May is the Magic Word

In other countries, when people think of May, they think “clement weather”. Where I live in, however, May follows April for being the most torrid. But everything is different this year. It’s just a good two weeks into this month and already I’ve seen dark clouds depriving the noontime its usual summertime brightness. It’s affecting everyone’s mood and behavior: same time last year, I was accustomed to seeing off-duty invigorated yuppies jollily march their jolly way home, but all I see this year are facial expressions as gloomy as the shades of the umbrella they are covered with. And I’m at a circumstance that’s unprecedented in my entire life: my skin is shedding as consequence of the sunburn I got late April, and at the same time my skin is tingled by the rain’s pitter-patters. The contrast coming together felt peculiar, at best.

In a conversation I had with one of my old friends, I jokingly mentioned that this May ain’t May enough, and my life ain’t May enough either. If I am to write an autobiography, this month of 2008 would, hands down, be recorded as the nadir of my life. I have never felt so dead, so languid, so hopeless and so desolated. I wake up each morning with a hollow-like sensation running all over my spine, probably as a result from the world’s refusing to cooperate towards every decent person’s hope for peace. Everyday, I read news of catastrophes and food crises, I see “charity organization” televise shameless paeans to undeserving politicians, I hear passersby talk about unimportant thing as if oblivious to all the problems the world at large is suffering from. Nothing is determined to give me an honest and non-delusional happiness, and at one point I was so down and sick of everyone’s apathy, ignorance and colonial mentality, that I shut myself from the world for 2 days. The nadir, and that is word getting used a lot today, is when I’ve had a shouting match on the telephone with a person I very dearly admire. Yes, I am officially depressed, and as you can probably guess, this is not sadness so piffling as to be called emo. This sadness is more real than that, and I’m too tired to rely on vices and consumerism for respite.

I wish I could get away from everything, to where monies, credit cards, fast cars and government propagandas are meaningless. I want to spend a day surrounded by nothing but the color of water. Or maybe go to a place where I could be lying on fields of grass and under a tree, drowning myself to the music of birds’ chirping, leaves’ moving, and cows’ mooing, and the plants and I each taking part of the circulation of air. Or maybe I could be seating on sands, watching the yonder sky change its color from light blue to auburn, and breathing in a smell of brine. But these places all seem so far away, and like Stevie Wonder who is blind, I could only see them by the visions of my mind. I ask myself just how often modern people get to live days that look exactly as Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” described. It is May, when the world is supposed to look like seventeen. How come it feels nowhere like that?