Monday, August 07, 2006 // 11:14 PM

wind song

i wish i could play the guitar. i thought of a lot of things, listening to this song, thinking about some faceless stranger playing this in some wood-polished studio, concentrating intensely. if you listen out for it, you can hear the squeak of the strings as his hands move over the frets, and it's that singular detail that kills me, that makes this human, real, more immediate than might be any attempt at an intricate perfection. and in the silliest way right now i want to know this person, the one responsible for the music, i want to watch this faceless stranger play for hours and hours and hours.

and i also think of daryl, when he first played this song for me and marcus, brow furrowed at the score. how does it feel, to field these requests, to have audience of human beings who might read you, through your music?

i remember back when i first started talking to kinyip, how we sat in the sanctuary once and i told him i couldn't play, and his response was because i'm here? it really is not so simple as just play lah; you really don't have control over when and what is going to see you self conscious. you can only try to fight it, and even then, too much of the time you just end up awkward, out of place. i've come to realise that the imposition of any sort of structure or Set Way Of Doing Things turns me into a writhing mess, and results in a me that is a hundred times less fluent than i normally am. so. so i'm glad that with piano, at least, now i don't feel it anymore, that i have the thickest skin in the world, sometimes; that i can take a greedy possession of the sanctuary grand every sunday after service and inflict myself on others, as selena might say. after the initial bashed inertia (about 2 songs) something inside me takes over and could go on for hours.

one of the biggest reasons that i have for being sore that tuition will be on sunday afternoons now, is that this means i'm not going to get any chance at all to play like that, for a very long time. not like that, really. nothing like that. and also that i can see how alien my friends are going to look, after a while. i feel the space around me hollowing out as we all move in different directions, however slight the difference might be. it is not the same, all of a sudden it's solitaire, i'm solitaire. things are dramatized, absolute in my head. i remember what christl said, once, about how she was afraid that after disappearing, you'd return to find that nothing is the same anymore. will nothing be the same anymore? what might happen in four months, it really isn't difficult, is it. to water down friendships and to wander off without realising that slowly it's come to a point where you just aren't on the same page as some particular one else, anymore.

and i also thought about how friendships and relationships need maintainence, which is funny because the person i get along best with (kevin) is the very person i talk to the least. so, so maybe it's better this way, maybe i'm just this selfishly voyeuristic, with friends who are people who sometimes i think deserve more than this. i don't think i can see beyond the immediate, where people are concerned, because i'll make and morph and mould myself according to the surroundings. i'm thinking about this because i'm thinking about how this time next year i might be packing, flying off, God willing. i told ma that i don't really want her to come with me, even though i know that's what a lot of parents do for the first week or so, when their kids go overseas to study. but some part of me wants to be alone because i want both the chaos and thrill of figuring things out on my own. even though i can see myself getting into a huge mess and regretting it on a long hindsight.

this is dedicated to chenghui, who thinks my blog is sad. because that's not really what i am, right now.