By Stephen Zagala
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Only thing left to do is repeat. I lose the schedule to the hours almost immediately, every early-morning dream merely a parallel to whatever remains of the day to come, the guilty pleasure of a twenty-four hour album I can’t help but put on repeat. Non-connection is itself a distinct connection. You look so tired and unhappy: what’s in your head, you zombie? In an ideal run I should not be thinking of anything except watching my step: can’t get tripped up on a road with no sidewalks, can’t fight back against a stranger in a Hiace picking up cheese blocks and craft beer at the Farmer’s Market coming straight at me, can’t afford to stop running. Everything is about how to get to the thirty-minute five-kilometer record. Monday afternoon you spend hours losing yourself over whether to study Pope or Wordsworth, to eschew the theory of the lyric altogether, to even bother taking the LRT to campus six stations away in the heat of the afternoon that you just cannot peel off: every question is merely an aftershock to the worst southwest monsoons in twenty years. Almost every job you could ever possibly think of almost having lays back on your laptop screen, only as far from you as your actual dream career. The sense that this cannot possibly work.
That’s the need to do something until it’s too late. Show an active interest in this job, you’ve got three free flags to show an active interest for jobs you apply to the employers until the end of the month! Nowadays, every night is a nightmare I’d rather remember, just for the sake of ruling out tomorrow, completely unable to fall asleep and a sunken stomach weighing you down when waking up: one dank room, four short hours, no good answers. When you get that job you’ve been applying for across three different job-seeking websites, you will need to sleep at 10:30, before midnight, and wake up at 5:30, maybe at sunrise and is that not paradise: thinking is a feeling too but I’ve stopped trying either, maybe both. Circling the collection of upscale townhouses that make up this collection of blocks on the last quiet street you still know as home, you realize you cannot complete this one without burning up tomorrow in car horns and drunk motorcycle drivers and the unease of consciousness in daylight. I was supposed to review today, but every theory is already the wrong theory. Can’t you see I’m trying: you know that we’re doomed. Daylight does not reach this vast depth of the wall. The nagging feeling of something amiss.
Only nothing is left to repeat. In the latest one, we pile in for the wake dressed in our best because all my jokes are already the worst: the deceased need to know we don’t want them gone: for my eulogy I throw away bullet points on Freud and Lacan and Zizek and instead theorize incorrectly that maybe this is all in our heads. To the best of my knowledge there is no study guide for the upcoming comprehensive exams, but there is the reassurance that there is nothing more you need to study than whatever you can remember from the Norton and is that not paradise. Call me a sorry mess, but well-framed. Every night is a delayed reminder to get out and run, and every day feels like weeks without having taken a step outside: not even commutes count because by the time that I’m ready to leave the house, it’s already rush hour: because every song you write notes to is every song on every jeepney and train and god-forsaken truck-ridden major highway of death, you might as well just stay at home. Adamson University has viewed your application for Full-Time Admissions Officer! Run, run, run, run.
There’s nothing left to do but repeat. After three weeks you check back on the document and find yourself in debt of fifty-three pages of classical theory explaining why you could never end up actually seeing The Odyssey, and you are stuck at home: if anybody knows how to define the sublime, it should be you, but you freeze debating to believe Ralph or Longinus or yourself. I cannot drive away and that is why I run, but I cannot run away and that drives me further and makes me feel Not Quite real just as abstract ideas are Not Quite real and the absence of the beloved is Not Quite real: you’re no longer laughing, drowning fast, but I’m Not Quite. In another I write up the scandal that shatters Philippine independent music, permanently this time, before waking up hungover and naked to take a shit in a public restroom with a hard plastic door too short and a broken metal lock too forward. The absolute certainty of a misstep. Your last awake friend stares back at you from the mirror and talks you into adding everything onto tomorrow, growing a list full of productive things to do like promise to wash the dishes after dinner and maybe try running somewhere else that you cannot go with your eyes closed or possibly even clearing your name from the National Bureau of Investigation to make sure that you’re ready for that job that really is coming your way soon, so very, very soon and is this not paradise. The walls are closing in and they are starting to howl.
There is nothing left. Hi, Stephen, it looks like the Registrar Assistant job with the College of Saint Benilde has closed. Soy un perdedor, that’s how my life is: you couldn’t write this. You have not dreamt in a while. When I woke and was awake I determined that the real adversary of my determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the range and degree of difference between things of one day and things of the next: simple, except it’s all blank. It does not scare you. Looking back at your latest stack of notes leaves you looking to when you remember what you meant, you are going to have to read it all again. Left to do nothing, nothing repeats. Please note that only shortlisted applicants will be contacted for an interview. Grasping for another dream: lost at sea and having not yet written my final essay to complete my postgraduate coursework, I weave together three friends who wish to remain anonymous, Borges translations, and the ever present presentness. Can anybody hear me: I just want to be me, I don’t belong here. Hi Stephen, the Editorial Assistant job with REX Publishing is not likely to proceed. It’s too late to repeat, but that’s nothing. It is impossible to overstate how wrong everything already feels: you spelled catharsis correctly, you have read this segment of a Defence of Poesy before, and your wrist is stuck after annotating every corner of The Waste Land (Eliot’s, of course), and you are choking on all of this. Hi, Stephen, thank you for your interest in the Academic Admissions position, but it looks unlikely that your job will progress further. This could not have possibly happened, but I am on a train without the rails, you are on a jeepney without the cushions, and we are driving right at each other right when I’m running right beside you. It wears him out all the time: please, could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest. There’s nothing left to do. I was tired of ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had first invigorated me and far be in it from me to lie in you for refuge from the real world of the movies, still exactly as real. Hi, Stephen, it looks like your application for the Part-Time English Faculty Opening at Far Eastern University is likely to not progress further. Sitting upright in a cut-up t-shirt and gym shorts and squinting your eyes. Only thing there’s left to do is nothing. It’s noon again. It has only been one month. The eye-closing recognition that it has been far too late for far too long. You would finish that chapter on Romanticism today but you have to fill out a form for a public service desk job aligning calendar dates for institutional partners and double checking contracts and buying bulk boxes of black and blue ballpens that you definitely will not get. I am in love with all that I must have to read again and it is miserable and lasts five minutes. You do this to yourself, you do, and that’s why it really hurts: anything to forget everything. There are still three months left of this shit. Nobody’s going to come and save you: home again the next day I run into Susan and Lyn and Joshua but I’m running into the mirror holding my Norton which could not possibly be the right book but I’m holding on by my bed hangings and I am committed to running this reading selection back. That’s nothing to do. Hi, Stephen, the teachers roster for this year in Xavier School San Juan is full, but we’ll keep you on the waitlist till next year. There’s nothing. I could blow through the ceiling if I just turn and run, but we’re going down. Repeating nothing until it’s something. Let the traffic pass, tell anyone who messages that I’m not home, not fragments but Horace, Gramsci, and Haraway. That’s the repeat. Every reflexive backspace for every unreadable verse with every flourish that’s only ever slightly out of line because every single word is already irreparably irrevocably unquestionably beyond salvation. The need is nothing. It has already been one month. To be done, nothing is left to repeat. Hi, Stephen, you may not hear back from this nightmare. There’s nothing to be done but repeat. You resolve to wake up the moment you fall asleep, and your dream is to repeat and (get me out of here) and a bottomless chair and (get me out of here) and some holiday with friends scattered all around the world and get me out of here. The only thing left to do is to need to repeat. There’s nothing left to repeat. Is this not paradise. It’s too late to repeat. Hi, Stephen. It’s too late.
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