Kwento lang, pero malay mo totoo

Always, he slips through the passage way, unnoticed, always at the corner of the jeep. In his stillness, you can see the outlines of his forehead, the tip of his nose, the peaceful mouth, a sharp chin—the invisible line dividing him from the background. Unlike him, the moon changes its phase with every succeeding night, he however leaves no instance for you to go further than the line, the perpetual line, and go westward, but you have to remain with what he can only give to you, the east face, a questioning ear, the strip of misled hair, a dark cheek and a balanced eye.

He has never paid a fare, he walks bare feet, maybe he thought that was enough payment, he shouldn’t owe anyone, he never blamed anyone for his naked feet. His naked feet, free to feel the earth and asphalt beneath him but he seems to be raised above it, while droves of people grind their shoes against them. He walks slowly, meditatively, like a man with metal balls chained to his feet. The world his prison, or was it himself that confined him? The world and himself… aren’t they just one? He may have thought while his feet remain still, flat, or just moving unnoticeably.

He passes through shops. Always in a stir, insisting their trinkets be sold, bargaining a price to buy you, the consumer consumed. As they paw and they aw at the display, they uncannily turn into one. He passes through the church and from the wall fans was blasting wind, from the speakers was the gospel, also blasting its way through, through the anatomical ears and the metaphorical heart. He passes through the fortune tellers, decoder of the yet to be written, palms spread out, a wrinkled finger tracing the path where the future is. He may have felt that he would have no need for it, what is determinate but is yet to be does not need any foretelling. The only thing that one needs to know and nothing more is death. And yet many seem to be consumed by living, or at least what they think it is. “But who really knows?”, he says. “What is real living and what is not? Am I right to judge one man’s life as unreal? To know anyone, is that even possible? Like how I know the triangle has three sides and nothing more…”

He knew some things, he knew some people; some people were like things, some things were people, then he remembered his shoes. He came upon it by chance, he was somewhere where he does not normally go, and he did something that he would not normally do, and there it was. The strange shoes. He saw it there, laces tied together, the one dangling in air, while the other hooks itself on the insides of the barrel, or a pot, he doesn’t know, anything with an opening is considered an invitation to be thrown out in this town. He just couldn’t leave them there. So you see, it wasn’t that he felt he needed the shoes, but he felt that they needed him. And they went on their way, him and his shoes. He let them feel the earth and the asphalt as he once felt it. He let them walk through the busy shops, the solemn church, and the mumbling fortune tellers. Once and again, in the hurried walks of this one and that one, they would be stepped on accidentally, by different shoes, with different indentations, with different weights. And once and again, he would wipe the mark off with his bare hands and feel the leather, the criss-cross of the lace, the turns and the corners of his shoes, as he stooped down.

They were borne of time, him and his shoes, and they ended in it. He outlived his shoes; they couldn’t be used for walking anymore, though he thought it was more than walking that he spent with them. He felt it was time for them, and time for him to bare his feet once again, feel earth and asphalt. Though once in a while, the man would stoop down, barely touching his feet, appearing to trace the outlines of the leather, the lace, and the corners where his shoes have once been, his eyes smiling.

She snaps out of her trance, she notices his face seemed mildly annoyed. Has it been that long?, she thought. At the next street, the outline begins to be disturbed, a voice calls out ‘Para!’ and he lifts himself off from his seat, making a clinging sound on the metal step as he goes on his way, finally tearing himself from the long curious stare of some girl from the other end.