In Continuum.

A Quarter To Eight

I want to live where soul meets body
And let the sun wrap its arms all around me
And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing
And feel, feel what it's like to be new

It's been a month of human-traffic nightmare, and I daresay that I am qualified enough to make a full-length entry about it finally. There has been a self-imposed restrain to blog about the trip I make to school every morning at eight, because I gave myself a full month to observe every little detail happening on trains. I wanted time for the sights and sounds to sink in, to wrap itself around my head. Just so that when the words do filter through during the writing on this entry, I am going to be prepared for it all. After all, I haven't been traveling to school during the peak hours in any part of my life school life. My parents used to drop me off at my high school in the past, and my Junior College is less than three minutes from the front door - literally. So you see, all the distance and torture I am going through now is merely a process by which I am making up for all the distance that I never made in the past. You can say it is a retribution of sorts, but it's not like it was a sin to be fetched to school in the past, is it?

Like I said, it's been a little more than a month since school started. Not every school day requires me to drag my lazy butt off the bedsheets and dress up for school. But on those days, it can get pretty dreadful as I stare into the mirror's honesty at the hideous monster that I behold every morning. With his unshaven chin and hair standing up in every possible angle, I look like a crazed caveman with a cactus on his head in the morning. Some time between the moment I closed my eyes in the night and the moment I opened them, somebody must have kidnapped my physical body and ran it through a transforming machine. Because I usually fall asleep with much thoughts in my head, and confidence - in a way. I wake up in the morning losing all of those, sounding much like a moaning goblin and staggering like a drunken Irish.

'Cause in my head there's a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far-off destinations
So they may have the chance of finding a place
Where they're far more suited than here

The morning ritual begins with collecting the papers from the front door. Reaching out through the metal railings, and checking out the neighbors' living room at the same time - to see if anybody is there to see my hideous hair and horrendous face. Then it comes to the newspapers laid out before me on the dining table, with about twenty percent of the information read being processed, while the other eighty percent is devoted to scanning over the pictures in the papers. Food comes, and I usually try to finish everything within ten minutes, and fifteen minutes if the food is hard to stomach. Dressing up is next, and that can be a chore especially after the eradication of uniforms in my life. I remember and miss the times when I could button up my shirt with my eyes closed, because I could get a short nap in the mean time. Nowadays, I have to carefully choose the clothes to wear, to have some sort of variety in my life. It's not a fashion show, but I am still conscious about how to present myself in school. After all, being single, this is the least I can do. Then, of course, it is off to school.

A quarter to eight, I arrive at the train station promptly most of the time. The lady at the main entrance to the station hands out free newspapers, still warm to the printers where it came from in the wee-hours of the morning. The paces I take in the morning are short and slow, carefully threading its way through the bustling crowd in the peak hour. But people around me shared none of my lethargy, all rushing to get down to the platforms downstairs and squeezing pass each other down the escalators, eager to start their day to end their day. And as for me, I descent into the underground station with my hands n my pocket and the loud music in my ears to wake me up. Watching as the world with its people rushing by me like a fleeting blur, I felt at east all of a sudden, so free from life's hold on everybody else - except me.

I cannot guess what we'll discover
We turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain

The frequency of the trains in the morning is higher, but that is not helping much with the crowd that gathers before the glass gates every time. Despite the different-colored clothes they are wearing, they all look brown, red or black to me - like ants. In their eyes, I see little semblance to any human that I have seen, only the kind of lifeless spirit lingering in the pupil of the commuters. They all seem to be robots, like the ones along an assembly line, moving with a command and stopping at another. With a folded newspaper in their hands or their cell phones, they are properly armed for the fight against the Sandman as they stand on the train, packed like sardines in a tin can and suffocating. But they are robots, they seldom show any sign of discomfort or stress, for they are probably used to all the discomfort and all the tiredness. But not me, I am still new to this. And in the middle of the army of ants, I unleashed a silent scream as the doors opened.

The other ants on the train flooded out of the carriages like the foam of a root beer would if you shake it hard and long enough. Courtesy is forgotten at a quarter to eight usually, and people throw them in between the railway tracks below their feet as they rush into the carriages without letting the passengers inside out first. I for one, wait until everybody is out until I make my way in - if I can make my way in at all. I usually end up being squeezed to the glass doors and my face inches away from the outside, pressed against the side with my chest and smelling my own morning breath bouncing back from the walls. The ride to the next station almost always seems like eternity, and the crowd around me no longer registers this strange distortion in mental time. Institutionalized, they ponder over articles and crossword puzzles on the newspapers, or pictured little kids running about on the fields in the darkness of their closed eyelids. They pondered and some slept, but none of them realized that they were slowly turning from an organic being to one that is made up of wires and cables, metals and microchips. They were the living dead, the robots of our society, and they were all brainwashed.

I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
If the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too

The office ladies would pour their attention over Sudoku puzzles provided in the morning paper in the morning. Even with a 1/5 star rating in terms of the difficulty, they still take for ever to complete one single puzzle. I guess in a way, they just wanted the puzzle to take up the whole duration of the trip, in order to make it shorter. Some would have their heads lean against their arms that is hung from the plastic rings that lines the horizontal bars above our heads. With every gentle swaying of the train, the standing/sleeping crowd would sway with the carriage as well. It is always a rather humorous thing to see some of them stumble with the braking of the train, to see them tumble forward and into the arms of some other stranger, then blush in embarrassment at their carelessness. That is of course, I make my own tumble and receive the same accusing laughter from my friends traveling with me.

The men usually just close their eyes and listen to the music plugged into their ears, like myself in the morning. They aren't a very interesting crowd to talk about, though I've always admired at the patterns on their shirts, and made mental notes to purchase their shirts if I do get a job at an office some day. The other men, however, spend most of their time reading articles on the newspaper. Every single article is not missed, and every word is read about two to three times before moving on. Despite being inches from each other, they almost always find the space to hold up their papers, and you start to wonder if it is even humanly possible to read a single page that long. It might be the hour of the day being too early for any efficient brain activity. But I guess there are times whereby the brain just refuses to function in proper, until their day officially starts in the office.

So brown eyes I hold you near
'Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body

Things people do when they think that nobody is looking, everybody is guilty of that. I am not sure of what I do when nobody is looking, but I do notice the little things that others do on trains. For example, there will be a significant number of passengers on board with no newspapers or musical entertainments. So they look to their cell phones for comfort, and look through their old messages a million times to clear the older ones and save the nicer ones. They start to look through their calendars and find their own birthdays, or count the number of days till the next pay raise. This process is usually repeated ad infinitum, until they come up with something else to do, which is usually when the activities get an upgrade. These upgraded people usually starts to look at others, or fall sleep on the shoulder of a stranger, thinking that it is more productive than reading through old messages. There was a man I saw on the train, who just sat down in the middle of the crowd and fell asleep on his bag, just like that. However inconsiderate he was, that kind of ignorance was admirable in a strange, perverse way.

Then, there are the really inconsiderate ones on trains. Being a head taller than most people, I get all the different kind of hairline studies. There are the normal ones, the styled ones, the bad haircut ones, the bald ones, the semi-bald ones, the black with a little bit of white ones, the white with a little bit of black ones, the white ones, the blond ones, the blond with a bit of black ones, the red ones, the smelly ones, the oily ones, the badly dyed ones, and the dandruff kind. I saw a woman with dandruffs the size of a small island once, and almost hurled right on top of her head, but reconsidered my options since that is not going to help with her dandruff problem very much. I wanted to stuff a few five-dollar bills into her back pocket with a note "For your anti-dandruff shampoo". But I am not going to risk being accused of a molester, especially by a fifty year old lady dressed like she came in a time machine from the middle of the sixties. No-bloody-way.

I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
If the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too

You should see the population on board the train who likes to dig their noses when nobody is looking, or the ones that use pen caps to dig their ears when they - too - think that nobody is looking. However, that is not to say that everybody on the train does those things. In fact, most people just stare into nothingness mostly, since most part of my journey involves the train to travel underground and not overground. Even if it is the latter case, the view is pretty much the same every morning, unless it starts to rain and everything becomes a blur. Standing there and leaning against the steel railing, I look upon the commuters on trains with a smirk on my face, mentally jotting down notes to write for this entry of mine.

The same kind of people can be found on the bus stop I take 74 from every morning, and on the very bus itself. People look at each other, check out their clothes, and then proceed on to the next person's wardrobe - so on and so forth. Men would check out the women's breasts, while the women remain where they are, totally oblivious to everything else happening around them. Like all the robots that march the Singapore transit system in the morning, they go through life like cows being dragged out of their fences to plow the lands in the morning, or the way I used to being shoveled out of my bed in the army days to start a brand new day with training, training, and more training.

So brown eyes I hold you near
'Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

I wonder if there is a place left for humans, somewhere out there in the unknown and the wildness. If there is a day when people can scream into their bosses' faces, and tell them that they've had enough for the day. Just for one day, everybody on the trains will go to this little place, this retreat, this utopia of sorts, this paradise. You can call it Worker's Paradise, Commuter's Heaven, or simply the Land-Where-We-Can-Live-Without-Feeling-Like-Sardines. Whatever you decide to name the place, I wonder if there is such a place at all. It is going to be like a bank, where we can deposit our emotions and feelings with them, until the end of the day when we are done with our work, we withdraw them and put them back into our heads. A place where soul meets body at the end of the day, a place that prevents life from taking away what makes human, human.

We think, therefore we are. I think, therefore I am. Life works like a giant file sometimes, filing down the feelings and emotions that we have for certain things and make us numb to the surroundings. Looking at the people on the trains, I wonder if they ever thought about the same things as I am now, or if they have already succumbed to the wearing power of life and allowed their thoughts to be trampled under life's feet. I need to find this place quick, this place where soul meets body before a quarter to eight in the morning. Perhaps I should find a hidden patch of grass somewhere near my place, or a drawer in my room to put my materialized emotions. I wouldn't myself to be numbed, to look like robots or zombies on the train by the time I finish my years in the college. Before army, I had the same fears about my sanity as well, but it is the real deal this time. Because at quarter to eight, I am feeling the sanity in my head slowly seeping out of the hole in my head, and getting lost on the tracks below the wheels.

I just need this place, at the end of the day, to hang my head. To say that it is time for a break, time to rest - or a time to blog. Whatever it may be, a place away from the suffocating air in the passenger carriages and in a place only I know of. If sardines and tunas go to hell after they are being grounded into shreds, I am sure they turn into humans and are placed on trains at peak hours of everyday. At least that is what I feel like every morning without a place for my head, a severely sinned sardine. Or tuna, since I prefer tunas. Tunas are nice...

See, I am losing my mind. Help.

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere