world weary
Elise lived in a world of changing monotony.
The first day It happened, Elise was on deck for her recitation for Credit Transactions. It never bothered her that the library, on a Tuesday afternoon, was not full, nor bustling, nor lively. She went to her seat, heaved her notes, and began to read. The guy beside her was reading a book on Taxation. She managed to muster some interest to observe that the book had no cover.
She also noticed the LCD clock in the library flickered from the correct time to 00:00:00, and then from that to 0E:EE0E, and then from that to the correct time.
Elise, on her credit, did notice something was wrong, four days after. She was at the Snack Bar when she noticed that some of the stores were open but unattended. She would have a slice of pizza for lunch but no one was there. She sighed, turned her shoes, and returned to the library. She remembered she had some biscuits in her bag.
Elise was called thrice for recitation on Transportation, thirteen days later. She answered every question correctly and even quoted the relevant provisions in verbatim. It did not bother her that half of the class was absent. The professor did not announce a boycott.
It was 11 AM, nineteen days later, and Elise cannot return the book she borrowed a few weeks before because there was no librarian present. She left the book at the counter with a note and returned to her usual seat to study. The guy with the book with no cover was there, hoodie up, but he was not reading. He was doodling on his book.
Twenty-eight days later, Elise answered a question wrong for the first time. It was her fifth recitation for the day on the same subject because she was only one present. The professor asked her to sit down and recorded her grade. Elise waited as the professor began to call the absent students again, one by one.
Neither Elise nor the professor showed any interest about the boycott.
Neither Elise nor the professor was bothered that the roll included some students who did not even step on San Beda.
Neither Elise nor the professor detected that some of the names were of people who had long died.
Thirty days later, on an almost empty library, Elise observed that the LCD clock was running backwards, with letters sometimes replacing the numbers on odd intervals. The guy with the book with no cover was not there, although the book with no cover was still on his seat. Elise picked the book up as she sat down. The guy crossed every line on the book with a black marker. The doodles on the front page were just crosses after crosses inside circles after circles.
There was a message on the end, written on red ink, repeated a thousand times on the blank page:
Elise closed the book with no cover and opened her own. She still had a lot to catch up on agencies.
The professors stopped going to class on the sixtieth day and yet, inexplicably, when Elise went to class day after day, the class cards for that subject would be on the table. Elise did not dare take a peek.
Elise would wait for the class hours to end, sitting alone in an empty room, and then go back home. She would read her notes as the letters and numbers on the crashing LCD clock outside her classroom ticked by, except in Transportation Law, where the professor expressly prohibited the students from reading anything during class. She would look at the whiteboard then.
The guards stopped showing up on the sixty-fourth day.
The custodians, on the seventy-sixth day.
The electricity and the water went off on the eighty-fourth day. Elise started to bring her solar-operated lamp to school and sat inside the ray of light as the classes started and ended.
On the hundred thirty-second day, inside the damp, dark, and lonely law library, Elise closed her book on Labor Standards. She was about to open it again for the thirty-fourth time when her eyes darted back to the book with no cover on the table beside her.
On a sudden flash of protest against ennui, Elise took her pen from her bag.
In another world, on another time, in a bustling library, a guy with a book with no cover was surprised to see a sentence, drawn in red ink, on the front of his tax book. The sentence simply said:
I am content.