I never loved nobody fully
Sep. 16th, 2011 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
levityCoffeeshop that is actually a coffeeshop, this time, and it's stupid but I have an apartment that is basically a place to park stuff and sleep and a coffeeshop an hour away from my corner of Metro Manila that for all of the prepackaged commercial second-home air coffeeshops have by definition really does sometimes feel more like a home than my actual house and five hours and two hundred and twenty kilometers away is a bungalow behind a metalworks shop with an unkept front garden and a jungle of a back garden and, yes, two swimming pools, and so basically I am trying to express, again, the special tragedy of those of us who grew up the big fish in a small provincial town we know easy as breathing and that we never really loved, because to love something means being able to imagine being away from it enough to say Fuck no. Leaving was always part of the equation, and of course you can never go home again (hi there Cesc Fabregas, hindi ako bitter grabe) but there's a lot to be said for returning. I can pretend to be witty and say that this is the universe's way of preventing all-out war between me and the brother when the time comes for us to decide who gets to keep the house, but the very real likelihood of both of us being celibate forever denies me even that.
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The time and place for Regina Spektor is early evening to about ten at night, holed up in the backseat/front passenger seat of a car, rain tapping on the windows if you like, nothing with you except your music and the natural melancholy of yellow light from streetlamps. I have established this. It is one of the useful things I've gotten from spending so much of my life in transit, in addition to a permanent sense of beauty in the fleeting and an immunity to any form of motion sickness. You play the Beatles on the car stereo when you're climbing the winding roads to Baguio with the family, windows down and sunlight bright and muted, laughing at the Marcos Busted and singing at the top of your lungs, off-key on purpose. Taylor Swift in the living room of your apartment, with the Intarmedkids sprawled out on every available surface comfortably close enough to horizontal, adolescent emotion both mocked and chorused. Silent Sanctuary to Benjie's guitar in the old Pisay bus, with communal snacks and communal beverages and any number of pusoy dos games going on. Fall Out Boy in lab class, whether you're in second year high school and making mitosis slides from onion roots or in lab tech culturing bacteria or in histology trying to act like the most beautiful thing in the world isn't separated from you by a wall and a glass window. Panic! At the Disco on a bus to Calasiao, Pangasinan with Kathleen, accompanied by preumptuous literariness, very bad jokes, and a bottle of capsaicin. Yellowcard in one of Pisay's gazebos with Guia, finding out how to best amplify the sound from her phone's speakers using your water jug, its cap, whatever you have in your bags, and all your physics. The Clash when you're going at a hundred and twenty on the NLEX with your dad on the last day of a golden summer, almost- but not quite- drowning out the sirens in the background, and you will never again be able to listen to police on my back without grinning like a disappearing cat.
I have established all of this, okay. I have my soundtracks straight in my head. Regina Spektor is for dusk in the urbis and northern highways, not for four-in-the-afternoon sun and the welcoming warmth of a not-packed train and definitely not for what I have to call, for lack of a better term, my singing voice, but I'm living love songs right now. Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall-
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The time and place for Regina Spektor is early evening to about ten at night, holed up in the backseat/front passenger seat of a car, rain tapping on the windows if you like, nothing with you except your music and the natural melancholy of yellow light from streetlamps. I have established this. It is one of the useful things I've gotten from spending so much of my life in transit, in addition to a permanent sense of beauty in the fleeting and an immunity to any form of motion sickness. You play the Beatles on the car stereo when you're climbing the winding roads to Baguio with the family, windows down and sunlight bright and muted, laughing at the Marcos Busted and singing at the top of your lungs, off-key on purpose. Taylor Swift in the living room of your apartment, with the Intarmedkids sprawled out on every available surface comfortably close enough to horizontal, adolescent emotion both mocked and chorused. Silent Sanctuary to Benjie's guitar in the old Pisay bus, with communal snacks and communal beverages and any number of pusoy dos games going on. Fall Out Boy in lab class, whether you're in second year high school and making mitosis slides from onion roots or in lab tech culturing bacteria or in histology trying to act like the most beautiful thing in the world isn't separated from you by a wall and a glass window. Panic! At the Disco on a bus to Calasiao, Pangasinan with Kathleen, accompanied by preumptuous literariness, very bad jokes, and a bottle of capsaicin. Yellowcard in one of Pisay's gazebos with Guia, finding out how to best amplify the sound from her phone's speakers using your water jug, its cap, whatever you have in your bags, and all your physics. The Clash when you're going at a hundred and twenty on the NLEX with your dad on the last day of a golden summer, almost- but not quite- drowning out the sirens in the background, and you will never again be able to listen to police on my back without grinning like a disappearing cat.
I have established all of this, okay. I have my soundtracks straight in my head. Regina Spektor is for dusk in the urbis and northern highways, not for four-in-the-afternoon sun and the welcoming warmth of a not-packed train and definitely not for what I have to call, for lack of a better term, my singing voice, but I'm living love songs right now. Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall-
