sweet despair

During odd days when I find it difficult to stay on an even keel, I turn to music for stability. Many things - people, information, emotions - disrupt the balance of daily life. Sometimes, even knowing new things can shift the weight, and destroy the equilibrium (whether permanent or temporary, it is a an entirely different matter). Often, we find ourselves sucked in the noise of the world, the senseless blabbering of the people surrounding us, the frustrating traffic of the city. Music has been a source of peace for me, gently collecting my parts that had been scattered by the wind of chaos, and realigning my thoughts with the rest of my being.

I always enjoy listening to music whether it be a symphony by Dvorak, a slow R&B jam that tickles the spine, a frenzied house track, a punk song with killers riffs, or even a simple, ambient track playing in commercial establishments. I’ve always seen myself as fortunate, because I grew up in a household where listening to music was not only supported and encouraged, but was used as a way to bond and strengthen familial ties.

There is always a song or a composition which I turn to in order to pull myself together. I find it amazing how certain melodies, lyrics, and sonic fluctuations can take me back to safe places. I always called it my “musical escapism”. A classical prelude would often remind me of those gloomy October nights when my father prepared a hearty, beef stew for dinner. A particular electro-dance track would take me back to my high school days, and how my friends and I used to “strut” along the hallways during lunch. Jazz standards bring me to warm, summer evenings spent in our ancestral home in the province, when I would stay in the balcony, in awe of the stars populating the sky (stargazing in the city is simply no match).

Today, I am listening to Flower Duet from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. It reminds me of a time when I floated in sublime air - a rarefied sheet of atmosphere - where the sensation of breathing was felt, and not just allowed and controlled by bodily signals. It also reminds me of the married man I flirted with a few years back: our near-affairs and close-encounter with infidelities; my almost one-sided desire, and our missed opportunities; the things said and done in the little, private scale of things I strain to remember now. Recalling it while listening to the duet, I can’t help but feel I am my old self again: not only have I found balance, but I’ve also claimed my youthful vigor, my innocent curiosity, and my sweet despair once more.

Sous le dôme épais où le blanc jasmin
A la rose s’assemble
Sur la rive en fleurs riant au matin
Viens, descendons ensemble

summer

The sun comes out earlier, and stays a little longer. As it is always with summer, the days have been lengthened once more, and the heat strengthened. The rise in temperature is not only noticeable, it can also be quite unbearable, almost as if you’re constantly exposed to an open barbecue grill. As a consequence, walking has become an arduous option, and I am now quick to look for alternatives - the tricycle, a not so necessary second jeep ride, the cool of a bus station over the hellish trap of MRT platforms.

Summer days always remind me of high school. Which is strange considering we never had, or I never had to attend, summer classes. But the way the summer sun pours her huge shafts of light in the city reminds me of how our corridors upon dismissal, reflected waning sunsets into the room. Often, it would seem like the classrooms were tinged in sepia, as the floor tiles bounced back the light in a light brown hue. From the rays which came in the windows, you could see dust particles, like plankton, floating in the sea of light. Bright, hot, heady summer days always bring me back to such moments.

I hang on tightly to such memories of my adolescent years. I understand that with each passing second, the clarity of my recollections are slowly chipped away, and thus their reliability is compromised. But I cling to them, like moss on rock, because those few stills of the years when relations were most impressionable give me sanity. Without them, I am a huge ship with no anchor, bound to float away even at the minutest of ripples, and perhaps even capsize in the easiest of storms. Without them, the heat of summer days would get the best of me, and there will be no nostalgia to cool, no reference to make sense of the extremes of a tropical climate.

I have been trying to lull myself to an afternoon sleep but it feels different today. Each time I’ve been closing my eyes, I’m sort of going back to this moment when I was a young boy. It’s a tad bit unsettling but also very welcomed.

Have you ever experienced something similar? It’s as if your memories become clearer and they start flooding the present. A familiar scent, a similar weather - they trigger this flashback that you don’t just see, but you also feel.

It’s like I am twelve years old again, same time after lunch, lying down, watching the National Geographic’s documentary on Wildebeests, lazy and consumed by indifference to house chores. It’s funny because it’s a feeling that brings equal parts joy, and equal parts sadness. Everything looks the same but you’re in a different place altogether. I can’t quite explain it because I’m somewhere between sleepy and surprised while writhing this.

Words are inadequate. I would not consider it nostalgia since I’m not exactly longing for the past. It’s more like I’m being displaced and brought back to the past yet I’m still in the present, some sort of emotional time-machine.

I’m not going crazy am I?

take it with a grain of salt

it was a little hazy
as you tight-roped
along the edges of the pavement
you wore a grey tee
as you muscled
into the silence of my apartment
and slowly, you pressed
your fingers onto my waist
the furniture recessed
the hunger resurfaced
and the floor was polished
by the remnants of what we wore
pulled down, went up
as I slowly, dutifully closed the bedroom door

it was a little cloudy
as I woke up
into the warm curtains of morning

all around me
subtle traces
of what I might have missed
but a scent wafts the same
as the smoke I claim
and suddenly the night’s reminisce
a stranger’s kiss
a one-night tryst
the melancholy
of post-coital guilt.