There Would Always Be Hidden Treasures

17 December 2012

I had gone to a very life-changing university. It broke me off to bits. After high school graduation, I was a happy kid. And everything held importance to me. I favored the good and the beautiful but I also embraced the ills and the ugly. I prided myself for having an open and tolerant mind. There was this quiet confidence that I am clever. But all that I thought I knew about myself was disproved or emphasized by UP.  Graduating in high school I thought, after four years, I will own the world. That, fighting spirit of nothing is impossible was intact. But after UP, I was left unsure of myself. If in high school I discovered my strengths, university life slapped me on the face with the enormity of my weaknesses and with the truth that I could not work alone unlike the Superman mentality of I-can-do-everything-on-my-own I fostered previously.

More than the hard-earned lesson of humility, what I love most about UP is the people I got to know. One of which is my dorm mate Mai. I haven’t heard much about her lately. She seemed to disappear to nowhere.

She’s reserved and quiet. Even in my most passive time, she will always be a level higher in passivity. Mai acts like a lady. She’s quiet and thoughtful. She’s more than meets the eye. I dislike it when people doubt her intellect. They’re wrong. Though she seems so shy, almost witless, she’s genius.

Mai is able to distill her ideas until they come out in the simplest and purest form without losing its impact level. She’s amazing. As an illustrator, she is able to come up with very heavy mundane ideas and make it come out light in her fantasy theme without losing the intellectual connotation of the idea. She knows how to make the morbid and depressing transform into magic. It becomes easier to absorb but potent still. Mai is really outstanding.

Such genius to me is a miracle. I met a genius like her in my small life! I am glad that though the world is very big, there are lots to explore and experience, I am restricted to experience not all of it; that though the world is a big world, I have my own small world. The intricacies of this world are not only existent, they are to be experienced and enjoyed. For that I am grateful that there other people exist to enjoy what the world offers that is not made available to me.

What I feel sad about is that Mai knows already what it is that she wants to be doing her entire life. Being the artist that she is, she wants to be a fashion designer. She wants to fill the earth with her vision of beauty or that’s what I think she wants, because she is not very vocal about it. Maybe that is what I want for her in which case I am still dismayed that she’s not doing it. She took up political science and is now working for a company doing administrative and clerical duties.

With genius as hers, she should be given lots of time to get inspired to create wonderful, original art that she can do so well. I want her to enjoy her genius, splashing on its puddle like a child. I don’t want her buried in a desk office before a computer reading on circulars and filing memoranda or whatever it is that she does now to earn a living because she can do so much better in a different field. It would be a waste for her if she would not go into her forte.

This is the part of life that I am a bit protesting against. I know I do not have rights to question how life manages to go on but really, do we have to work on making a living at the expense of losing our lives? Tragic. I hold out for Mai because I believe that somehow, we share the same vision. That is that we want to make the world beautiful. She has that power of creating beauty; I can only want to create beauty, I know I am not able to translate thoughts of beauty into reality the way Mai does. So I want in my heart for her to flourish, to grow where she is planted. And because I do not know yet what it is that I would love to do for the rest of my life, I am at pains because there she is, she knows what she wants and is exceptionally good at it (though she always discounts herself) but she’s caught in the need to make money.