from my Tinyletter archive (March 2018):
This is the story of a girl, my boyfriend slurred into the mic. The music pulsed, electric, brutal, in that dark basement, as he pointed into me, deep in the crowd, all eighteen and dumb.
I absolutely love her– he sang, his unspecial voice hanging as the guitars went on, then –
when she smiles. Eyes locked with mine. Click. Keys gone. No more. I yelled, raised my arms, doing my job, probably even melting into my spot, into shared sweat, into spilled beer. The boys flailed around the stage some more, jumping, banging their heads toward each other until the song quieted and then ended.
When our relationship ended three years later, it took me a long time before I began listening to these songs again. For a long time, I stopped enjoying the kind of music we shared. The first time we talked, we talked about Death Cab For Cutie. It was easy. I was an easy target. I deleted the pirated iTunes off my laptop, along with about 13,000 songs we discovered and listened together. We made playlists for one another at every chance we could get. A playlist for saying sorry. For anniversaries. For the time we would be spending apart.
But then the story, along with the songs, quieted and then ended. We broke up on my 21st birthday and parted ways inside a crowded train. Rob Sheffield wrote, "Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you." Our good songs left me. Or perhaps I left them inside a heavy box, organized into little envelopes: A playlist of songs for dancing. For long bus rides. For the bedroom. Left outside, by the side of the road, where it stayed just there, sweet, insistent. Sometimes, I would try to return to it. Just one band, I'd say. Just my favorites, just the ones that were mine before they became his. But I never really did.
Not until one night in March, eight months after, when I saw Death Cab For Cutie live. With two new people beside me, and surrounded by strangers, I cried, yelled, raised my arms, but not because of an unspoken obligation, or because the singer knew me. He didn't, but he was singing to me, a nobody, an unspecial me. And in that moment, in that hour, I reclaimed the songs as mine, snatched it from the imaginary box, again my own personal jewels. Dazzling and sharp. Ruby.
When I got home that night I felt beaten, cracked open. I took a shower and peed all that I held in so I could keep my spot at the concert. The next morning, I went back to my music, found again my missing parts. I began to enjoy again the songs even when they still felt like unspooling, still sounded like Baguio, like what I thought happy meant: small, breakable. I spent weeks relearning those songs, amazed at how colossal they all sounded now, and at how much I had missed them. I missed the noise, the way it spilled in and out of the song. I missed the heavy sadness whispered, breathed into weird boyish music. I missed the angst, that sometimes smoothed into desire:
I am alone / In my defeat, I wish I knew you were safely at home; or not at all smoothly, but was a stark, loud feeling nonetheless:
If it makes you less sad, I'll move out of the state / You can keep to yourself / I'll keep out of your way.I started going to gigs again. Began to enjoy jumping and thrashing around dark basements where pretty boys sang, their damp hair sticking to their sweaty faces. But because I am who I am and I like the songs that I like, it kept happening to me. But because music is desire articulated, I kept giving it away. You know that part in Love is a Mixtape where Rob exclaimed, yet again he thought, to another girl, "I'll make you a mixtape"? I'm always Rob in that moment, eager and earnest, to share, to test, to try again.
Fast forward. In a car with a beautiful boy. When Frank Ocean released Blonde, we stayed after work to listen to it together, stealthily eyeing each other across the office, until we were both out the door, one after the other. We went track by track, listening in order, nothing but the glow of the dashboard of the car. Blue and orange blinking. We drove out of the parking lot, mindlessly into the slow moving streets of Quezon City. I can't remember anymore what else we listened to that night, but I remember driving all the way to Makati, just because there was still music playing. Of all of them, F probably had the sexiest taste in music. After it fell apart, I denied myself the pleasure of Channel Orange, of D'Angelo. One good night, we stopped in the middle of Katipunan Extension as he played Cruisin'.
Music was made for love, cruisin' is made for love. How could we not have stopped. How could that night not have ended in bed. Of all of them, it was also him who took the most from me. He took Balisong. He took Baby You're My Light. All of Phoenix, which I had just reclaimed from X. Even fucking Radiohead. It's been long, I guess, so I can listen to these now without wincing. I could even unironically play Love On The Weekend now.
There comes a small victory in taking these songs back. I took pleasure, took pride in getting my music back. They were mine: I found them, I built company out of them. It took time, it took a lot of restarts. It took a lot of square ones. Just recently, I made the mistake of reaching out to X again. X, who sang to me whenever he called, from another country, four hours behind my clock. The last song I heard in his voice went like,
My heart hurts so good, I love you babe, so bad, so bad. It was an annoying song, which I had only up until a few days ago, was able to tolerate again. One bad night, I heard my neighboring building, which happened to be a bar, playing this song so loudly I had to sit up from my bed and cry soundlessly.
During last year's Valentine's, I saw A post about a song I had shared with him when we were still starting out. It pained me to see him still keeping the song, because I thought I had taken it back. But a friend comforted me saying, "You just have that effect. You leave something." I've always been thinking about their pull to the ways I listen to music, but had never really paused and thought about them thinking about me. F still follows me on Spotify and I could see him listening to Band of Skulls. A would sometimes post a Leon Bridges song.
Like beasts out in the wilderness / We are fighting to survive. Stupidly, or maybe bravely, I would play the same song on my computer, too.
There isn't any wise bit in this letter, just a lot of musing, and a lot of music. Some songs you can take back, some you refuse to give back. Some you really can't hear the same way again. But some nights you find the courage to listen to all of it, quietly, walking through the thick of it again. Music is desire, is feeling in a legible form you can click, you can wrap as a gift. Despite all the ways it could hurt, really, why would you deny someone the gift of a song? We give and we give. Here, have a song on me.
Remember me when this song plays.
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