Songs With Our Eyes Closed

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There is a little boy at the 7th street who walks to his school so that he can buy comic strips with his leftover pocket-money, sit down on the park bench, and laugh at important things like the lopsided nose of a character.

There is a 15-year-old girl who smells like lavender and speaks like autumn, and listens to her favourite band all day long. Between vapid classes and during the bus journeys back home, she would shut down little and big noises and feel quite triumphant. 

There is a man in his twenties who lives in a castle of newspapers. Unemployment has its perks, he says when people ask him. He sleeps quite comfortably and sometimes hunger propels him to chew the white edges of papers.

There is a woman who has snowflakes in her hair. She romances her husband's estranged guitar on Saturday nights. The guitar speaks to her of times when there were mistletoe, and beach holidays, and he would do a horrible chicken dance upon the bed. She used to laugh her guts out.

There is a young writer who has hauntingly lonely eyes and who searches for plots and heroes and climaxes everywhere: abandoned construction sites, moonlit river banks, and under yellow street lamps that cast unformed shadows.

There are people who are writting love mails but not to each other, attending parties and returning home with aching feet, kissing under umbrellas, exploring new crevices and undulations in each others' bodies, ignoring calls to sleep, drunk dialling and swallowing down plentiful words. 

And through all these, the broken record plays as a background score. But we don't open our eyes, do we? 

April 6, 2015

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