For the Love of Light

Mark Sebastian has that blank gaze in his eyes. This gaze he has is as if he is on a hypnotic trance on something interesting, and that there is a sudden detachment from his external senses. He is breathing, but he isn't moving, just on that blank gaze to the front. This gaze makes him look comatose, or more obsessed to that item he is staring at, but definitely not with diarrhea, as people with diarrhea cannot stay still, hoping that by not staying still they will not have to go immediately. This is something so interesting and hypnotic he cannot help it but ignore the use of any external sense.

This hypnotic trance that happens to us due to a fixation over something we find utterly interesting has given everyone an embarrassing story. These stories can be humorous, and downright stupid, which makes it humorous in the first place. The most common trance would be a person's fixation over someone he or she is highly attracted to. When someone is highly attracted or attached to someone or something to the point of getting hypnotized, they would react in a manner that would only result in failure on their side. They lose their senses and rationality. This situation is far worse than finishing a bottle of cheap rum. Mark is intrigued on what many of us might not find so interesting, it is a shadow puppet show being done in a little rural village in Thailand. This is the country where the tone and pronunciation of words sound sweet, to the point where it sounds a little to feminine. Thai men should not be put in certain jails if they want to keep their manliness.

Mark is a tourist, who have seen shadows ever since he was born. He has also played shadow puppets in his house with a flashlight. The best he came up with is a dog with really pointed ears. These are the same animals we can only conjure up with anyway, there was once an Indian puppet master who came up with more things out of shadows using both his hands. Mark cannot do any of that.

And now he is staring and reflecting on how the farther the light throws the shadow to, does the shadow grow exponentially larger than the object. How an object perceived to be large in size, in reality, is something very small.

The discovery of how light can generally cause a confusion in the size of anything or anyone was during the dark ages, where whenever cavemen went back to their cave the cave wall would reflect a larger than life shadow of a small squirrel. The image of a killer squirrel has terrified cavemen every night, until one night, when one brave caveman decided to go after the squirrel, who, in reality, did not want to go out, but was pushed out of the cave, for farting a very nasty smell. It was this time that the caveman found the squirrel, bashed its little head, and came back to the cave a hero. The reality of the killer squirrel was discovered the instant everyone decided to go out of the cave and look at the dead killer squirrel, and realize it was no larger than the regular morning squirrel. The heroic caveman had to spend the night outside.

And there is was, in front of him, the memories of childhood, the story teller who he cannot understand, and the puppet show, mesmerized by a flood of thoughts and yet calm and peace.

Would it ever be possible to be flooded with thoughts and yet be quiet and tranquil at the same time? Mark is so overwhelmed his system shut out the external sense, and only kept the gave, and the reflection, on how what we always see might be totally different behind the curtain, on how we mostly live on illusions and belief, when the reality behind something so complex can be so simple. This and the idea that you can have several characters played by one person, this little multi-tasking that makes us believe there are different people out there when there is only one person behind everyone. This froze Mark.

Also, at this point, Mark is supposed to embarrass himself. This is what we are all waiting to happen to him because of that blank stare. Unless you forgot the whole point of the story, and got fixated with what Mark was thinking as well.

Mark accidentally stroke a transvestite's breast as he moved his arm, to which the transvestite found delight, and to which made Mark apologize and subconsciously feel disgusted. After all, Mark, like all straight men, are not entirely comfortable with transvestites, and will have to accept that it will take time for everyone to readily accept them.

The shadow story would not be relevant, as no one really paid attention to it, but it did carry an amazing storyline, and value, if only we decided to focus on that rather than getting distracted with Mark.