Nevergirl's

I have a confession – and it’s one that I could lose friends for. As Mariel puts it, I’m baduy – they’ve come to accept that as a given – but I’ve no business crowing about it to the world. After all, she is my best friend; that, by association alone, makes her baduy, too. Nonetheless, I really need to get this off my chest because it’s 3:29 in the morning and I’m sitting here overflowing – simply overflowing - with love for Queen.

I love Queen – that is my confession. I’ve loved them since I was 10 and I loved them so much I had the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody memorized long before I learned the wordings of the Holy Spirit School hymn, which we had to sing every Monday and Friday in school. So what if Freddie Mercury died of Aids or that he openly admitted that he adores Liza Minelli and Cabaret? That doesn’t make him any less of an artist. If anything, it makes him even more of an artist. After all, the rock music industry is notoriously homophobic. For someone like Freddie to make it big in a testosterone-heavy arena is proof that – to borrow from Rizal – “genius knows no country, genius sprouts everywhere, genius is like light, air, the patrimony of everybody, cosmopolitan like space, like life, like God.”

Freddie was born Indian. Before there was a Freddie Mercury, there was a Farrokh Bulsara – and for Bulsara to conquer the music industry the way he did is sure evidence that sometimes, talent triumphs over clever packaging. Freddie had no machismo, no good looks, no bad boy image to sell. In fact, Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballe even said that the difference between Freddie and practically all other rock stars was that they sold their image while he sold his voice. He had to; there was nothing else he could do better or be more passionate about than making music.

Ironically, the man who is considered one of the greatest rock singers of all time never had formal voice training. I’m not sure if he had any training in songwriting, too, but with or without training, that guy sure writes well! He wrote complex harmonies and intricate melodies, used a wide range of genres, and utilized just about all types of key signatures. He was a singer, writer, musician, and performer and I would have given just about anything to see him perform live. I would have loved his flamboyance, his eccentricity, his ability to excite an indifferent audience and hold them in the palm of his hand. I would have loved the way he stuck out from other musicians like a sore thumb.

You see, I have always had the highest respect for people who dared to be different – and Freddie wasn’t only different, he was wonderfully odd, too. He took his music to the edge, drove his creativity further than the rest, and wore tights. He had gaps in his teeth and looks like he had swallowed a golf ball each time he sang. He was also – in his own words – as gay as a daffodil. How could anyone not love a man like that? And because I can’t NOT love him, I’m leaving you with one of my favorite Queen tracks, the song that best expresses what I’m feeling right now – at 3:29 in the morning. And no, I don’t mean that part about feeling like a sex machine ready to reload.

I’m not going away. I am going somewhere. I have places to see, verses to learn, stories to write, odd corners to turn, moments to capture, heavens to peer at, ghosts to drag, and nostalgia to challenge the stars with. I want to find places that will break my heart and hold moments that force me to stop and remember. I want discovery and metaphors, scars and cycles, moonlight and galaxies, tombstones and ripples, and the birthing of stars.

I’m not going away. I am going somewhere. I don’t have a map or a saltwater sketch of all these places I am going to but I don’t need one. My feet know the way to the sea.

There’s this friend I can’t NOT write about; first, because she’s crazy and second, because she’s crazy in a way that’s both weird and cute at the same time. She flitted from one job to another, never staying long enough at one to grow to love it.

Then, one day, she went to Bora, spent many a night laughing and dancing by the beach. By the time the vacation ended, wild horses – okay, I exaggerate; it was really a stubborn mother – had to drag her home. She hated going back to her call center job, hated doing what she called ‘soul-sucking’ tasks. Her feet itched to wander but really, when you’re born in Cebu and have spent your whole lifetime in the same place, what corner of the city or the province do you have left to wander?

We talked one night. I told her, “Why not go to Thailand? I know some people who could help.” And that’s just what she did – packed up her bags and went to Thailand less than two weeks after we had that conversation. I know I told you this friend is crazy, but that’s some serious kind of crazy, is it not? Imagine walking out of your job and the life that you know for 25 years just like that.

Then, last night, we talked again. Turns out, her commitment-phobe of a boyfriend proposed marriage. The thing was, she wasn’t really listening to what he was saying. He only caught her ear when he said the magic words, and she was so surprised all she managed to get out was “What???” He didn’t say anything after that and so she had to spend the whole night obsessing about it. Did she hear him right? Did he really propose – or was he talking about marriage in a theoretical, maybe-we-could-do-it-someday sense?

She couldn’t stop thinking about it so the next day, she emailed him if he meant what he said. This is strange for two reasons. One, they live together and two, while she was emailing him, he sat only a few feet away. Yes, my friend is crazy like that. He then mailed her back to say he meant it, of course, but that he was worried because they didn’t have a lot of money and he couldn’t afford a ring and a wedding. Her reply is one for the books, and I’m blogging about it now (even if I just might end up taking this post down because this story is not mine to tell) because I really, truly feel this scene is one that that should have been in Sex and the City — it’s that cute.

She said: I don’t care about rings, and I don’t care if the wedding is smaller than my feet. I just want to be with you.

So yeah, it’s official. They haven’t set a date but they’re doing it, and one of these days, I really should ask her what size her feet are because that’s how small – or large – her wedding will be.

I think I’m beginning to like solitude.

Here, the lazy whirring of fans and the dull purring of the AC are broken only by the sounds of house chores – scrubbing from the bedrooms, the screeching of furniture being moved, the tink and clink of dishes being washed. Here, the help putters in the kitchen creating her own medley of sounds: washing, pounding, chopping, frying, sauteing, boiling. Here, the little girl’s and the husband’s are two footfalls I know; and I listen for the patter of one at 9 in the morning and the skips and hops of the other 30 minutes before lunchtime. Here, too, life passes by idly, with the languor of a daydream.

There is a quality to these slow but sound-filled days that’s both depressing and intoxicating. While the absence of company is making me contemplate talking to pillows, it’s also making me see little pockets of joy everywhere and in the mundane — sitting idly while waiting for the sun to set, seeing a movie I never had time to watch before, inadvertently hearing snippets of funny conversations that float up from the houses next door, sipping hot chocolate and eating casava cake in the afternoons, hand-holding while glued to National Geo’s The Perfect Weapon, and sometimes hearing the wind pass through the leaves of trees – pass through and rustle like a lullaby.

Yes, I think I’m beginning to like solitude. Luxury bed linens too, but that’s another story entirely.