You remember sitting in a jeepney. Passing by a police station and a small branch of a big-name grocery store that sounds more like a rip-off of 7-Eleven. You come across a church. You forget to make the sign of the cross as the jeepney goes past it. You forget, or you just don't.
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| July 3, 2016 Seoul, South Korea |
Those were the bigger details. Now your eyes travel to the smaller ones. The loud chatter of two high school girls at the far end of the jeepney, near the driver. Your right ear ignores it. Your eyes, however, cannot. So you stare. You run your eyes along the line of passengers across you. An elderly woman grips the handles of 2 large SM plastic bags as she snores, her head lolling around her neck. Someone from across stares at you. He's attractive, flirty. He keeps his eyes on you. Travels downwards. Until he sees the fingers locked with yours. He looks away and you swear you could almost see a small smile there, as if to say, "Of course not."
Ah. The fingers around yours. The ones owned by the person wearing the other earbud. You're connected by one set of earphones. You're too broke to buy a splitter. The music ranges from 50's folk rock to 60's German metal to 70's neo-psychedelia. It's only a 15-minute ride, but you do this all the time so you've heard everything.
He likes to surprise you with music. You love music. You're just not a musician like him, but he talks to you like one anyway. You mostly nod, ask questions. Mostly things you've read in your favorite book. Ever heard of an augmented fourth? The Devil's tritone? You wait for your turn to speak. To talk about yourself.
You zone out sometimes when he talks. It's not unusual to be on a jeep with him when you're tired. You're always tired. He likes spending time with you. Or so he says. Whatever. He talks so much and you so little. But you love it anyway. Or so you say.
Whatever.
He's nice. There are days when he looks at you like you're the only person he can see. You feel stupid for looking for happiness anywhere else when all you need is right there in front of you, suspended in a single moment. Even though your intuition tells you it's all pretend. Because that's what you get for dating an actor.
Whatever. You sometimes confuse intuition with emotion. You're in love with him. That's what matters. Right?
You accidentally grip his hand too tight as you think all this. Whenever you're sad, you always clasp your own hands together and squeeze them, as if you could wring out the sadness from your bones. You can't, of course, but it stops you from crying. Just, this time, your fingers happened to be intertwined with his.
He asks you what's wrong and you smile at him and say, nothing. Like you always do. You lay your head down on his shoulder to assure him, soothe him. You're always soothing him.
You loved him once. You've convinced yourself you still do. You're desperate. It's not the loneliness. You're just a perfectionist. You wanted your first to be "the one".
Of course not.
You had a year together. You should've left earlier. Because now you're sitting alone in a jeepney heading home—45 to an hour—and you can faintly hear everybody hurts... sometimes... from the earphones of the person beside you.
You're remembering again. Afternoons spent in cramped jeepneys with his favorite songs playing in your left ear. Always the left ear. Maybe it meant something.
You cry in the jeepney. Nobody cares. All the strangers are tired and you're just another one of them.
You like "Everybody Hurts". You liked every single one you listened to with him. Remembered titles in such great detail, artist and all, that you could name them in anywhere that you could hear them—during a neighbor's karaoke night or in a grocery store with your mom. Mundane, but effective.
These are the kind of details you notice. These are the details he never cared to know about you.
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Is this non-fiction? Maybe. Maybe it's fictitious. Maybe it's the fragments of a healing girl. Who knows.
