Gravity

June 18, 2008

It’s Sunday and you decide to skip breakfast. You toss and turn over the bed and listen to the wide stretch of typical Sunday morning silence across the dorm’s landing.

Then you look for something inside your cabinet, maybe your cell phone’s charger but nothing in particular really. Your hand then find something hard and glossy, you pick it up and it take no less a millisecond to recognize what it is: your high school yearbook.

You go outside and fill your mug with hot water, then drop a string of tea. You sit by the window clutching the glossy, hard bound book between the curve of your stomach and pulled legs. You light a cigarette for breakfast, sip the tea then you begin to flip the leaf of pages of the long-kept yearbook. You smell the old ages as the aroma of caffeine and nicotine mixes inside your lungs.
 
Mindlessly, you flip the pages in a quick rhythm, sometimes stopping a minute or two at some pages. You wonder why everytime you open this book, you never miss noticing something new, or different. Then you held a minute longer as you arrive at the page of your high school crush. You smile, engulf a lungful of smoke, and then muse. You linger some more, pore over at the details of the picture infront of you, then grin at the thought of power you have over the paper. Now you can look at each others eyes.

Then you continue flipping through the rest of the pages: faces of long-lost friends run like video clips infront of your myopic eyes. Some of them you would barely remember, but the close ones still look familiar. Then something tingles inside, sting of nostalgia perhaps?

Outside of the window, the College of Engineering rooftop beams the sunlight brightly against the cobalt sky. The early birds flee the corrugated roofs everytime the cold morning zephyr blows. What is wrong with this morning?, you ask. There is nothing wrong with this morning, you actually know that. It is even close to perfect.

Then you turn up at the class picture of your Senior year. You are at the middle of the second row, putting on prim and proper convent-bred smile. You are at the center of the four decks of fifty heads all beaming, ethereal happy kind of smiles. The focal of the camera’s lens was perhaps fixed on you, adjusted at your convenience.

But as you examine at the picture closely now at some distance, you realize that all these years, you stand at the middle yet you are outside.

You recollect the long years of the past, some in diminutive detail of one ordinary day at your grade school or one of the meaningless hours spent ogling at your high school crush and you realize you were so different. You were so different to the point that although you were the center of gravity of your high school, nobody, or nothing ever fell into your depths.
 
You realize that nobody took in to know you better, to understand you beyond the person who perfects math and solves trigonometry as fast as lightening. Nobody from your high school has ever understood what it is that you really desired to have: not the praises, not the applause but the imperfect friendships and the silent hugs, those sort of things.

What is wrong with this morning?, you ask as you laugh at yourself and how emotional you can get, another aspect of you nobody ever recognized from high school.

A center of gravity which can pull no body. You said this aloud.

The early birds flee from the edges of the roof, and sink to the blue lake of the vast sky.

You close the glossy, hard bound book as you let out the tears harboring from the emptiness inside.