Cold Mist

I. The Hopeless One

Ah, dusk.

It is dusk once again. A dusk chilled in mist that shrouded the distant peaks as it spilled down like wave after wave of phantom cavalry at full charge to assault the lowlands. I have witnessed this before, oh yes - many times over - just like every other student who had found cause to stop from their academic suffering to look outside the window. Yet for me, this phenomenon, this coalescence of light and darkness, held naught more than the memories of an era long since gone.

I learned many things in that university, within and without the confines of its classrooms. Of that there is no doubt. Through the years I constantly felt, however, that most of them weren't even frequently applicable to the mundane life I led after college. They have had their own share of usefulness, of that I will now admit, but only during moments that are not relevant at all to this story. I guess I must consider those years a necessary waste of time in order to achieve for myself and my family the kind of prestige associated with bachelor degrees.

No matter how chaotic our life in that university had been for us, and no matter how messed up life was thereafter, I very much doubt there ever was an upheaval of such intensity as that which the students of Southern Hills University encountered during the coldest season on my senior year.

Sometimes I think I want to talk about the campus: silently majestic with its empire of structures which, stolid to the passage of time, housed the colleges that gravitated to the southern suburbs of the city. For us soldiers of paper and pen, the campus was already a city all by itself: a city of book reports, a city of hallways and streets that emptied and died when the sun went down. It was big enough to warrant having its own time zone, some believed. And indeed it had that. Yet sometimes, it's the life of stale donuts and half – eaten pizza (also gone stale) and heaps of ground barako coffee – concocted into drinks that put to shame existing recipes right before exams which I want to talk about, sometimes too it's the cold weather of that time for it was colder back then, somehow. But on second thought, I think it's mostly the 'Hopeless One' I would want to relate to you at this point. For a reason yet unknown to me, that memory is among the very few that I would dare to resurrect after all these years.

Before Friendster and the host of other narcissistic social networks that cropped up later on and before the notion of stalker accounts was thought of, we in the Southern Hills University had our very own psychopath.

He was referred to as the 'Hopeless One' with a mixture of dread and pity. Why didn't they just call him "stalker" be done with it and make all our lives easier, you ask? Or how about 'Avenger' or 'The Phantom'? Honestly, I have no idea. I think they had flipped out on that one too. I mean, our lives as students were full of grief as it were so you'd think they'll go for something that didn't exert much effort. Just the same, they went and called him the 'Hopeless One' and clamped it on quite permanently. It even says so in the school archives.