8. Glitch (2017)

(the playlist) 

The further along we go, the more i realise some feelings aren't felt the same way anymore, if any. It's always been easy traveling through time to find something old to mourn about, to extract and put into new words. You just need music, an old diary entry, a memory brought back to life.

At times it's something to laugh about, at times it becomes regret along the years. And sometimes it's a fleeting moment you're still in disbelief that you caught. 

Mine happened in the june before I turned 22. Someone I'd had feelings for again and again but never got to hold, a dreaded white rose. A phone call under the guise of someone else's behalf became catching up over texts became waiting for him by a wall in novena. He brought down his bag in the crowd of the train, he ordered us pizza to pickup, we laughed over Google translating "lima suku" into 5:15. 

Someone boarded the train with dark glasses and a walking stick, and the station usher called out by the doors for a seat. He talked about the hurricane I knew and his new girl, and I nodded like it didn't break me just a little bit. 

I think he told me about the first time he saw the new trains, about how he thought their flat faces looked abit cute. About how he had never seen them that way and how I was always the person he thought of when seeing any. A thousand little moments that would become my favourite night of the year. 

New memories at an old station; in 2014 it was a staircase hug that threatened my heart to explode. In 2016 it was his twentieth, koi at the bus stop and train depots outside the window. June 2017 it was a hill at the top of the world, I felt like, while the rest of it was sleeping. 

I told him how apart from a rose he was always a moon to me. The way he comes and goes as he pleases like the phases of the moon, the way he sometimes disappears altogether. That night he was full, right next to me, like the one we watched rise throughout the sky. 

I think he'd stayed almost nine hours with me, a once impossible idea. What made it more unbelievable was, for that one night, he was completely mine to touch. Nobody else knew how alive I felt, if I even was. 

And I wish he had kept me a secret; such a contradiction to all the times I'd had to beg my partners to show off pictures of us. I wish he had kept that night between us instead of telling the last person I wanted to know, before disappearing on me altogether. Maybe I hadn't touched him in the way I had hoped after all, just a plaything.

So now I look back to that night, forcibly, just to write this. And I've convinced myself it was all in my mind, no proof of its existence apart from a stagnant playlist. The leftover pizzas have rotted, the coffee flavour we drank are not in production anymore, the tshirt I'd been wearing somewhere in the landfill. All a figment of my mind, all just a glitch in the world I'd typed up.