Locker Thief

Note: This is a half-nonfiction, half-fiction story since it’s more of an amalgamation of all the locker stories I’ve heard rather than being based on one specific experience. As such, some of the details in this story may be somewhat unrealistic (such as someone actually leaving their phone and not having it on their person at all times) but I beseech you all to suspend your disbelief.

It begins with the typical scene of a school locker room: light chatter, rustling fabric, clanging metal, and clicking locks. The only anomaly was the click of one person’s lock: or the lack thereof.

“…What?”

My friend, who was content and lighthearted just a moment ago, had fallen into disbelieving silence. Gaze fixed on her locker, her eyes scrutinize the contents inside with an unexpected gravity. Her hands soon join her hands, flinging through folds of clothing, pushing aside other arbitrary objects. However, in such a small space, there was never that much to search for in the first place.

“My phone is gone,” she said, her tone resigned with a sense of begrudging finality.

“Did someone steal it?”

But the question was unnecessary. How else would a phone mysteriously disappear in the locker room? And no matter what we questioned or who we questioned, we were rendered powerless, at a loss for any solutions, unable to do anything but report it to a teacher.

The teacher too asked an unnecessary question. “Did you lock your locker?”

No, she did not. But who would want to?

Every year, the PE teachers would tell us how essential it was to keep our possessions safe by transferring everything to one of the “larger lockers.” The capacity of these larger lockers was quite pitiable, being only somewhat wider than the freshmen lockers and about half their height. To store all your belongings — backpack, clothes, textbooks, whatever else you may be carrying, and whatever else may be in your small locker — in that is a hassle, moreover considering the gracious 6-minute changing time limit. Thus, for high school students who are most likely not here by their own volition, they simply ignore this “essential” suggestion.

It is an unspoken principle: before going to their PE class, some leave their locks hanging but not completely closed on their small lockers; a few more would store an extra few bags or textbooks into the large lockers; most leave their backpacks out, innocuously lined up along the walls. It is an unspoken principle, and some could say it was founded upon an established trust or mutual commiseration, but neither is particularly accurate. Instead, it was the shared desire to avoid an inconvenience and the individual presumption that we all knew which lines not to cross.

Yet someone, some time entered the school locker room when it was farthest from its typical scene: empty, silent, vulnerable. They saw how the room was suspended by the same delicate balance that held unlocked locks in the air, and then, they chose to break it.

Angle of Truth

(A reflection on competition math.)

A monochrome world is a fair world.

This is what my father finally tells me after years of routine and expectations. He tells me there is no “maybe” or “if”s when only one correct answer exists. He tells me the graders cannot be swayed by a blur in their eyes or a ringing in their ears (or an ache in their heart) when the rules were rigid and inert; their judgment is faultless, doubtless. After all, an unisolated mind is a fickle one.

I nod. I drown in the shame welling inside my throat. I crumble into the frail resentment of my spine. But hope holds out, this weary yet naive clench in my chest — selflessly, selfishly, I keep my mouth shut.

.

If a monochrome world is a fair world, then what does that make me?

One correct answer. One desired outcome. As long as I set the gears in position, the machinery will rumble into motion. Beginning on a white page, draw a neat black diagram, then find the side lengths, then set up the equation. Step-by-step, the problem breaks down into its parts — a foundation of probability, a transformation in geometry, and then the finishing touches of algebra. Not so simple, since searching for the correct parts is a task in it itself, but it is something everyone could do with practice.

Practice, practice, practice. The omniscient, omnipotent solution is nowhere in sight, not on this white page with nothing on it. A blank slate, or an empty search? I try. Tables, lists, figures, variables, equations. It is a haphazard sprawl creasing across the paper, stumbling in the dark, around the increasingly claustrophobic scratchwork. If I keep going, if every aspect of this situation can be labeled, if all the information is derived, that will be enough for the conclusion.

This is a monochrome world, but is it still black and white when red — scathing, burning — is carved onto the sphere of the universe? The paper bleeds from the marks even as the print underneath remains unchanged, wounds cut by carelessness. They are terrible, simple errors. A messily written 6 interpreted as a 0. A final conversion, forgotten about. A variable whose inaccurate value distorted the next one, then the next.

I am wrong but not wronged. This is fair.

.

I want to reach for the roses, but cut myself on the thorns.

This is the garden I cannot save. Weeds, poison, and thorns. Tangled in the flowers. In the machinery that is supposed to be the mind. I know how it should look, so why do I keep repeating the same mistakes?

I know how it should look, but I do not know the garden’s beauty. What is beautiful about the most pristine simplicity? What is so shameful about the flaws? When the weeds are wandering thoughts. When the poison is knowledge in its richness and expanse. When the thorns are tears in perfection, a rejection of the monochrome and the gears, the soul that accompanies the mind, the proof of humanity.

This was never meant to be a garden, an exercise of cleaning and fixing. No, this is a field of wildflowers, vivid as impossibilities, stems reaching like the outstretched hands of imagination. And it is far more than the fields itself; it is the mountains, valleys, oceans. Bridges bind algebra and number theory, geometry and counting, taking husks and filling them anew. They are all one, blending, seeping, fusing. These are the solutions, the epiphanies, the roads that begin from everywhere at different tilts that still return to the same axis. I take the fragments of my knowledge and form it into something old, something new — sea glass, held at the angle of jagged peaks, and it becomes gold.

Red is just another color. It is anger, yes, but it is love. It persists in this world of varying balances and scales, in this world that is anything but monochrome.

Can You Hear Me?

Featured above: a recording of my favorite classical piece 🙂

.

“Do you think we can receive consolation through music?”

The pianist’s gaze settles on the instrument’s gleaming keys, the pristine black and white surface, but his eyes are distant. In his mind, the piano is just a dust-lined memory, a cold hollow space that had consumed him whole and had not let go of him since. But the violinist by his side, optimistic, passionate, and naive as she was, sees something else entirely.

She sees waves, a spray of mist gently caressing skin with the ebb and flow of the tide. She sees leaves, a twirl of scarlet and gold swirling in the autumn winds. She sees fireworks, bright bursts of light phasing in and out of existence through an unseeable night. She sees nothing, and then she sees everything.

“Yes,” she answers. Because she also sees this: a lonely, wounded boy forgot how to listen.

In a cascade of notes, he is deaf, paralyzed by the strict expectations of the sheet music, the metronome, the world. And there, lost in the melody, is a boy whose voice can no longer be heard.

 

.

 

This is a scene that I have witnessed unfold twice before. The first time was in middle school when I watched the animated show Your Lie in April, and the second was when I watched the drama Do You Like Brahms this past year. While both feature a pianist who has lost interest in music and a violinist who appears to be the opposite, the two shows resonated with me in different ways.

Your Lie in April, which placed a heavier emphasis on classical music (and which was better written overall), made me realize how music could weave together such vivid narratives, painting a beautiful picture of the emotions behind each note of a piece. On the other hand, although Do You Like Brahms felt as though it was plagued by unfulfilled potential, it was this same lackluster story development that made me question one of the drama’s central themes in more detail: Can we receive consolation through music? With so much grief and regret tied into certain aspects of our lives, is it possible for us to begin anew in them?

The pianist in the aforementioned scene would say no. What is music but a collection of notes played just at the right time, speed, dynamic, and technique? To him, music is a mirage that we project our emotions onto — emotions that, over time, become more and more cumbersome with the experiences that taint our memories.

But what about the phrasing, what about the color? Even if that is just the audience’s imagination, a conjured feeling around a piece that is falsely credited to the performer, I don’t care whether or not I would be experiencing delusion or reality. Strange, how my views on literature and music are so different. While I believe that literature requires the reader to listen to the author before they can listen to themselves, it is not so for music. After all, the music itself already requires listening: the next step is for the audience to feel. 

Once, the night after a day that left me burnt out, overwhelmed, and hopeless, I started my homework, dreading the task before even opening the assignment. However, as I opened my classical music playlist on Spotify, a strange and wondrous change took place: Piano concerto no. 2, op. 18, composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff, began playing. And though I’ve listened to this piece countless times already, the sweeping arpeggios of the piano solo and the swelling strings of the orchestra reached into the hysteria inside my mind and touched it, soothed it, if only for a moment.

Perhaps someone more proficient in music theory could step back from this piano concerto, break it down to its parts and then analyze it by fragments, but that could not erase the emotions I associate with the piece. In fact, it would only augment it. Because like with any other aspect of living, we cannot begin “anew” — not truly. But unlike with many other aspects of living, if we removed our calculative, objective lens, then we can hear something other than the weight of expectations or the wounds of time.

There, intertwined in the melody, we will hear ourselves.

.

Featured below: a recording of me playing Consolation no. 3 by Liszt, though it should be noted that my performance of this piece is very, very flawed :’)

Making Sense of the Nonsensical

At 6 years old, reading was not much more than a routine. Go to the library, skim through the titles, look for the prettiest-looking book covers, read them, repeat. Sure, one of the more common platitudes of elementary school is to not judge a book by its cover, but then again — I was 6 years old, reading simple picture books. It was okay to be a little superficial.

Or maybe it wasn’t superficial at all. I enjoyed reading, the act of immersing myself in another world constructed by little more than words, drawings, and my imagination. And were the color, contrast, balance of these pictures not just as important as the words on the page? They defined the borders of this make-believe world, establishing the order in which life existed and persisted. When I had walked past the books with messy covers — blotchy shading, bland and haphazard palettes, overcrowded figures — I was rejecting more than a picture. I was rejecting a noisy, disorderly world.

So, reading was much more than a routine. I just did not know that yet.

As I grew older, much changed: I could read books without pictures, soon preferring the words just by themselves. As I grew older, not much changed: I still read in search of the ideal. What made a narrative satisfying was no longer its illustrated beauty, but instead reaching the richest possible fulfillment.

Although I could not pinpoint it yet, I wanted my stories to have substance. I wanted plot, characters, setting, and their joint progression. I wanted deliberate diction, symbolism, and themes. But more than all that, I wanted all these elements to come together and form a cohesive whole, like a thousand fragments eventually rolling into a pearl. Then, I could hold this pearl in my hand, touch the smooth silky surface, see all of humanity’s complexity encompassed, caressed, soothed by its gleaming reflection.

My favorite books all become pearls in my mind, but they are not the only ones. There are memories too. They were the moments in my life when I thought that if I was a character in a book, then this would be the conclusion. It would be when I grasped a new depth of emotional intimacy with another. When I had an epiphany about myself or the environment around me. When I achieved something grand in pursuit of my passions. Before, I had felt as if those moments had both eclipsed and illuminated all the moments that came before. It was The End.

Except not.

I stride, but then I stumble. I pull close, but then I drift away. As much capability as I have for change, I can just as easily regress. As such, when I read and come across a narrative with loose, fraying ends, I sometimes wonder bitterly: what’s the point?

What’s the point of a mishandled motif when serendipitous encounters cannot exist? What’s the point of lamenting over a character’s unresolved backstory if we live in the same evasion of closure? What’s the point of pondering the what-ifs or could-have-beens, the unfulfilled potential?

What’s the point of literature beyond a beautifully fabricated fantasy?

But then I remember that as much as literature is fantasy, it is also reality. Symbols hold meaning not for the sake of holding meaning, but because the world evokes emotion out of us, and in turn, we imprint our feelings onto it. Character arcs are not just a means to rewrite our personality, but to struggle in our stations just as that station struggles to contain us. Just as every word in a text must contribute to its overall meaning, every detail in our lives holds subtle influence over us, forming our identities into a pearl, pearls — determined by the definite yet indefinite in description.

I am no longer a child who rejects literature that looks too noisy and disorderly, but then again, I am still a child seeking solace in stories. Parsing through a blur of words and color, little by little, I see how purpose and intention can persist in the fickle flow of time. Little by little, I learn to make sense out of the nonsensical.