Today in the early afternoon I was caught in a stupor - one of those moments when I cease to be motivated by the common range of things yet couldn't really figure out what I would do otherwise. It wasn't, though, that I have finished all of my presentations and accorded my duty as a student - I was simply too absent-minded to play along with them as I often do.
The sun outside was blazingly white (when I'm writing this it occurs to me that I'd like to mention the sun quite routinely and each time in a different shadow), so were the grass, the trees, and the buildings. Most of the people I still knew were probably all having classes, and I stood alone in my room, amongst a pair of sunglasses, a noodle bowl, and a spoon. Sartre said, "I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these characters spend their time explaining themselves, and happily recognizing that they hold the same opinions. Good God, how important they consider it to think the same things all together." Though I was surrounded with neither voices nor characters, in a sense I felt the same as he did - all of these familiar beautiful things around me, and the way the sunlight was casted upon them created a sense of togetherness that I was not in. After all, I thought to myself, it was a wintry Monday afternoon, and I was a young lad at the university. Perhaps I should dumb down slightly and try to blend in with nature. Hence, with a pair of sunglasses hastily placed on my face and a book in my hand, I dashed out of the room like a naked man dashing out of the sauna - I decided to go to Bremerhaven - there's a wonderful beach where I used to chug around, and if there's anything that Bremen could offer yet Berlin couldn't, it should be a beach with seagulls.
Like any story about a journey that I would tell, I had myself transported in various trains, buses and escalators and reached the town in under two hours. Even though I was then almost 30 miles away from the university, my actual walking distance was about thrice of that from Nordmetall to C3. I wasn't therefore tired - I was merely a bit eager and unsure. Like trying to date with a woman who's chubbier and stupider than I thought, I arrived in Bremerhaven a bit underwhelmed but was anyways eager to enjoy it to a fuller extent. I passed by various shops like Karstadt and Mai Mai, the latter of which somehow triggered my appetite, almost running down the whole trip to a lunch break, emerged from the revolving door and sat on the bench away from the teenagers blasting German hip-hop music and in front of the ocean, while my buttocks spread like they did on the black cushion chair back in college. I took off the sunglasses, and exhaled fully like an upcoming gangbang member waiting on the sofa, but of course, without cigarettes, beer, and any other participant. I fidgeted, swirled, smiled, and then abruptly stopped smiling when a seagull was caught flying mid-air by the violent wind - its face was at first bewildered, but quickly turned aghast when it began to fly backwards. I had the brief intent to laugh, but ended up only twisting my mouth with a certain gentlemanly restraint. I realized that I shared some similarities with the seagull - we saw the same scenery, breathed in the same oxygen, and waddled in the same organismic packages in pursuit of the right feelings, the only difference being that the seagull waved its wings with a vehemency and sincerity that was impossible in my own sore, unmovable ass.
I shuffled through a few pages in my book on philosophy, barely registering a thing, and looked up to the horizon, perhaps, I thought, some of these days, I would remember this. For longer than I would prefer, my catchphrase had been "fuck it", so long, as a matter of fact, that I had forged a label "fuckitism" for the convenience of referring to such an attitude. I left the bench with an adverb that I could only write as "fuckitistically" - correct, I then left the bench fuckitistically as the teenagers listened to the same song, or a different one with the same uncomprehending swagger. The landscape of Bremerhaven had dimmed a little bit but contained largely the same things.
I boarded the train back to the university without the capriciousness when I started out. It was with what that I came back I couldn't exactly pinpoint - it was the feeling of having the primary and secondary senses met, yet the tertiary rebuked. I came back confounded with thoughts but none of them valid enough to nudge my consciousness. I walked automatically, found automatically my semester ticket in the pocket, and gazed automatically at the tree. I was perhaps happier? Perhaps the trip had from some angle validated a portion of my existence where it had not been? It was like drinking orange juice after refusing to order drink at a salty Chinese restaurant? It was like playing basketball after work while thinking about astrophysics? I didn't know the answer to any of these questions. I didn't even know what is a question and why would I have it.
Meanwhile, the teenagers have perhaps returned to their home; the sun has begun to shine several timezones behind mine; the students have stopped having classes and started to sleep; I have stopped writing and started to sleep.
Tomorrow, though, tomorrow, as I remembered dearly, the grasses are green.
