In solitude

Random musings from this afternoon:

When I muse, I turn my head sideways up, almost always to the left, as if the answers in the world rest there. I purse my lips, lest a thought comes out unpolished and before it is organized into coherence. Sometimes, I take a while, and when I stop, I forget about what I was thinking.
*

Kenny’s/Seattle’s at Katipunan is a place you go to in order to be lost. You go there to be somewhere else. The beauty of the place is its sense of detachment. It does not pretend to be your home; it lets you alone. In its vastness—two spacious floors peppered with around a hundred tables- you find priceless solitude. Order your food, grab a seat, and, in a moment, you are in your very own microcosm. The place becomes oblivious to you, and you to it. The place doesn’t mind that the colorful paintings lining its walls and its floor-to-ceiling sculptures are ignored—it knows its purpose is to be unobtrusive. The waiters leave you alone because they know that you desire to be invisible. A man in the corner nook happily taps away on his laptop, grinning wildly once in a while and laughing to himself like no one is looking. At another table, a group of teenage girls talk loudly of their secrets and of high school gossip; no one hears. You scribble away in your journal vigorously as you did when you were younger and had the bedroom all to yourself. For a while- an hour, perhaps- you feel truly alone, and you bask in this thought. All it takes is a sweeping glance across the vastness of the room and its hustle and bustle, and you are back. The trick is to not look outwards.
*

At the next table, a man with a nice, baritone voice talks about Facebook in the manner of an expert. It takes you a while to know that he isn’t. Nearby, his infant daughter sits proudly on her yaya’s lap and looks on, hanging onto his every fraudulent word. You wonder how long it will take her to find out.