in school. Oh, shush. I’m not judging him. We all do that sometimes.

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After a few centuries for him -- a fruitless three minutes for me -- a tinge of sound breaks his meditation.

From a profusely significant amount of transparent folders, he pulls out a blue one. It reads, Educ 26 Final Paper. Terrifying. He flips through it aimlessly, scanning a few pages, pauses at one, and moves on. When he realizes that his life is a boring one, he dips his hand into his pocket and gets his phone. He undecidedly and unforgivingly attacks the keypad, sporadically arguing with it when a button does not work. He’s probably rummaging through a series of old text messages or playing Snakes. Who knows? Some people still do.

His two friends -- I would assume -- arrive from World War III in the relentless battle to get over and done with the lines in the canteen. They flop down on the benches and sigh loudly with their Sting bottles and pizza pies. He doesn’t mind them and fumbles through his brown Jansport backpack and gets his Titus pen. He begins to scribble on the leaves of his final paper. You can imagine sweat as he gracefully flips to the next page. His two friends are arguing -- pies in hand -- about something inaudible. Don’t drop them, please. There are millions of hungry people in the world.

He shoos them off and continues with his gentle art of handwriting. I am staring at one heck of a text-filled page on his hands. This guy has a lot of things in his head. Imagine him stress his energies on a paper that would dictate his struggles.

He closes the folder, puts it back in the pile, and talks to his friends with verbose actions and begins to explain like an interpreter for the mute. Maybe he isn’t an introvert after all. He continues to furiously fling his hands everywhere as his two listeners finish off their pizzas. He has a seriously weird way of compensating for his initial lack of enthusiasm.

“Congrats sa imong….” Someone has suddenly put the canteen’s volume on full blast. He must’ve won something. Or maybe he is a rock star. I guess I’ll never know. (Francis Borja of Xavier University)