PasaHERO Tales #1

by Adrienne Onday

art by Eri Santos and JC Alfonso

It was the 31st of July 2014.

I started the day in a sour mood; whether it was me waking up on the wrong side of the bed or the world being far too cruel before 12pm, I was not sure. I couldn’t have cared less.

I was complaining about how tiring it was to watch people try and fight the cruelty of the world when it was all so futile. You wake up and do the same old things. Sometimes, you come across a small thing that makes you feel worse or better, but even that doesn’t last long.

The 31st of July was destined to be a heartwarming day for me.

I was dropped off at UP Diliman, standing under the waiting shed near the College of Mass Communications and waiting for a jeep that will take me to Palma Hall. It was raining so hard, and the winds were so strong that a branch broke off a tree and fell in the middle of the road. Just then, a man appeared and seemed to be headed to the same shed I was under. With just an umbrella in hand and a shoulder bag slung over him, he was dressed casually and yet smartly. He was drenched, though, soaked by the rain that increasingly fell harder. He passed by the branch that fell.

With nobody else around, I watched the stranger seemingly taking his time walking despite the heavy rain. To my surprise, he stopped in middle of the road, pulled the branch out of the way with both hands, ignoring the rain completely, and tossed it in into the vacant lot by the road. Then, he went on his way to wait in the shed. We waited for a jeep together in silence.

We went on to hop onto different jeeps, but I was left thinking about that moment the rest of the day. I thought that it was really nice of him to do that. Most people would just ignore the branch that fell, because it was raining so hard. The man was not even driving a car so he should be barely concerned with the branch, but he went out of his way to keep the road safe.

For some reason, this really struck me. A random act of kindness with no one else to witness felt like a small space provided by the universe for some realization; or maybe it was a message specifically composed for me--my earlier bitterness with the world melted into understanding and compassion, not only for this stranger who stood by me quietly in the rain under the waiting shed, but for everyone else around me. That same morning I was just going on about how useless it was to be nice and good to others, but here was a man clearing a road with nothing in it for him.

I was so bent on thinking that the world was only consuming itself with malice and unkindness, but it always seems like the universe loves to prove me otherwise, loves to get my hopes back up; that humans still have it in them to be compassionate and thoughtful of others and that it is always worth it to keep fighting for all of us.

I have but one regret because maybe I’m reading into small actions too much: I never got to thank the stranger. But when you have just a few straws left to grasp on, you take it. And when the world shows you a man who tosses a fallen branch out of the way and into an empty lot, you thank him on behalf of everyone else.

--
Adrienne is a student of BA Sociology at UP Diliman and is the co-founder and co-owner of Ligaya Komiks

Eri is an artist, a writer, a lover and a friend. Everything else is subject to personal bias.