Commuting Potential.

I was in a cab today, since most of my everyday life for the past year and a half was spent going to and fro classes, and somehow this one was unlike most.

This cabbie took special care of his car, he had new air fresheners hung in strategic spots, he had the unwrapped stock in his glove compartment which, when he opened to put his sunglasses back, I saw was perfectly organized. It had a pack of cigarettes, an extra lighter, a neatly folded towel and an apparently worn poetry book by Salah Jahin – one of my dad’s favorite compilations. His tissue pack was kept in a leather keeper, his seatbelt had a small leather wrap at the point where it is to touch his bare neck for comfort. His steering wheel had a bumpy leather cover so his grip doesn’t slide under his sweaty palms and have him skid on a sweaty summer day. He had light fusion jazz improvisations playing in the background and his leather arm rest was as presentable as it was practical. Everything was taken care of with the precision of an owner rather than a renter, and he seemed to have the relaxed countenance of someone who not only accepted, but embraced his fate. Would you call him unfortunate? I certainly didn’t dare. I wished I’d have the same level of acceptance he had about most of the things that I have, or might come upon at one point or another.

And it hit me, that’s what people meant when they said it’s not what you got, it’s what you make of what you got.

Then a corolla came out of nowhere and took his designated alley, and right then and there came the most fluent set of vulgar verbiage I’d ever had the chance to witness. It was full of envy and bitterness at  the juxtaposition that has just been accentuated to the seemingly oblivious soul whose only fault was that he was dealt a better hand at life than the next one.

Then it hit me, that’s what people meant when they said that nothing is what it seems.

Does the new realization replace the former? Subjectively speaking, yes. But for all I know, neither could be true. So I choose to keep both, as I would have had they happened in two separate time bubbles, because there’s no point of linking dots when you’re never gonna run into either personages again. They’re all surreal plots one concocts to make the lost time in transportation a little more tolerable.

What do you make of this? It’s different with everybody. I, for one, see that you can’t ask that much people. It’s good enough that they manage to be good people for short intervals. It makes life easier, and it makes theirs relatively happier.

Maybe the cabbie used to lead a life that was a lot more similar to the corolla driver at one point, and a vicious turn of fate reduced him to his current state. Maybe he lashed out at fate, or the materialization of fate in that incident. Maybe he was angry at the metaphor, the reminder of a better time.

Maybe if I was in the Corolla, I’d see the cabbie as one of the zombies that roam my vicinity and make for nothing but monsters that I have to swim through to get to work, hopefully scratchless. Maybe that Corolla was the driver’s last reminder of his past better life, and he’s driving to a job whose paycheck doesn’t cover his electricity bill, and he can’t get himself to let go of this one last luxury.

Or maybe none of this is true.

Then it hit me. Just as the same Solid Geometry problems was drawn from three different angles by me and the couple of students sitting next to me in class, there’s never one right answer. The endless variables to everything make for a chance, that’s hardly taken, for people to momentarily step out of their shoes. Instead of judging one and idolizing the other, taking a step back to observe the possibilities could prove better than being the judge, jury and blind momma justice. You’re not really sentencing anybody but your own vision, so much that even you can’t see it.

You can see so much, if you’d just look. And I mean really look at things, hard enough that you’d see through them and back a thousand times over. Even if you don’t come up with anything worthwhile, which is highly unlikely, it’d make for good entertainment and creative potential.

And a blogpost.