Life

So I was contemplating on my life, the years that passed, the months that flew, the days gone, the departed hours and the ticking seconds. Has it really been that long? I ask myself. Just a while back, I was this loner kid that ate lunch in the gymnasium instead of the cafeteria. And while everyone would be playing ball with everyone else in the hard court, I’d be in the library but reading. I was courting images from pages and pages. It wasn’t what those hard bounds were all about, it was about how they were coloured. Images of planes, skies, stars and outer-space. Sooner later, I’d be wandering in empty yonder trying to get by, moving with the flow of the synaptic highways. Then I’d be snapped back into the classroom with my teacher calling my attention back to the ground.

Past forward, classroom clatter was more like bumps and ticks of a vinyl record, or tape noise out from an overplayed cassette. Enters the music years of my pre-teens, the time when sitting on my ear baffles was my Saturday afternoons. Then I would conjure up images on paper that would be looking like album covers rather than dinosaurs and toy soldiers. Images were dark yet funky, colourful but sweet.

Then the notes came into play. After years of listening to records, I reckoned I’d rather that I make something out of my own. Befriended the ebony and ivory keys, entertained the lot buddies and made people happy. Yet I was happier that when I would do so, they just left me be while they sat in their fascination. At twelve when the collective was into crushes, hanging out, and getting the newest game gadget, I was looking out for the next pop hit to play or learning how to sequence the drums of my first song. And when all’s too crowded, I seclude to my sketch pad.

College onwards and three bands later, life became a concept, a paradigm. And I… an oblation. The visual arts education taught me to dig deep yet fly beyond the horizon at the same time. But this had a share of tangible experience that one could really say the best of the best and the unimaginable worst. From the leader that leads a pack to turn the faculty’s heads up-side-down and bow, to the things that made deans frown. It was the “bold, the beautiful and the ugly”. Did I get enough, maybe I had more than enough in the seven years that be. But that tattooed my philosophy on the skin of my soul.

After more than seven by seven years, I’m still that little boy alone in the museum of life. Where people are a mere portraits hung on the walls. Conversations are poetry in the book of parody. And the urban landscape is a masterpiece being sculpted by grime while I take baby steps to that dream I left in the sidewalk of that campus.

Four solo exhibits later, the world seems to be more colourful than I originally thought. But these colours unseen were colours that can’t be stroked on canvas. The Metro is filled with people so diverse as compared to a provincial city where everything is analogous. Adult life is a contentious tango. You either dance with it or live like a hermit. But I on the other hand would rather recluse to the stage. Cause when the spot light is on, I’d be blinded by the colours and people are just shadows that speak to me in whisper and murmuring tone. In the mean time, standby for my next song.