Voice Note #20 - Devil on My Shoulder

My heart feels tender like a boat in a storm

A new song for you. Plus today’s essay: a love letter to rain, favorite songs, and sleeping in.

Devil on My Shoulder

Stalked your new girl on the internet
Against my better judgment
I don’t really know what I was looking for
Standing naked, cold tile bathroom floor

My heart feels tender 
Like a boat in a storm
I waited out the worst of it but
You were never going to love me
The way I hoped you would

No, we can’t just pick up
Where we left off
Because you feel like it
Don’t forget you were the first one
Who broke away
And you can’t fix it

Finger floating over my next text
Been a long time, holding my breath
Wish I could reach you all these miles away
Like, I’m here, you just don’t know it

In the end I’m only fooling myself
You don’t get to blow me off again
All these years and all I want to say is 
Hello, I cared about you

I tried hard to be good for so long
Devil on my shoulder said it was alright
Thought you could see me once but you walked
Devil on my shoulder said it was alright

No I heard you right the first time
When you told me exactly 
Who you were
It just took me a while to believe it

Devil on my shoulder said it was alright 
Devil on my shoulder said it was alright
Still, what I’d give just to hear your voice
Raw like static through the phone lines

No, we can’t just pick up
Where we left off
Because you feel like it
Don’t forget you were the first one
Who broke away
And you can’t fix it

Devil on my shoulder said it was alright
Devil on my shoulder said it was alright
But you were never going to love me
The way I hoped you would

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Rain feelings

Outside my window is a view of the city from an altitude, where I can observe cars weaving in and out of lanes, turning corners and disappearing behind buildings. It’s both comforting and melancholy to me, seeing headlights gleam against a wet street. The sound of hazard lights blinking on and off, on and off. It’s gloom and it’s bliss. It makes me feel the way I used to feel, as a small child, hearing jazz music play over the stereo whenever I went into a Starbucks with my dad. Over the counter, he’d order a coffee for himself and a hot chocolate for me, and I’d stand transfixed, letting the music waft over me as I inhaled the warm-bitter smell of whatever was roasting just a few feet away. I remember asking my dad, “What do you call this?” 

“It’s jazz,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Jazz,” I repeated. “I really like jazz.” To my little ears, jazz music was cozy, but it flickered with a subtle undertone of despondence, barely audible and almost gentle in its presence.

As I write this, it’s raining. I spent two hours this morning in bed, half-awake and half-asleep. Whenever I lie in, I feel like I’m getting revenge for my child self, who had to get up at 6 am bleary-eyed, drudging through the imperative routine to get ready for school. Growing up, my sisters and I shared a bedroom as well as a bathroom. I was always the last to get up and make my way to the sink—as desperately as I wanted, every single morning, to be the first. To not be the one left behind. 

And yet it made sense, our haphazard arrangement, which was settled every morning by whoever could yell, “Me first!” from bed before anyone else (sometimes I’d wake up to it, instantly annoyed I was already too late. Drat!). My sisters took a miraculous five, ten minutes to get ready. I could never figure out how they did it. I took my sweet time drifting from toothbrush to towel to hair tie, and then wondered, every morning, why it always took me so long. I was simply incapable of moving any faster. I would usually still be slipping my school shirt over my head while my sisters were making their way out the door. My youngest sister, the most diligent and punctual and put-together of us all, would holler at me from the front door as it swung closed: “Meet you by the elevator!” Sometimes just “Elevator!” if she was in a mood.

I’d run outside, my feet jammed halfway into my shoes, slinging my lunchbox hastily over my shoulder, elbows and knees akimbo as I raced to meet them. Often, the elevator doors would already be closing, my sisters disappearing behind a diminishing sliver of space as it slid shut; or else they’d already be gone, and I’d be imbued with a sense of dismay. Something dropping in my stomach, like, oh no, I’m the last one out again. On top of that, I’d realize that in my rush, I’d worn the socks with holes in the toes. 

I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of ten, and perhaps that contributed to my distracted morning manner, but I think I also lean towards floating, wishy-washiness, the glorious and torturous state in between dreams and waking. And yet in spite (or because) of it, I have always grasped towards stable ground, for solidity and warm blankets and being on time. For somewhere to land.

I made valiant attempts to get it together in the years since. In many ways my entire life feels like a series of valiant attempts to get it together, despite my true nature. I started using a planner in middle school, making elaborate routines and sticking to plans (or at least just writing them down). Sometimes I’ll clear a whole day for just one appointment. I write and rewrite my daily to-do lists with rigorous devotion, like a prayer, like this time please get it right. For the most part I think I am flexible, but I can be rigid. I think I’ve had to force my way into these systems because I knew from a young age that I had to — or else I’d miss exams and interviews and meetings and dates and my life would unravel as it’s always threatened to, then I’d be stuck with a mess too unwieldy for my flighty mind to handle. I have always been afraid of spinning out of control, and I always feel as though I am just barely avoiding it.

The car rides to and from school were both a dredge and a comfort, a version of lying in bed at 6am but in transit. I’d listen to music and stare out the window, feeling rain tap onto the glass from outside. Idly watching cars roll by, the sky as gray as the city. I’d often play the same tracks on repeat, the way I’d pull my blanket over my head when my alarm went off in the morning. I repeated songs so frequently that I sometimes lost their texture. But I listen to them again now, years later, and it’s like entering a time capsule to whenever that song belonged to me the most.

The first time I listened to The Killers’ “A Dustland Fairytale,” I was also reading the lyrics, sitting in the backseat of a car, creeping through typical Manila traffic. I was in high school and must have been on the way home. Somewhere in between the first chorus and the second verse, I began to cry. The song took me somewhere else, somewhere beautiful I could clearly see, somewhere out of the ruckus and the droning chaos that was that afternoon’s traffic jam.

I kept wanting to go there, again and again. I’d listen to it on the school bus, in the basketball court, in the library. On surreptitious trips to the bathroom, hiding my earphones underneath my hair. Sometimes I excused myself from boring classes to listen to music in the hallway when I needed a fix. Can you be addicted to a feeling? “A Dustland Fairytale” brought me to a place I wanted to live in. 

Visions drifted into my mind every time Brandon Flowers sang about Cinderella in a party dress and the cadence of a young man’s eyes. I wanted to bottle up those daydreams so they could live forever. So I spun them into a story, my first real work of fiction. I don’t have many secrets, but that short story is one of them. The daydreams were like a music video only for me, a world that emerged on command every time I pressed play. There was blood and sand and a speeding car. There were desert roses and distant stars. There was a bandit in a saloon, a woman on the train tracks, true love looming on the horizon. That song was the most beautiful thing I had ever been swallowed by. When I hear it now I’m seventeen again and outside it’s raining but there’s a sunset in my heart, burning fiercely across the sky. 

An inner world you can immerse yourself in is like a secret room in your mind. Songs  are like keys that unlock their own private worlds. In interviews about her creative process for her 2017 album Melodrama, Lorde talked about how every song is its own tiny universe. As someone who also makes music, it feels the same on either side, whether you’re a creator or a listener. The first line of the first song I ever wrote went, “I knew a girl who lived in a fairytale world,” and at the time I thought I was just making up a story but maybe that girl was me.

There are some songs that are so special to me, I can’t listen to them too much. They feel like tiny vials of magic, and I have to savor every finite drop with each listen, lest the magic run out. Like Johnny Rzeznik’s “I’m Still Here,” a song I fell in love with in the way you fall in love with a person. It takes me back to the specific tint of wonder with which I used to see the world, a wonder that faded slowly as I got older. I suppose the best way I can describe that tint of wonder is: you remember how candy tastes when you’re little—it doesn’t taste the same today, and it never will. The feeling is that taste, or the way a tube of Vaseline cherry lip therapy once smelled more wonderfully intoxicating than any bottle of luxury perfume, in a way I no longer have access to. 

I have always hated the cliche that the world loses its magic when you grow up, but on some level it’s true. Though I do believe we ease into a different sense of wonder as adults, it’s not quite the same. I remember feeling an irrevocable sense of loss as I witnessed that wonder dwindling away. Like watching a flower blooming in reverse, rewinding on tape. As I shifted out of my skin and that feeling circled into a slow wane, I grasped even more desperately back towards it. 

One of my childhood journals has a cover that depicts fairies in a garden. The illustration is full of mystery in that no-longer-accessible-way I was so drawn to. It was ethereal to me. I could stare at it for hours, losing myself in a fairy’s translucent pink wings, in the dusky turrets of a faraway castle, in the opalesque gleam of a moon that I was certain had to be real. I must have been seven or eight. Years later, at seventeen—still falling in love with songs and movies and books and paintings despite The Feeling whittling quickly away—the cover of my diary was something I made. Nothing special, just a spread out of an old National Geographic from the 1970s, cut and pasted onto both front and back journal covers. It was a blown-up image of a desert at twilight, with a neon-peach dot of a sun sitting deep into a fading violet sky. A dustland fairytale that I had pastiched together for myself.

Even then, my imagination ran wild, like an untamed horse I could not rein. It took me away on galloping strides, flying through landscapes, turning storm clouds into starlight.

When it rains and I have the luxury of time, I linger in bed. It’s an attempt to give myself what I wanted when I was younger. There was something I was always yearning for then: a kind of comfort I felt I wasn’t allowed. Familiarity. Ease. The kinds of feelings you chase when you’re a lonely kid with a head full of dreams and a heart that makes lots of room for people it doesn’t know how to invite. 

In those grade school days, I’d take my books out of a locker I shared with another kid I wanted to call my best friend, just so I could say I had one. We weren’t really, but she was kind to me. I’d see classmates passing notes and longed for the same easy rapport, too, the sort of friends you’d risk trouble to fold a note inside a ball pen for. But I didn’t have those friends and there was no point in writing notes to anyone but myself.

Instead I’d gaze wistfully at the rain outside, watching the view go gray, and then white, as the harsh torrents obscured everything from view. I would wish to be somewhere else. My mind took me to all sorts of otherworldly places. But as enchanting as they were, the only place I really wanted to be was back in bed, under the covers, with a book and the lamp light on. With nothing to do and no one to be. Not running late because there was nowhere to run to, and therefore no reason to be left behind.