Voice Note #15 - Outro

When was your Last Good Day?

Apr 07, 2021

This week’s newsletter is an essay I wrote exactly a year ago, when the pandemic first hit in a big way. It’s called “Let Everything Happen.” Before sharing it, I’d like to give a little context on where that essay came from, and how things have changed since.

At this point, we are past all anniversaries. Past the mid-week of March where everything changed for all of us, where the world made a sharp turn into something so wildly unfamiliar, it was terrifying even for those who were safe. I can’t even begin to get into the devastating losses here—the pandemic has shaken every single human being on this planet in a deeply personal way. To any of us fortunate enough not to have been directly afflicted, whether by death or the virus itself, there was a sense of camaraderie found in dark humor. We began jokingly (and then not-so-jokingly) referring to the recent past as the “Before” times, making wistful promises for “when things go back to normal.”

When was your Last Good Day? By that I mean, your last Before day. Your last day of utter ignorance. The last day before lockdown hit in your city, before quarantine, before the need for physical distance, before all of it. The last day you spent in a public space without a mask. It might not even have been a good day, really. But it was the end of something, still, a sense of pre-pandemic normalcy that we may never be able to get back. In her essay about the film Before Sunrise, Helena Fitzpatrick writes, “Whatever the “when this is all over” that we all talk to each other about actually turns out to be, it will not be recognizable. The early part of last March happened in a language that none of us will ever speak again.”

My Last Good Day—my last “normal” day out—was March 14th, 2020. I spent the entire day on a date. He and I had met up for a spontaneous drink at a bar near my place the night before, our knees grazing under the table. We both went home, slept, and then got up the next morning to have coffee, supposedly—though the hours stretched out until before I knew it, the day was gone.

What I would give to do it again, to walk through bookstore aisles with someone I might like, feeling the warmth of a hand on the small of my back. The awkwardness of daylight conversation, when mundanity hits and it all feels too real, stripped of the facade of alcohol and neon lighting. The quiet thrill of something new, of the promise it holds. That day I walked home in a daze, my vision blurry at the edges as the sun began to melt over the sidewalk. I cut through the empty lot near my building, the overgrown grass golden with the languid late-afternoon light. I hadn’t wanted to leave, but my sister’s flight was landing at around five. My parents and I would be picking her up from the airport.

When we said goodbye, he asked when he would see me again. I joked, “After the coronavirus.” I had seen SARS, the bird flu, H1N1. Lived through all of them unscathed. My safety and survival had rendered me blind and ignorant. He laughed and said he hoped it would be sooner than that. We hadn’t realized, yet, how bad it would be.

When I arrived home, the apartment was empty. All the lights were off, and there was something about the air that felt musty, somehow. I padded into my bedroom and took off my jewelry. My hands felt grimy. I felt acutely aware of the slick layer of oil on my face, the dust on the soles of my feet. Updates began to trickle into my notifications, and then my social media feeds. A sense of stifled panic was starting to hum beneath the surface.

My parents had left for the airport without me. When they returned, the country had declared lockdown—or at least that’s how I remember it. My heart sank with an urgent kind of terror, denial niggling in at the margins. I felt like we were at war. I texted my friends. Checked up on my date, who I had made tentative plans to see the next day. “I’ll see you next week,” we all assured each other.

In an interview about her 2013 film Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig said, “You don’t know when the last time of something happening is. You just know when it’s over. The opening sequence (of Frances Ha) is this, like, glorious day between her and Sophie. You don’t know what the last great day you’ll spend with your best friend is. You just know when you’ve never had that day again.”

Today’s newsletter has been difficult to write because the world has been difficult to comprehend. Sometimes I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that we’ve all survived a year of this. Currently, cases in Manila are reaching an all-time high: the tally reached 15,310 new cases in a single day on April 2nd. I can’t remember the last time I stepped out of my front door—surely, it was sometime in March. That might sound like an extreme, but it doesn’t feel like one really; I’ve acclimated.

I have mostly been at home for this past year. The handful of times I saw friends were always one-on-one, outdoors, socially distanced, with masks on. I only leave the house to take walks, or shop for essentials, but even that has been put on hold, with cases rising amongst residents in my building and hospital wings declaring full capacity. I can barely remember what normal feels like. It doesn’t matter that outside, places have intermittently opened up in between locking down—laws are declared by flawed, mistake-prone human beings. I am wary of them. Just because restrictions are loosening up doesn’t mean the virus is less prevalent, or less of a threat. There are bigger factors at play, things we have no say or direct control over. We can only do the best we can to keep each other safe.

The other day, over Facetime with a friend in Boston, I said that I felt both horrified and disconnected. I asked her, “Have you ever had a nightmare where something terrible is happening, but you’re paralyzed? Like, you’re just frozen, and there’s nothing you can do?” That’s how I’ve been feeling. And while I do recognize my own grief as valid, I also don’t think I can complain—I am ultimately grateful to be safe, to be healthy, to be alive. There’s a point in all this waiting.

The piece below is called “Let Everything Happen.” I wrote this essay a year ago, just as things were starting to change. It feels odd, to mark a whole year of this strange blur of time. I’ve lightly edited it for clarity, but for the most part, it remains the same—a time capsule of the limbo that was the first month of lockdown, when none of us knew just how severe this all was, or how long this would last.

As time ticks unrelentingly forward, my Last Good Day fades further and further away into the distance, just as yours does. I hold fast to the promise of anticipation. Far beyond the horizon, so far we might not even see it, our Next Good Day awaits.

March 2020

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Someone taught me, once, how to say “for sure” in Spanish. It’s “fijo.” Fixed. “We still have time,” he said shortly after we first met, three weeks before his departing flight. Everything was up in the air, and even our first meeting had been sort of unlikely—we’d both tagged along to a Cinco de Mayo celebration neither of us had really been invited to. We might have never crossed paths, and there was a chance we wouldn’t meet again. By the end of the month, we’d be boarding planes to countries several time zones apart. His semester abroad in Manila would be over, and I would be in Vienna, on a last-hurrah vacation before starting a new job. I was smitten in spite of it all.

I turned to a friend for advice about my ill-fated crush, and he told me, “Just fall in love as intensely as possible with the little time you have!” I took it to mean, simply, “Make the most out of whatever you can, while it’s still here.” Rainer Maria Rilke captures the sentiment beautifully in the poem “Go To The Limits of Your Longing” (a title that is chaotic life advice in itself): “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

I heeded my friend’s advice and hung out with my crush; I didn’t regret it. In the end, I was happy to have known him at all. He was funny and kind and heart-wrenchingly sincere. I could talk to him for hours about nothing. In the middle of a conversation, he said, “My face hurts from smiling.” A couple of hours later, we were laughing like idiots, drinking water upside-down to stave off hiccups. It was midnight and we were making a ruckus on the second floor of a grotty, brightly-lit Mexican restaurant. It didn’t matter that our goodbye ended up being anticlimactic, that we parted ways as unexpectedly as we had met—I knew I had connected, for a blip in time, with someone golden. For that I was glad.

Soon after, I began to say yes to everything, to go out every weekend, make friends with strangers, attend every event that interested me, so long as I could afford it and had the energy to go. I was buzzing, in those days, with delight. Falling in love all the time with every new thing that came my way. In the midst of one eventful month, I wrote in my journal, “Life feels very full right now. My heart is happy.”

That new job had a contract of six months, a solid half-year of uncertainty. I hustled hard to prove myself, but there was no way of knowing for sure if I’d be staying on after my contract was up. I quickly grew at home with the work, with the routine and stability, but most of all, with my teammates. One morning, by the communal coffee machine, a coworker asked me how my first probationary months were going. I told her, “I come in here every single day feeling grateful.” I immediately felt embarrassed to have been so open, but it was true. On particularly joyful weeks, of which there were many, my heart would sink as I looked around me and thought, “This could all be over very soon.” I’d calm down after telling myself, enjoy this while it’s here. On my last week, my mom called me in the middle of my lunch break and said, “Well, this is it. Give it your best shot.” Go out with a bang. I began to cry, sitting in the fire escape of the building where I took her call. Although I no longer work there, I have formed some pretty solid friendships with my former colleagues, and everything I learned from the job has changed me, probably for the rest of my life.

I no longer balk at running too fast, or falling too hard, for the fear of a majestic crash. If it hurts in the end, it only means there was something worth mourning. I allow myself to be enraptured by everything—places, friendships, people, experiences—and if a few weeks is all I have, I’ll still relish in what I can relish in. Our hearts and souls are not finite resources. Knowing that something won’t last doesn’t deter me from going for it, if it means the experience is worth living through to begin with.

I recently befriended a neighbor who is moving abroad soon—in five months, at the time of this writing. She was distraught over a fling she was developing feelings for, and I found myself repeating the advice I’d gotten the year before. “If you want it, go get it. You might hurt, but then you’ll heal, and at the end you would have had something beautiful to remember. And maybe even fallen a bit more in love with life.” I knew it sounded hokey, even as I was saying it, but I couldn’t mask something that felt so honest with any pretense of coolness or cynicism. I was being earnest, and I suppose earnestness is saccharine, a lot of the time. I couldn’t tell her to ditch him while she had the upper hand, because I don’t believe saving face is ever worth whatever you might have missed out on otherwise. Pain is part and parcel of living—you can’t have joy without it. I remind myself of this when I can. I wear my heart on my sleeve; I don’t know how not to anymore. You have to pay a price, but it’s almost always worth it.

Yesterday, over the phone with a boy I met the week before the nationwide quarantine, I said, “I’m not afraid of getting hurt. I’m more terrified by the prospect of—”

He finished the sentence for me: “Not living.”

There’s a line in a 070 Shake song he sent me that goes, “And the memories die/And I’m glad you were there for it.” If the pandemic doesn’t force him to return to his home country, he’s here for the next four months. And maybe once, I would have thought, why bother with something that will inevitably end soon, but the truth is that nothing lasts. We are all leaving, anyway, and every heartbreak is worth it in the end. We might as well take what we can get. We still have time.

Outro

To loves lost and dreams found,
and hearts of gold trapped in
glass cages,
this one’s for the lovers
and the dreamers
and the weeping, whooping last cry of summer,
and the people who say,
“Yes, darling,” in the night,
and the bottles of wine on coffee tables
and living room floors
all around the world,
and the midnight rides we hold close to our hearts
like a prayer,
and apple pie,
and busboys in old t-shirts
of bands they used to front,
because here they are, gleeful;
and amongst all the “Listen, babe”s
there’s a kind voice in the darkness
that doesn’t believe you are
too much
or not enough.
I blow a kiss to God at the altar
and say a silent prayer to one of my alternate lives.
I tell her that I am yearning, in this moment
to be in Florence,
And that I hope the ancient city
is just as beautiful from her window
as I imagined;
See two people by a river
say goodbye
and thank you.
A delicate face
held precariously
like tilted glass
The end credits roll whenever
I stand at this street corner
and it’s, let me tell you,
where the magic happens,
this space between us.
Call it what you will –
by any other name, it’s still magic.
In this space between.
This is where it exists.

nikicolet

A post shared by @nikicolet

A note about Voice Notes

I first started this newsletter to explore new things, to have fun, and to keep myself accountable with creativity. Voice Notes has been a thrill and a joy for me to work on over the past several months, and I plan on continuing to send out new ones on a weekly basis.

After an accidental month-long hiatus, I’ve decided to make some adjustments—I’d like to keep the creative process feeling as playful as I intended for it to be when I began this project. I’ll now be releasing the music on Voice Notes on a more spontaneous basis, when I come up with new tracks or feel like covering a particular song. This will be my last regular Voice Note recording for the time being. Starting next week, my newsletters will no longer include regular tracks, but I will definitely be sharing new songs whenever they come! In the meantime, you can listen to the entire Voice Notes playlist here. If you like it, subscribe to my Youtube channel! My music is also on Spotify and Soundcloud. If you’re new to this newsletter, you can check out past pieces on the archive here.

NICE THINGS

A few things I’ve been enjoying recently.

Banana bread (I used Roz Purcell’s recipe). No added sugar or white flour! This baby was mostly oat flour and some very ripe bananas. And peanut butter because peanut butter makes everything better.
No style, all substance. 11/10, if I do say so myself.
This episode of Las Culturistas is pure chaotic good. I love every single time Andrew Jackson and Josh Sharpe guest on the show. I haven’t even seen season 13 of Drag Race yet, but that didn’t matter—it was hilarious and completely lifted my mood one night I was feeling a little blue.

My friend Adeline’s wonderful newsletter. This last one explores growing up vs. getting older, the ways we attempt to find (and define) our identities online, and connecting with past versions of ourselves. A sneak peek:
Lately, it has been difficult to gauge whether I am really 27, or still caught somewhere in my teens. I have always felt like I’m somehow evading the system. I cook, I clean, I pay bills, rent, taxes, I run errands, I work… I wait for adulthood to descend, but it never does, and this feeling has only compounded over the last year. We’re aging, Maya Angelou argued, but we’re not growing up, because to do that would cost us everything.
In reconnecting past and present into a singular space in time, we allow ourselves to return to who we have always been.
It’s so brilliant wish I could quote the entire thing.
Gaslighting and believing your own story, a piece I wrote for Young Star this month. (It also came out in the paper!) (On print!)
Ok I guess I’m a journalist now……...
This glorious mix by my friend Shireen, a brilliant DJ who is very good at Twitter
The Poog episode “Mornings Could Be Huge”. I have this weird interest in (obsession with??) routines. I like hearing about how people spend their days—especially when it comes to alone time. It genuinely thrills me to discover what people do to bring themselves back to feeling more like…themselves. In particular, I enjoy hearing about morning and evening routines. I also find so much pleasure in plotting out my own, even though I’m not very good at actually sticking to them.
Photos from friends in Vancouver, Amsterdam, Berlin, Malaysia, Luxembourg, New York, Madrid, Bangkok, and Boston, to name a few places. I love love looooove seeing random photos of my friends’ days, getting glimpses into what they’re doing and seeing. They have brought me so much joy in quarantine (especially as I have not left my apartment at all since cases began to rise rapidly in Manila last month). I don’t know why, but it feels like teleporting for just a brief moment into what that friend’s day might look like, in a different time zone, in another corner of the world. After all this time sitting at home, I’ve gained a heightened appreciation for how special the little things are. Life is the little things.
Texts to my friend J, after she sent me a photo of a tree blooming in what I assume was a nearby park.
“Strap in Everybody, We’re Telling the Truth”: an incredible essay on Conflict Confidential, a new favorite newsletter of mine. Amy Dallas’ writing is both deeply compassionate and steadily level-headed at the same time. This piece feels like a hug and a breath of fresh air and a glass of cold water all at once.
Stray, a memoir by Stephanie Danler. She’s one of my favorite writers—the first time I read her novel Sweetbitter, I devoured it in one day, on a car ride from New York to Boston. I’ve been taking my time with this one, though. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. If I could describe the primary emotion I feel while reading this book, it would be sorrow.
Frank Ocean’s cover of “Strawberry Swing,” which I tried (in vain) to cover. I ultimately failed to do so, because the chords were too hard and quite frankly, I was too depressed, but maybe one of these days I’ll get around to it.