In undertow

Before 2022 ended, I already had a feeling that 2023 would be different. I managed to book exciting things for myself to look forward to at least for the first five months of the year—Arctic Monkeys (one of my favourite bands ever since I was a teenager), Harry Styles (my second favourite white boy) in March, and two days of The 1975 (my favourite band) in May. Four concerts, all VIP, in the first five months of 2023 are truly insane and financially irresponsible but very exciting. I feel like I have a reason to live again. 

That was one of the things that the pandemic took from me. Aside from taking away one of the constant things I have treasured for over a decade, it took the thing that I value the most — having to look forward to new experiences every year. I don’t know if I have blogged about this in the past but year on year, my travels and potential concert dates inspired me to work hard and really wanted to ensure that I am taking that part back of myself. 

When I look back to the year that had been, so many ups and downs had happened. This time last year, it seemed like a fever dream that I was supposed to move out of the country and start a totally different chapter in my life. It’s silly that I really found myself in a proverbial crossroad and for someone who is an ardent believer in timings, the decision wasn’t even difficult. 

So despite being in the depression pit again towards the end of the year, I was so determined to turn things around for myself. In my journal, I wrote: 2022 was the year I found, in Albert Camus’ words, my invincible summer. Hoping 2023 would be kind and joyous. May the year be filled with love and prosperity. 

But then things didn’t really go according to plan. The moment the clock struck twelve and the entire planet welcomed the new year, I was already drowning myself in my favourite sad song. 

I hated it because it’s so dumb to be sad on the first day of the year [(January Marice didn’t even realise it then but this moment would be pivotal in how things are unfolding for her (love, July Marice)]. But I was so determined to get out of my depressed era and start anew. 

I think this is the first year I really did not have any specific resolutions for the new year. All I want is to grow up and be mature. It’s very vague but the good thing about it is that it alleviates any additional pressure that I put on myself. 

And as fate lets it, little by little, things are coming together for me and it’s funny because it all started with a song and a white shirt. Around this time, I still couldn’t see the big picture, just the moodboard of the things to come, but in my heart I have never stopped believing that the universe has her own silly little way of turning things around for me. 

2023 is my chapter two.

Oceans and engines

I am writing my thoughts on the back of the receipts I have accumulated for the past two days as I have attended Head in the Clouds. I have taken so many videos that I know I probably wouldn’t post anyway (but I should) so I have deleted almost all apps on my dear old phone to free up space. My head is just full of thoughts tonight and I badly needed a release. 

The sky has finally cleared tonight. It’s been raining for the past two days and I feel victorious knowing that my body was able to survive that kind of stress. Eight hours of standing under the rain without food, drinks or pee break. My legs hurt so much and the soles of my feet are sore but I survived and that’s all that mattered. 

The lineup was okay. It was mamang who really wanted to go — it was reminiscent of the Wanderland event that we were supposed to go to just a week before covid-19 was declared a pandemic and the world went on a lockdown. Despite these inhibitions, I have decided to go with her anyway because I feel like I am catching up on so many things that the lockdown took from me. Sometimes I wonder if I have gone overboard (purchasing tickets for The 1975, Harry Styles and Arctic Monkeys in a span of two weeks) but if there's anything I have learned from this pandemic, it's that life is too short.

These past two nights have been incredibly tiring and eventful, but the second day was the most memorable for me. I had so much fun watching Zedd’s set — it made me understand why people enjoy EDM sets. The energy of the crowd amplified everything. I really loved it. I was at the barricade singing and dancing and held hands with eaJ because he was at front having the time of his life too. I don’t listen to his music and haven’t really heard of him before HITC, but he has soft hands. 

I guess the highlight of this night was seeing Niki— and I never expected that her set would make me cry hard. Embarrassing but it wasn’t too obvious because it was raining hard anyway. The raindrops helped mask my tears. 

I don’t know what’s with tonight that is too lonesome. 

I first started listening to Niki because the boy sent her song lowkey to me. It’s funny because it’s one of those moments that I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. I just got off work and I was on my way to my car. He was at the gym and he sent me a hot gym selfie (okay writing this made me laugh in real life lmaooooooo) that I spilled my caramel macchiato on my jeans. It was that night when he sent me her song and I remember him saying that it’s not really his vibe but he thinks it’s something I would like (and he’s right). 

At Head in the Clouds, there was a song that Niki played and she said that she didn’t really plan on playing but she just felt like she had to. She got her guitar and started singing. I knew immediately what song she was about to play. 

At that moment, Orion Carloto’s quote from Flux about missing someone in waves popped up in my head and I felt like I was living it. I don’t experience it often anymore but all of a sudden I could feel like a tsunami of emotions drowning me and I missed him so so badly. It was overwhelming and the only thing that my poor self could do is to cry. 

I always feel bad about myself when I miss him, because the fact of the matter is, I have these feelings despite knowing that he broke my heart in so many ways. But I guess that’s my bruised ego talking. I don’t want to deal with the rational part of my brain right now. Tonight I don’t want to think; I just want to feel. 

I could see the moon from my hotel room window; it’s illuminating Manila Bay and the cargo ships seemingly parked there since this morning, waiting to unload. They seem like they’re in a standstill, which is an ironic background of the huge stage that the staff has already started to pack up. I was a few metres away from it a little less than an hour ago and now it’s being torn apart into smaller pieces, quickly and effortlessly. 

It’s fascinating that there are some things in life that are very easy to take down or to remove. I know when I wake up in the morning the entire stage will be gone and the concert grounds will be empty, as if nothing happened in the past two days. Just like what happened with him. One morning he was just gone, as if nothing happened, as if he never knew of my existence. 

In times when I let myself feel, when I let myself miss him, the after-feeling is always that lingering thought of embarrassment that I still have these feelings for someone who has forgotten and replaced me. I guess I’m still in that stage of disbelief that I’m so naive when it comes to these things. But I have also been working hard on giving myself grace and fully accepting that I really do wear my heart on my sleeve and I shouldn’t punish myself for it. 

But god, it’s so hard. I feel like I have to rewire my system to do it. Lately I have been thinking about how our childhood really influences how we cope with things. I was raised to have a mentality to never lose and to overachieve. To do that I always let things get to me and I have a hard time determining which one is within or out of my control. All my life I’ve been a very black or white, all or nothing kind of person. Living in the gray feels like a cop out. 

I remember in January of 2019, weeks after he broke my heart the first time, I prayed to Mother Mary to not make him an important figure in my life, to remove him completely in my life if he was just going to break my heart. Seven days later, he did something that cemented his place in my life. Sometimes I still go back to that moment—why did she let this happen if he’ll just crush my heart? 

Self-help books and inspirational gurus on Twitter would say, maybe the universe made me meet him because he needed that love. In the boy's words, "a defining chapter" in his life. But that's unfair. What about me? When will it be my turn to be loved and to be the plot and not just a chapter?

I loved and didn’t get the love back. It’s fine. I will be fine. I should stop romanticising and questioning what transpired simply because of the cosmic thing between us. At the end of the day, the universe could set up the greatest thing in our lives but it’s still up to us which road to take. 

The moon is shining brightly and it looks so pretty. I feel like it’s smiling at me from my window. For the first time ever, I am writing about the boy using his real name (which I will obviously edit when I share this to the void). I have written so much about him (immortalising him in my journals, how lucky is he?) but I never really refer to him by his real name. I guess it’s because using it makes the pain real, and a part of me just wants to lock his name alongside the good memories we’ve shared. But maybe that’s wrong, maybe I shouldn’t really try to separate the two. 

It’s 2:07 am and I feel like crying again. Nothing good happens after 2am, as the great Ted Mosby said, but whatever. I don’t want to think; I just want to feel. 

I’ll just deal with the afterfeels in the morning.

Exile

It’s ridiculous that I have started writing this blog post since September, and I am editing it one week shy of my birthday (in 2023). 

I think of all the blog posts I have written in the past years I have resurrected my blog, this is probably the one that underwent several drafts and title revisions. Because it has been sitting in my drafts for five months, too many things have happened. This post was supposed to be a thought dump like what I used to do when I started blogging, but then I had to extract my October and November entries from it. 

I didn’t really mean to take a hiatus from blogging as this was one of the things I promised myself to follow through, because a) I do well when I am not bottling my feelings; b) routines are good for me. But I got sick in November—really sick, which I will talk about later; got incredibly depressed in December because it’s that time of the year again, got sick again and depressed in January, etc. I am not going to pre-empt the 2023 updates because I am planning to catch up on posts. 

The timeline of this specific post would be all over the place because it starts in September and would jump to different months in between. But hey, time is an illusion anyway. 

Here are some excerpts from the things I have written on my notes app, but got too sick to sit down and update from an actual computer: 

November 2022 

I have been incredibly sick for two weeks now which isn’t really surprising due to the turn of events, but the weirdest part of it all is that I dream about him every night again. This hasn’t happened for quite some time now and yet now that I am seemingly on my deathbed, he visits me every night. Or I visit him. I really don’t know. 

It’s the same scenario every night, I always dream about running from something, and then it always ends up on the staircase going to the fifteenth floor and there he was, sitting on the steps like the good old days. The first night I dreamt about him, I actually attempted to run back from wherever I came from. I don’t know why I hesitated or why I didn’t want to face him. I think the overall feeling I had in the dream was I am so tired and scared; but I couldn’t even process my emotions anymore because he saw me already and pulled me in a hug. 

It freaked me out, lol. It is silly that my tired and sick self goes back to the fifteenth floor with him on my deathbed. If I were to die tomorrow, that would be the last thing that my brain would play. After everything that had happened, why does my brain still go back to that? 

I think I know the answer to that, and in the original draft of this blog post, I have explained it lengthily. But looking back at it now, I have decided to omit the paragraphs that came after, because things did not make sense anymore. 

Sometime between December 2022 - March 2023 

I remember coming across an article that was written by Alexa Chung about heartbreak in 2013. I could not relate to it back then, but sometime around December to March, her quote randomly popped up in my head—“The problem with heartbreak is that nobody can help you when you’re heartbroken. Nobody and nothing.” 

Now that I am older and was unfortunate to have my heart broken, I could relate to Alexa now. I was thinking about this one night that I should be proud of myself that I am navigating this incredibly painful journey alone. But it gets sad too, you know. Sometimes I feel like it would be a bit better if I had someone to listen to my thoughts. I have nothing but the void and it gets super lonely. 

None of my friends have been broken-hearted, so I just know that no matter how much I try to explain to them the pain I have in my heart, they’d never understand. I don’t think they’ve ever loved before too. Their broken hearts were caused by broken families or broken dreams. Mine was caused by a boy. 

So no one really told me about the life shattering pain of being replaced. All this time, I have been processing being forgotten, but it has never occurred to me that being replaced would bring an unimaginable, life-shattering pain to me. 

It’s ridiculous how many times I tried to rewrite and rephrase the next sentence that comes after this to not make me much of a loser but I don’t think I should candy coat it. When I wrote my previous post entitled shrike, I was hurting so bad because acrostics meant so much to me as it’s the only perceptible thing that I could associate with the times that I actually meant something to him. I’ve held onto that for a long time, but then in May 2021 (yes I checked, I wrote about it too), I saw him make an acrostics for someone else. I cried so much that day because he included one of our songs in it and I thought that was the worst thing that could happen. But I was wrong. That was nothing compared to what transpired in the last quarter of the year. 

In times when I want to check up on him, I take a peek at his last.fm which is the only remaining thing that connects us somehow. But I guess these days I have had incredibly bad timing because I saw him make an acrostics for someone else again. I think this was the time that I started to realise that the thing that I valued so much is being done not just for me anymore but to other people too. He used Mardy Bum as the M song on his playlist and of course I felt gross because my baby nickname which he knows is literally in the song title. But then again, does he even remember? 

My heartbreak came in threes, and the third one hurt the most, like a bullet straight to my heart. He didn’t just use the songs that I included in the playlist I made for him, but he actually included songs from the acrostics that he made FOR ME. And to make things worse aka the nail in the coffin for me, this person and I have the same syllable in our name so he literally used the same two songs in the same fucking order. In 2022, there are 82 million songs on Spotify which grew to 100 million as of February 2023 according to their company info and yet he couldn’t find other songs that are not mine to include in that goddamn thing. 

I have too much core memories tied around songs and it makes me feel physically sick seeing them being distributed for other people. It's like giving my favourite sweater that smelled like me to someone I ought to be special, but then that someone gives that sweater to another person for them to wear. It's painful and disgusting. Like how can you even fathom that? Why can’t those songs be left alone instead? 

I am having a hard time processing this, not because I am dumb but because this is something that has never crossed my mind. I never replace; instead I try to put all the good memories and my love inside a proverbial box and tuck it deep in my heart. I don’t go around welcoming new people in my life because I want to replace those who left, or in this case, those who have forgotten. 

Christ, I feel so naive.

About you

Sad girl season officially started for me in the last week of September, and it will continue until the last day of December. It’s bittersweet to view it like this, because this season used to be my favourite, my most anticipated time of the year. But now, I am just engulfed in this cruel sense of nostalgia, the yearning of the happier days, my better days. 

It makes my heart literally ache—like I could feel a pang in my chest which makes me wonder if this is what heart attacks feel like—every time I think that my greatest love has been away longer than he stayed in my life. And the other, well I guess we’re going down the same path anyway. The thing is, one was taken away from me by death and the other was by a cruel, deliberate decision. 

Because I am in a depressive mood, I have been ruminating again. I thought I had outgrown this bad habit of picking my wounds but I guess I was wrong. In one of my crying sessions, I realised that two of my greatest fears are being forgotten and being demoted from special to ordinary. I mean, I have always known that but I guess I never thought that my abandonment wound is this deep. 

Someone said that I like intellectualising my feelings because it’s a way for me to validate them. I always have this need to understand the reason why I feel this way, and why did the universe let this situation happen to me. I feel like I have to find a lesson in everything; maybe because that way, if there is a lesson for me to learn in a situation, that means that the pain I have been through is not for nothing. 

*** 

My most anticipated album of the year, Being Funny in a Foreign Language by The 1975 was finally released last October 14th. I was bummed because I wanted to listen to it at midnight (this is the first time I am not listening to the leak), but I fell asleep early that night. I woke up at 3am, contemplating this new era in my life that’s about to start. 

I don’t think I am the best person to write a review on BFIAFL, because I would be totally biased. Not because The 1975 is my favourite band, but because that album has my favourite song of all time. 

I never realised it until that day—that I listen to so much music and I have so many songs tied to special moments and people yet I couldn’t name my favourite song. I guess the closest would be Girls’ Hellhole Ratrace, which I have loved for more than a decade now. It’s a very special song for me because every single word in it resonates hard (sadly). 

And then came About You, the penultimate track to BFIAFL. I remember freaking out about it on Twitter when I first saw the lyrics—they teased it during Matty’s press runs prior to the album release. This song would kill me, I tweeted to the void back in September, after seeing the lines “I know a place; It's somewhere I go when I need to remember your face”. It was just too personal and it hit home. 

I was ready to take the song out of context, thinking that maybe Matty wrote another political-slash-socio-cultural track. When BFIAFL was released, I really couldn’t focus on listening to the other tracks because I kept on waiting for About You. When the first note played, I already knew that I was going to fall in love with it. 

When it came to the chorus and Matty sang “do you think I’ve forgotten about you?”, I fucking lost it. Never in my wildest dreams I have expected that line to be in the track I am most excited about. From that moment on, I knew that it was my song.

*** 

In an alternate universe, About You was written about me. 

I really cannot help not to get so emotional every time I listen to the song. There’s something so personal about it, something that tugs my heart and something in it that feels like home; and in a weird way, it actually soothes my abandonment wounds. I am actually in a phase in my life where my brain craves the song and I couldn’t really sleep at night unless I listen to it, like how white noise is for babies. Yeah, I am down that bad. 

When I listen to it in the mornings, I keep on daydreaming how it feels to not be forgotten. How it feels to have someone to tell me, do you think I’ve forgotten about you, silly! like it’s the dumbest thing in the whole universe because how can someone forget me, a very special babely person in their life. How it feels to be loved and valued, and to not be the first thing to be disposed of. 

When I listen to it in the evenings, I keep on ruminating about the sad fact that I am the only one who remembers; the one who never forgets but always forgotten. And it hurts my feelings so bad because I keep on going back and asking myself what I did wrong and what I did to be forgotten so easily. I guess it’s wrong to say that I pick that wound because there’s nothing to pick, really—it has always been fresh and open. 

About You is definitely my track of the year alongside Pleasure Systems’ Blur, and now that I think about it, I could see the parallelism between the two. 

*** 

My brain is so preoccupied with these sad thoughts that I really couldn’t write a proper review for BFIAFL, but I will try to write things that I remember that are not related to About You. 

One thing that I liked about the album is that it made me feel good about myself because I could spot Matty’s influences just by listening to the songs. That is one of my goals this year—to widen the genres that I listen to so I can perfectly curate one of my playlists that I am most proud of, Like or Like Like. 

But I really didn’t have to go beyond my usuals to know that this album is a lowkey homage to LCD Soundsystem (Matty ripped off All My Friends in the new 1975 intro song lol). As a person who hates changes, I definitely miss the old intro but I also understand that this is a start of a new era. I should probably apply that to my personal life, too. 

Lyrics-wise, I enjoyed how vulnerable Matty is in this album; which admittedly came to me as a surprise because of how pretentious he can be. This is supposed to be the part where I mention other standout tracks in the album—I swear there are a few that I really liked—but my mind is just filled with About You thoughts so nothing matters anymore. I would give this album five billion stars out of five, just for that song alone. 

But bias aside, it’s not my album of the year—I’ll have to give that honour to Harry’s House, which I think would be in my top favourite albums of all time now. The 1975’s self-titled album is still my favourite of theirs though.

Shrike

This is one of those things that I have often had nightmares about, one of the things that I have often written about on my blog. I have anticipated this, but I have never imagined that it will actually happen in real life. 

Tonight I found out that he deleted acrostics and emotions hit me like a fucking bullet train. 

In my nightmares when this happened, I felt anger, but now that it happened in real life I felt like this huge ball of sadness is consuming me. I feel like there are a billion thorns impaling my whole body right now and it hurts so bad. It’s 2:22 am as I write this post as a desperate way to vent because I am having a bad panic attack and it’s the only way I know how to get through this night. But I can’t even think straight and I can’t even put into words what I actually feel right now. 

I don’t understand why he had to do that. I also didn’t think that he would do something like this because I assumed he would think that it’s going to hurt me so so so much. But maybe that itself is a silly thought; why did I assume that he still cared for what I feel after everything that had happened? I guess I just didn’t think that he’d be this mean, hurtful and heartless and that somehow, I was still someone he shared good memories with. 

When he deleted Acolyte I was so much in denial because I didn’t want to face the fact that he is erasing all the good memories he shared with me. But maybe that was the start. Maybe he is really scrubbing off everything that is related to me. I feel like he wants to delete that I was ever a part of his life and that we shared all these good memories. And it makes me feel like shit, it makes me feel so alone and just so so so fucking sad. If I were mean, if I were a total bitch who went berserk after he abandoned me, I would understand. But my last message to him was I am here in case you want to talk because I could feel that something bad was going to happen but I wanted to come from a place of love and grace and understanding but that really didn’t matter to him anyway. And the most stupid thing is that, I genuinely meant it. I was nothing but kind to him and I loved him dearly and I just couldn’t understand and accept why he is doing this to me. It hurts so so bad and I want it to stop. I want the pain to stop. 

All of the playlists are so fucking special to me and each of them has their own story. Acrostics came around the time when he was away but he wanted me to know that he still thought of me. It was a piece of good memory locked inside my heart and now he has taken that away from me too. I don’t understand why he had to delete it. Why can’t he let me have that piece of good memory for myself? Why did he have to fucking do this? 

Now my brain goes into overdrive and I am very much worried and afraid that he had actually thrown away every material thing that I gave him, including my favourite photo of myself which I liked referring to as my babely pic. It makes me physically sick to think that a photo of me exists in a landfill. I pray to God that that had never happened and he would just ship the items to me, especially the photograph, and I would gladly pay five or ten times the shipping fee. Or he could name the price if he wants. But then again deleting acrostics seemed to be impossible in my head and yet here we are. 

It’s stupid because I actually had a nice dream with him in it this week and I was writing about it supposedly for another post, but now it haunts me. 

I was in the frozen/ice cream aisle at Galleria, rearranging the flavours alphabetically—something I liked doing whenever my anxiety was really bad. He appeared beside me while I was busy and he asked me what I was doing, and if I was looking for my favourite ice cream flavour. I told him I haven’t had that flavour since 2020, and I continued alphabetising the ice cream tubs. 

He was chirpy, so I told him he seemed so happy and he said "yeah, I have my own room now and I have been making music". He smiled so brightly and it made me chuckle and I asked him to tell me more about it. He cut me off and asked me, “What about you? Are you happy?”. 

Now that I am writing this post, I am thinking that maybe he is at his happiest in life right now, but if that’s the case, why did he have to look for acrostics tonight and fucking delete it? Shouldn’t he be out there being fucking happy and just let me have these crumbs of good memories for me to enjoy? This fucking playlist doesn’t even take space in Spotify at all. And when you delete a playlist—especially a playlist with a follower—Spotify asks you if you’re sure that you want to delete it. It hurts me so much to imagine that he clicked yes and he probably did with so much enthusiasm. 

I just don’t know what went through his mind that made him decide to hurt me again. Was abandoning me for the second time not enough? Knowing that one day he just woke up and decided he didn’t want me in his life anymore without any notice, not even a fucking one liner, has hurt me so deeply. And now he’s back doing all these things which I think are unnecessary, because hasn’t he had satisfaction in hurting me that time? Does he really have to go back and scrub off everything Marice-related like I am a fucking stain? I have been quiet, I have been here on my own little island, I have never done anything to hurt him after the last time we talked in December 2020. And yet from that time he has done so many things to hurt me, notably deleting Acolyte, his birthday gift to me for fuck's sake, and now, acrostics. Why does he keep on doing this? 

The other day I was thinking how much more pain my heart can endure. I am having a very depressive week, and I just couldn’t believe that this would come out of nowhere and be the final nail in my fucking coffin. 

The imagery of a shrike impaling its prey with thorns and leaving it out there in the open in so much pain and agony, as it consumes it bit by bit, keeps on flashing in my head.

An airplane carried me to bed

My dumb habit of taking naps at night is back, and he’s back in my dreams again too. 

I dreamt that I went to visit his last fm, and aside from showing the last tracks he listened to, it showed there that he went to my Spotify profile page. I checked my Spotify because I found that weird, and I saw that a new account followed me there. I didn’t recognise the photo but it had a note in his profile page that said it’s me. The account was empty but something in me was telling me to find his main account on Spotify, then I found out that he deleted it which resulted in the deletion of all the playlists he made for me. I had a panic attack in my dream then I woke up having a panic attack in real life as well. It was dumb as fuck, and then I fell asleep again from exhaustion. 

The second round of my dream brought me to a classroom with him, some guys I don’t know, some boys who look like they were teenagers, and then one woman who apparently is their professor. The boy was sitting in the row behind me, and he was talking with his seatmates. I was watching him when the professor noticed me. She asked me if I knew any of the boys in the room, and I said no and whispered except for the boy. I looked back at him and he was tutoring those teenagers. The professor exclaimed what I whispered and that got the boy’s attention so he moved and sat beside me. I was pretending that I didn’t see him and tried to focus on what the professor was saying. The boy kept on poking and pinching my cheek and I was trying my best to ignore him. He kept on calling my name and he was giggling on how soft my cheek is after all this time, and he never stopped poking and pinching. 

I got upset and walked out of the room because I remembered that he deleted the playlists and now he’s acting so fucking friendly to me. He followed me and this time, we were at my old high school’s yard. He asked me why I was so upset with him, and this set me off. I could feel my blood boiling under my skin and I started screaming and crying because he deleted the playlist. He got mad at me too, and I just remember us fighting like lunatics in broad daylight. I started to have a panic attack in my dream then woke up having a panic attack for the second time. 

I fell asleep again after that, but this time I was transported to this small place that looks like Mini Stop but it’s not. We were seated near a huge window and I remember watching the pink sky and I could see that there was a full moon. There were food wrappers on our table and he was eating beside me. We were calm and we were okay, unlike the first two rounds of my dream. 

I stood up to look around but he pulled me to sit on his lap (this is a recurring theme in all of my dreams—I am always perched on his lap and there’s something melancholic about it). We were just quiet, he continued eating and then I kept on watching the pink sky and the moon while playing with his hair. He broke the silence and told me, “you know, there are so many things I regret, so many things I wished I did with you”. 

I remember staring at him and studying his face. I couldn’t describe how it felt; he looked older, more tired, different yet still so familiar. 

In the middle of making out, he asked me “do you—” and I cut him off and I said yeah. We decided to leave the Mini Stop-esque place and go to the huge building across the street. 

Then we were in this dark hallway of what looked like a hotel and we were choosing rooms. I told him that I want to try out the bed in each room. We were giggling because one of the beds was so noisy that every move we made, it creaked. 

I think we tried around five beds—a noisy one, a very soft one (we sunk in it), one that was covered in toilet paper (we ran away when we got in that room), one that was covered in black feathers (we both agreed we didn’t like the gothic theme). 

The last one we visited was a room with a tiny bed. He knows that I don’t like small beds because I am not used to it, but he tackled me and wanted us to choose it because he was getting impatient. I was clinging onto him because I felt like I was going to fall off; and it looked like that IKEA bed scene in 500 Days of Summer. 

I could feel like I was getting tired and the last thing I remember was him telling me that I can’t sing that Ra Ra Riot's line anymore. 

Before we could have done anything, I woke up. 

*** 

I couldn’t go back to sleep anymore even though I tried so hard. I was finally getting to the cute part of the dream but my brain wouldn’t want me to go back to bed. 

I immediately checked the playlist he made for me in case that my dream was sort of a premonition, but it was still there to my relief. I realised though that he started making that playlist on September 9, 2018—four years ago today. 

That playlist and I have been through a lot. It’s one of the four playlists that I have downloaded on my phone, and it was a playlist that accompanied me on my long travels (domestic and international) and long drives. B had received a lot of compliments from my passengers, especially my parents, lol. I don’t think there was a time that I played that in my car where they didn’t say anything nice about it. That lowkey triggered a childhood wound of mine, because all I want in life is for my parents to think that I am the best lmaoooo but they never said that to any of my playlists. 

*** 

When I went to Twitter, someone on my feed was talking about how they get sad about the leftover information that they have in their brain from past connections. And I feel like it was just so fitting for what I felt today: 

Oftentimes I get sad about the leftover information in my brain from past connections. Walking by their favourite flowers, seeing food/drink they’re allergic to, recognising lines from poems and books I remember they liked. Then I realise it means I truly cared about knowing them. 

It's a special form of bittersweet. The melancholic feeling of remembering the parts of someone they chose to share in a specific moment of time with you. 

Of course it hurts when that happens. This hits hard when I listen to a song or I come across something wherein I’d imagine we’ll have banter about. And I think because this is how I do things, I find myself sad realising that the person I cared for just woke up one day and forgot about me. 

There is something that I actually want to talk to him about (like a real topic, and not even related to wounds he had caused me) that I wanted to get off my system. I actually started typing it so I could release it to the void, but I found myself opting to write my thoughts in my journal instead. 

After writing it I felt so silly, because I was saving them for a conversation that is never going to happen; daydreaming of a conversation with someone who I am not even sure if he remembers my name. 

September has just started and it’s been kicking my ass. I already know that this fucking nostalgic month would dehydrate me.

In bloom

Matty and I are born seventeen days apart (my favourite number, how lovely, and I only realised lately that there are seventeen characters in my full name too, thanks to acrostics), so we almost have the same birth chart. It always makes me chuckle, because I used to hate him and his band and how pretentious they are, which now I realise were just projections. 

I started writing this piece about The 1975’s new era last July 7th, which, weirdly enough a new chapter in my life also began. 

It’s so weird to realise that I have been trying to finish and publish this post for over a month. I wanted to write how excited I am that The 1975 has released a new song—Part of the Band—and how it sounded very Vampire Weekend slash Ra Ra Riot-esque. I remember feeling quite anxious when music publications posted about the lyrics of the song before its release; and I was worried that it would be something like that Greta track in Notes that no one really appreciated. So it was a really nice surprise at first listen that it’s a likable track. 

I was one of those people who stayed up to listen to its premiere on Radio 1, and for the first time in a long time, I found myself waiting for a 1975 video premiere alone. 

*** 

I have written about this for a gazillion times, but I am saying it again, Vampire Weekend and The 1975 are bands that bookended phases in my life so my brain goes haywire and I internally panic whenever a new era is starting. While I was taking a shower, I realised that I treat them this way because I associate their albums to special and unforgettable memories in my head, and these memories are frozen in time and I could easily thaw them whenever I listen to the albums. 

For Vampire Weekend, their self-titled brings me back to my Gossip Girl days, while Contra reminds me of the time I was thriving at my first work at a magazine, which has always been my dream. Modern Vampires of the City takes me back to my absolute favourite and the bestest best year of my life—-2013. That was the year that my blog blew up, I met my favourite band, and the most special of them all—that was the year that my favourite boy, the love of my life, came into my life. Sadly, Father of the Bride does not have any special memory with me, except that day when I slapped the boy which shocked the both of us because I thought he was going to tease me about you know who having a you know what (lmaoooo it’s been years yet I still can’t say it out loud, I guess I am still not mature enough). 

For the 1975, the timeline is a bit messy. Their self-titled album brings me back to the old office, on my tiny desk where I (illegally) downloaded that album and hated it at first listen. And then fast forward to 2018—I was in the new office, on a relatively bigger desk, with the boy having me listen to self-titled and ILIWYS. I can still vividly remember how enthusiastic he was telling me about the songs as we were browsing Genius. Last.fm tells me that this happened in September 2018. Four fucking years ago. 

ABIIOR was announced soon after, and I remember listening to it with him and one of our friends who also happen to like the band. Then NOACF was released during quarantine, and yet we streamed it together (we weren’t talking when they released the singles though, and I can vividly remember talking about my thoughts with two of the 1975 listeners I know at work but they just couldn’t get me). 

And now that the new 1975 era is fast approaching, I am quite embarrassed to admit that it’s making me sad and I would probably cry every time they release a new song. I am still learning how to navigate these overwhelming emotions, but I feel like this will become a reminder that things aren’t the same anymore, and that he’s gone. I feel like this is just adding tonnes of salt to the wound and I hate it, especially because I feel like this new album is going to be one of the 1975’s bests, a redemption from the mess that was Notes. 

*** 

One of the things that entertained me while I was in the waiting room last month was Matty’s interviews with Rolling Stone UK and Pitchfork. For a few minutes, it felt like I was transported somewhere else, and not stuck in this place I find akin to purgatory on earth. 

I feel like Matty and I could be alike—obsessive when it comes to the things we know we’re good at, perfectionists, and incredibly stubborn especially when dealing with how we envisioned things to be. I feel like we are both unhinged, too self-aware but with a tinge of God complex, but he’s more impulsive so it’s reckless and I am too calculating to jump into something (unless it’s about clothes, then I could be so reckless). 

So I enjoy reading or watching his interviews because I feel like I am living vicariously through him and how he expresses his thoughts to the world. I particularly like Ryan Dombal’s Pitchfork cover story because he was able to write and describe Matty in his finest, including his thought process, which has always fascinated me: 

It can sometimes feel like he’s having a fraught conversation with himself as he doubles back on knotty ideas, momentarily loses his train of thought, or changes his mind entirely mid-sentence. He is cursed with a self-awareness that can turn a simple idea into a galaxy-brain diatribe. “It’s exhausting to be me,” he admits, smiling. “I’m an exhausting person to be around.” 

I really like Ryan and his writing; he also used to do the profile and cover stories for Vampire Weekend. While I was reading his article, I found myself daydreaming to be a music features writer too, but I would like to be documenting and writing about an artist that I like or have grown to love. I originally wrote journalist here but I realised that what I wanted to do could be quite biased, so I changed it to features writer. I want to be that person who will humanise a musician, like how Jenny Eliscu is with Britney Spears and in this case, like Ryan with Matty and Vampire Weekend. 

In these interviews, Matty kept on being described as “a lot”, which was quite a triggering string of words for me, still. I guess unlike me, that really didn’t bother Matty—he knows he’s a handful after all—but it’s still a feeling that I could never get used to. I remember reading something about this on Twitter that being too much shouldn’t be something that should be hurtful, but I don’t want to unpack that in this post. 

Matty also said in his Rolling Stone interview that this new 1975 era is their most vulnerable, or that it centres in his vulnerability in art and life. The era of being offline and of being, in general. The era of falling in love and writing about it and the era of the said love and its aftermath, wondering if true love does exist but hoping that it does. 

It’s quite ridiculous to find out that he only realises that the common denominator in all of their albums is love. It’s fascinating for the writer (and me, the reader) on how Matty realises this just now, in the middle of that interview, and he comes to that realisation as he had one of his monologues again. 

He said that in every album that he made, he has convinced himself that he had so much to prove. They are making a “1980s pop-rock album” and at that moment I think I stopped breathing. This would make me go insane and absolutely stoked; maybe this is the reparation from the universe after hitting me blow after blow the past year. Matty also indicates that he never wants to do anything that feels humble, because it would be performative. This made me laugh out loud because I agree with him, one hundred percent. How chaotic. 

Matty’s objective with Being Funny in a Foreign Language is his desire “to make something very, very intimate and something that allows (the listeners) to be witness to a moment.” He said that he had written personal songs in this album, although he admits that he has projections in them too. He admits that he has a self-sabotaging behaviour and always thinks that he is going to fuck everything up. I think he’s the type of person who would want to run away from all the difficult emotions and conversations that he ever faced, which I feel like contributed a lot to his drug addiction. I know this is bad to say but sometimes I wonder if I’ve had the same access to drugs, will I be addicted to it too? But maybe not. I think unlike most people, I am more comfortable dealing with my pain and feeling it course through every single cell in my body. Of course I am not perfect—-there are days that I’d rather live in a world where I am loved and cared for and if given a chance I would choose to live there forever. 

Anyway, I feel like that line about making something very intimate was really nice, and that is one of my dreams as a writer too. It would have been cooler if I knew how to write music, but I realised that in my own way I have been immortalising people in my journals and on this blog too, like I am the third-world version of Sylvia Plath. 

*** 

The new 1975 album release is just two months away, and I am half excited, half anxious about it. Aesthetic-wise, I feel like this is one of their best; the singles are promising too. They will probably announce a tour soon (there are rumours that they might perform in Asia in April, my birthday month) and all this tour talk brings me back to the best night of my life. 

But for now, in Sylvia Plath’s words, I will wait and ache.