the pessimint

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The Pessimist

His whole life can be told on a postcard. In a childish handwriting, so biggish you could fit a tractor in between the letters. It is such a shame though, because he is an interesting being with such an intricate mind. Freud could have (and would have!) written an encyclopedia on him but, alas, Freud is dead. The only person who would have been interested in him is long gone.

In an ideal world where everybody has an esteemed place in society, he would be “the eccentric fellow with a realistic vision of life, incredulous of inane dogmas, a person to whom seeing is believing”. In the real world however, he would merely be pigeonholed as a complete loser - and rightfully so - given that after 22 years of existence, he does not really have any remarkable accomplishments. Not unlike a baby, he does not do much - nor does he care much - of anything; and not unlike a house plant, he does not need much to live. A little bit of water and sun is enough to keep him going. Oh, and cigarettes. The extra-long ones are better since they last longer and cost the same.

Through the twirling puffs of smoke he just exhaled, he can see a red Chevrolet with tin cans dangling over its white license plate saying “JUST MARRIED”, making irritating clinging sounds as it goes. “Fools. They get married so someone would be forced to love them when they get old, ugly and pot-bellied.” This idea of bragging about getting married, what an absurdity! Why on Earth would someone be proud of being ball-and-chained, condemned to the same person for the rest of their lives? He also observes that a married couple always ends up becoming two of the same person, one being the doppelganger of the other. They speak the same way, have the same prosaic humor and almost always manage to adopt the same seemingly cute but actually annoying habits. The dissolution of individualism is bench marked by the day they oh-so-proudly say “I do”, and further cemented by that “JUST MARRIED” sign. He bets that in less than a year, the groom shall have a license plate bearing the words “JUST GOT A MISTRESS”, or “JUST HUMPED MY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE”.

The TV interrupts his daylight reverie by bellowing the well-known jingle of the commercial for RapidMart, a 24-hour convenience store selling everything from bread, butter and marmalade to combs, nail clippers and extra-large condoms. As their poster boy proudly recites, “RapidMart is a bakery, a drugstore, a fruit market, and a hardware store all rolled into one. Need something at 3 in the morning? Look no further than your street corner, RapidMart is always near.”

The idiot box is a device he pretends to despise when really it is one of the very few things he enjoys in life just because he has this amazing ability to hate and throw incoherent profanities at every single person who appears on it for no apparent reason, without them hating him back. “Fat-ass weather girl,” he would say, although he isn’t exactly the reincarnation of a Greek god himself. He is not fat by any means, but he does not look healthy either. He is just another product of the fast-food society, the result of mass-produced beef patties and genetically-modified shredded salad lathered with industrial mayonnaise; wedged between equally mass-produced, perfectly cut buns, which somehow people the world over find strangely delicious.

A flabby guy comes out on the screen and, with the beauty that is the two-week slimming pill as they proclaim (or an exquisite airbrushing work), is transformed into a six-packed, chiseled-jawed Adonis. “Another stupid weight-loss ad. Who buys this crap? If we could all have Brad Pitt’s abs in two weeks, then all the people around me wouldn’t be looking like bulldogs,” he suddenly says to the always-obedient TV set while munching on the “100% authentic Mexican-recipe nachos” he grabbed off the shelves at RapidMart.

All of a sudden he hears a soft thud in the hallway, a door being closed. “That must be Dolores going to work,” he tells himself. Ah, Dolores. Dolores Youn, to be exact. Half-Korean, half-Mexican - all beauty. He can almost see her turning the keys with her dainty fingers, double-checking that the door is properly locked (she might have a mild OCD), before graciously going down the stairs in her white ballerina flats, making little fluttery noises which somehow manage to eclipse all annoying commercial jingles from his TV set and drive him straight into pensiveness. Her face is a smorgasbord of pretty, pretty features. Her hazel eyes are twinkling little stars, her lips the hue of a ripe pomegranate. Her skin glows with a permanent golden tan with cute little freckles around the nose. When she smiles, it stops raining everywhere and when she laughs, flowers bloom in the middle of winter.

She moved in a year ago. At first, he dismissed her as just another annoying neighbor who would talk way too loud, party way too much and not give two hoots about community life in an apartment building. She struck him as very pretty nonetheless, which automatically made her a potential self-loving pain-in-the-neck neighbor. Since he was a social pariah, he did not know anyone aside from his milkman. Pretty girls were not even a rare commodity in his entourage, they were just non-existent. Therefore his judgments towards them were solely based on American teen movies in which Dolores would be the popular but spiteful head cheerleader, and he would be the self-loathing loser whose existence was barely acknowledged.

Unfortunately, Dolores turned out to be the sweetest thing. She would initiate small conversations with him on the staircase, laugh at his lame jokes, ask him if he needed anything whenever she went to the grocery store, give him slices of the heavenly almond cakes she loved to bake, and tend to him if he fell sick. She was pretty but not at all malicious, which was a complete surprise to him, for he used pessimism as a weapon to be proven right and it usually worked like a charm. This new neighbor did not behave according to his intuition, rendering it erroneous for the first time. Worse, he started feeling an instant attraction to this girl, an attraction that would snowball into infatuation over time.

Dolores adores him, the way a sister adores her little brother. He, on the other hand, is obsessed with Dolores. Her hair, her voice, her accent. Her every slightly mispronounced word is music to his ears, and he could listen to her talk for hours. She is the modern day reincarnation of Venus, Aphrodite and Lakshmi all rolled into one, for she is his goddess of love, grace and beauty. “Dolores, the remedy to all my sorrows,” he whistles. For someone who has never had vocal training, he surprisingly has a more than passable voice.

He still remembers the last phone conversation he had. Not with Dolores, but with a female telemarketer, as they are the only ones who still bother to call him these days. Without them, his telephone would be a relic, a useless white elephant just like his resume and his desire to actually look for a job rather than living off his parents’ pension money. They were conducting a poll on people’s love lives, asking things like “Are you in love?” and “Is it a member of the same or the opposite sex?”. He likes it that people are getting more indiscreet and paying more attention to the lives of strangers. It makes him feel somewhat interesting.

“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the quality of your lovemaking?” prompted the telemarketer. Without hesitation, he replied, “If we weren’t platonic, I imagine it would be around fifteen, thus making your scale inadequate.”

“You mean, you are not having sexual intercourse?” asked the telemarketer in a puzzled tone, albeit a little condescending. He could almost see the smirk on her heavily made-up face, which was ironic given the fact that she stayed behind a telephone mouthpiece all day long being the annoying voice without a face, hence rendering the make-up pointless. She could have rolled out of bed that morning in her pajamas and go straight to work for all anyone cared.

“No, we are not having intercourse. Not that I don’t want to, because every second of every day I wish for it to materialize, but you see, the problem is that she’s my neighbor, and that would make things weird,” he said, obviously leaving out the crucial fact that she was not even his girlfriend to begin with, and that this was just another unrequited love story. Dolores was not even aware of the immense attraction she radiated on him, let alone the fact that he was head over heels in love with her.

He cannot remember how the phone conversation ended, but he remembers feeling lost and depressed after the line went dead. He remembers staring blankly at the receiver, blaming the defenseless device for making him feel pathetic. He remembers chain smoking by the window for hours on end, thinking of Dolores. He remembers wanting desperately to hate her the way he easily hates everybody else for no reason, but realized that all his will was going against him. If anything, failing miserably to hate her made him love her even more. It is ironic that 'Dolores' means 'sorrows' in Spanish, as though it is a warning that the bearer of this name is a born heart-breaker.

Now, somehow all those feelings are back. All of a sudden he has this urge to turn off the TV, get dressed, run to the fitness center where she teaches Pilates, and tell her how he really feels. All emotions, sexual tensions, hope and desire have been his, and only his, as all this while he is convinced that it is highly unlikely that she feels the same way. He never intends to tell Dolores how he feels, and ego has nothing to do with it. Profound skepticism does. He has always been so sure that Dolores does not have any resemblance of a feeling towards him that he's never bothered trying. “But what if she does?” he asks himself albeit knowing that rhetoric, more often than not, only confuses the mind. 

He gets up, smiling as he sees how his couch is so worn down even though bought less than a year ago. He would have loved to blame IKEA for the less-than-desirable quality of their DIY furniture, but he knows that any couch would have worn down as quickly if he was the proud owner. He puts on his beige corduroy jacket, the nicest looking in his possession ("Corduroy worked on Cary Grant!" he exclaims, forgetting the fact that he is no Cary Grant), puts a cigarette between his lips but eventually decides against it since the last thing he would want is to smell smoky while proclaiming his love. He spends the next 3 minutes choosing the least hideous pair of shoes to wear before deciding to put on the pale brown suede hand-me-downs, thinking they go well with the corduroy jacket. Bless his little heart, fashion is not his forte.

He steps outside into the chilly weather, suddenly realizing how flimsy the jacket is. The weather is rather gloomy, so much so that he can almost smell the rain approaching. Is it an omen? Is this God's way to tell him to return to the comfort of his couch and not make himself more of an embarrassment than he already is? So he hesitates. He hates walking on slick pavements. He hates wet clothes sticking to his body. He hates the sound of the sky growling incessantly when it rains. He hates blurred vision caused by raindrops on his glasses. He hates risking pneumonia.

However, if Hollywood teaches us anything, it is that proclaiming your love to someone in the rain is sacredly romantic. Besides, who would have the heart to say no to someone who braved the rain in a 20-year-old pair of pale brown suede shoes just to pour out their feelings to the person they love? Certainly not Dolores, he convinces himself. She is far too nice to do that. Or isn't she?

He continues walking. The fitness center is three cigarettes away from his place, leaving him ample time to construct a beautiful speech to sweep Dolores off her feet. Raindrops start hitting him hard on the forehead, but it would take more than that to dampen his determination. The roads seem unusually long when it rains, or maybe it is because his walking rhythm is excruciatingly slow, for fear of slipping and hitting his head on the asphalt. He starts to see streaks of lightning cracking the puffy clouds, followed seconds later by loud cracks of thunder. He remembers clearly that last night Fat-Ass Weather Girl proudly predicted the weather today to be bright and summery, ideal for a picnic. "Must be nice to be stupid and wrong all the time, but still able to keep your job," he mutters to himself.

The Nauzdir Bridge approaches. It is the larger of the two bridges connecting both sides of the town separated by the river Rauna. Dolores' Pilates center is right after the bridge, which justifies why his heartbeats are getting quicker and his steps weaker by the seconds. The brown river Rauna looks particularly tumultuous due to the strong wind and the heavy rain. Not only is it flowing at a frightening speed, the water seems to swirl as though there are small storms on its surface. He can see logs of all sizes moving downstream. He can see rubbish floating and swirling to the rhythm of the water, as though they are waltzing to his uncertainty. He can see small boats, tied to the berth only by dismal leashes, rocked violently by the turbulent water the way his emotions are rocked by this unfaltering love for Dolores. In a way, the river Rauna at that moment is the perfect representation of his unsure mind, his racing heart and his topsy turvy emotion.

His arrival in front of the fitness center is greeted by a lightning streak and a loud crack of thunder. And another. And another. "Maybe God really is mad at me," he mumbles. He suddenly sees his reflection at the glass door. His whole body is completely soaked. His corduroy jacket, unfit for heavy rain, resemble an old carpet a homeless man would use to keep warm. His carefully chosen suede shoes - oh the poor suede shoes - now look like a brown, less-bloated version of Ronald McDonald's boots. His hair was running down his face, almost completely covering his wide forehead. He looks beaten, tired and worn down, like a dog gone astray for weeks. Most importantly, he does not look like someone who deserves to have Dolores, or to even walk within a five-meter radius from her. The man he sees in the glass door deserves nothing and nobody. God is right, he should go home.

So he runs. His suede shoes squeak underneath him. The bridge trembles under his feet. Never in his life has he felt so unworthy of love, so worthless. His jacket starts to feel heavy so he tries to take it off and and discard it into the river when the wind suddenly grows stronger, making him lose his balance. The slippery pavement does not help either. He topples over, along with his corduroy jacket whose sleeve gets tangled around his left wrist, into the Rauna along with the logs and rubbish. He feels the current sucking him deeper into the water, like Alice slipping into the black hole. The only difference is that this river does not lead to any wonderland. He cannot swim to save his life, and in this raging Rauna, even the best swimmers would have a hard time holding on to dear life. He tries flapping his arms and moving his legs in a circular motion, but if anything he feels as though it is dragging him further down.

He realizes this is going to be the end of him. His father, an avid angler, always said, "Respect the water, you never know when it is going to suck you in and spit you out lifeless." Never would he have thought those words would ring so true. He stops fighting for air and lets go. After all, his death would be nobody's loss, as even he himself has nothing more in life to look forward to. Maybe death is the only way out. "If that's the case, then hurry God, end this misery," he prays. Suddenly he is surrounded by calm and silence, as though the water abruptly stands still. Has this all been nothing but a cruel nightmare? Or is this what death is supposed to be? "Am I in limbo?" he questions.

Dolores. He suddenly sees a blurred vision of her face looking right at him. Her twinkling eyes, her red lips, her glowing skin. They say that before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes, and now all he sees is Dolores. He wonders, if things had turned out differently, if he had gone through with his proclamation of love, would she have requited his feelings? All this while, he has been settling for “no” as the answer to that question, but somehow in the midst of this deluge, he realizes he is accepting defeat before the battle even begins, the same way he shelved his resume assuming no one would want him as an employee, the same way he never did anything for himself knowing he would never amount to anything. If living is all about taking chances, he knows for a fact that he has been dead for God only knows how many years.

He feels his legs kicking. His arms start to flail downwards. For once he feels his body actually moving up. For once in his life, he feels like getting out of this murky water into crisp, fresh air and starting anew. He looks up and sees light.

All of a sudden he sees a hand reaching for him from above. He grabs it, and never lets go.