A walk across the rooftops

You are in an Ortigas mall, waiting out the rush. It is a Wednesday evening, and you know that the later it is, the easier it will be to get a cab, and you are laden with groceries and want to avoid lines and crowds for once. Perhaps the cans of whole kernel corn were a bad idea — your arm is really beginning to feel the weight — but they make for a convenient snack and sometimes you just feel like filling your life with easy things.

With an hour or two to go before the crowds let up, you get a call from your friend R. For various reasons, but ultimately because it is marginally better to be unhappy while accompanied by friends than alone, he would like to meet up. He drives up to the mall entrance near the bookstore and you head off to his place.

There you are joined by other friends: L, who is as laid-back as always, quietly amused by everything, and M, beautiful and bothered, nursing certain concerns about existence. It occurs to you that while all your circumstances and attitudes are different, every single one of you — to varying degrees, from somewhat to gut-wrenching — is missing someone who is not there. (And that sounds redundant, but it also occurs to you that it is possible to miss someone sitting right next to you.)

You listen to records. R has a vast collection, picked and gathered from such subterranias as the basement of Makati Cinema Square and the bins of Recto, and as he lovingly slides vinyl disc after vinyl disc onto his player, you are treated to a musical tour of sorts, through choice areas of the ’70s and ’80s.

He plays XTC — partially for your benefit, you would like to think; he knows they are a strong contender for your favorite band of all time — but he plays the earlier, punkier, more aggressive stuff, and you realize that, much as you have always preferred them in their later, more Beatlesque orchestra-pop mode, the early stuff rocks. It evokes that certain glorious adolescent mix of anger, frustration, deviousness and glee that you miss sometimes, and has brains and balls in equal measure.

Rplays some Springsteen (jaunty); he plays some Rickie Lee Jones (lovely). He slowly works his way ‘80s-wards and by the time Only the Lonely by The Motels is blasting away, you are steeped in the sound of a decade that seemed to be all about surfaces, and yet still affects you like no other.

It is not a night for raised voices or revelations. It is an in-between night, a breather between madnesses, it seems. The city outside is unusually quiet, many of its inhabitants having fled to beaches or mountains for a brief holiday, and the four of you are in no hurry for anything. When you look back at these six or seven hours spent with friends, you will soundtrack it with songs by a band that never even got any play that night, though they did come up in conversation: The Blue Nile, with their heartbreaking little song-scenes, their spare yet perfectly placed instrumentation, their simple and utterly sincere lyrics casting images of street lights and lonely souls.

There is a poetry to this, if that does not sound too insufferable. In fact you remember lines from Carol Ann Duffy, from her work “Words, Wide Night”: Somewhere on the other side of this wide night/ and the distance between us. I am thinking of you./ The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

The room turns away from the moon. Friends sense impending sunlight and depart one by one. The days ahead of us slide and shift and stay inevitable.