Quarantine Summer, 2020

For longer than I can remember, I have always associated summer nights with sleeplessness. Something in the air, perhaps the humidity, provides fertile ground for ideas to sprout in my mind, like mushrooms on a dewy morning. And the ideas that keep me up are legion: a wayward memory, a word spoken out of turn, a receipt I find tucked into a book I’m re-reading for the moment.

This summer was no different. This summer was probably worse: what kept me awake was a cocktail of anxiety, anger from the news, and pent-up energy that under normal circumstances I would get to expel through tennis or the gym. This restlessness, the scale of this sleeplessness reminded me of the summer I turned 14, when I finally got my own room back at my parents’ house in Cagayan de Oro.

I grew up without the internet. Or rather, I grew up at a time when the internet meant prepaid dial-up, which is just another way of saying that the internet was rare. But having no internet gave me enough time to develop an imagination, a keen sense of what I wanted to become, and brought the untold pleasures of boredom.

It also meant that my consumption of media was more deliberate. There were no streaming services, so watching movies meant going out of my way to rent a VCD from Video City or ACA Video. There was no Kindle, and getting my hands on a book meant waiting for months for the one decent National Bookstore in town to carry it. Which is not to say that I lacked for things to occupy me. Granted, I did spend an inordinate amount of time staring at the ceiling, but it was on many such solitary nights I discovered Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Stephen King, and much later, the works of Joan Didion and Jhumpa Lahiri. This was around the time when priests at home labelled the Harry Potter books the handiwork of the devil, and so I had to scurry those books into my room and read them well into the night.

Some nights I would write, because this was when I still dreamt of making it as a writer, years before I sold out to corporate overlords. And I did have a lot of material to write about, growing up in an interesting household. But mostly I wrote about what I read, what I watched, or what I listened to.

I was 14 when I discovered a cassette tape of Joni Mitchell’s Blue lying around the house, which was precisely when I learned what it meant for songs to have gravity. Stuck in what seemed to me was a small town then, I listened to songs about leaving and traveling, and being homesick, and irretrievable loss. Imagine being restless, wanting to skip town in the middle of the night and listening to these words:

“I wish I had a river

I could skate away on.”

Loneliness and sorrow are felt acutely, and in very particular ways, and yet in these songs was proof that the world beyond recognized my experience

“I’m a lonely painter,

I live in a box of paints.

I’m frightened by the devil,

And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.”

These would stay with me through college, when I moved to Manila, on trips to Sagada, and Blue was among my go-to albums as I worked through a break-up that ended my first serious adult relationship.

There is another album that has managed to stay with me all this time, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, which I first discovered at 16, after it was lent to me by a professor. But I did not at the time understand much of the album’s anguish, or many of its literary references. Neither did I take notice beyond a passing glance of the album cover art — jagged lines shaped like mountain ranges that turned out to be radio readings of a pulsar, a kind of star that emits light while in a state of death. Neither had I made the connection in my 20s, as I obsessively wrote about pulsars for someone I really liked, and with whom I shared a mutual fascination for objects of space.

Some months ago when traveling was still a thing, I chanced upon a print of the Unknown Pleasures album cover art while walking along the streets of Melbourne. I bought it right away, and today it hangs on my office wall. Yet I still had not made the connection then. It was another sleepless quarantine night, when I was 32, that I read a review of the album and discovered the connection between pulsars — the subject I obsessively wrote about in my 20s — and the album cover art for Unknown Pleasures, which had pre-occupied many of my angsty teenage years.

The music, the reading, the writing — they were never in service of anything other than as fodder for my own meandering mind. I learned that at 14, when I first found out about music and books and the many wonders of being alone. I learned that again this summer: that when human connections are severed, my own inner life flourishes, that some things recur without us knowing it, and that some recurrences are so abiding they have kept us company for more than half our lives, but it takes being in quarantine to notice them.