tonight, i was at the loft. the last time i was here, i was looking for a place to watch the warriors game so i could see my parents wave to me on tv. they were nice enough to turn on the sound and i met a bunch of regulars. the bartender and i were talking and she said that she was moving to the philipines to try to find work in film, and friday the 26th would be her last night. since we had been talking about sake bombs earlier and she’d never done one, i told her i would bring her sake on her last day.
i almost forgot! but last minute, as i was stepping out the door, i remembered. the same characters who had been there for the warriors game were there, including this guy whose wife had told me, “men need to feel like they’re in charge, but most of the time, we’re the ones taking care of things. there’s really only one place they should dominate, and that’s the bedroom.”
and dancing, rie had added when i told her the story.
personally, i like a man to take charge when he truly knows what he’s doing. then i don’t care where he asserts himself, as long as he does it well. i don’t need to dominate. don’t like to, in fact. but i do demand dominion.
met several people and got sucked into their group. one of them rubbed my back for much too long, and much too creepily. another guy told me that he finds most good-looking women to have bad personalities. and he knows because he’s been in that situation a lot. he was dumb. but otherwise, had good conversations all around that featured lots of synchronicity.
at one point, i heard daft punk, something about us, come on the speakers. electricity filled my head and i remembered that this song had been inside me in february. it stirred something inside me, and i kept it close for days. the presence of this song tonight sparked me, reminded me of all my arcade fire, wake up moments, and as i went to note the synchronicity that seemed to be present tonight in music, the song changed.
even hearing the distinct opening, i couldn’t believe it. it was silvia, by miike snow, the song i’d been damn near consumed by earlier this month. curtis had posted the song burial by miike snow to his facebook, and i checked it out, having not heard of the band. the song sounded very kcrw-like so i did a search and found they’d done a live performance on kcrw last june. while listening to that a few times, i got really into the song, silvia, to the point i would wake up in the middle of the night to that song echoing in my head sometimes. i’ve never heard it played anywhere in public at random, then as i was writing about the music seeming to be synchronized tonight, it came on. it was a complete visceral experience. it hijacked my senses and threw me right back to those moments with curtis earlier this month, where we would meet and talk, but mostly just stare at each other in thinly-masked disbelief. this song had spent so much time inside me, in privacy, in secrecy, to suddenly hear it in my world outside felt like i’d been flipped inside out. like time and space had run full circle. the last time i felt like this was that day on the cruise to alaska, when i went to see those acrobats only to find their intro song was ludovico einaudi’s primavera. my inner universe had manifested outwardly, and here was what felt like the stirrings of evidence of will over matter.
i texted curtis and told him that silvia was playing and asked if he’d willed that to happen. that song is a million percent tied to him. he said he’d willed for me to be thinking about him, too. i told him how i’d watched the front door of the bar when the song came on, thinking how weird it would be if he walked into the room, wondering what if he did walk through that door. i watched the door, hard, not realizing until much later that i was holding my breath.
yesterday, i had heard the lady antebellum song that i had recently spent an entire day listening to, and pondered the lines, another shot of whiskey can’t stop looking at the door…wishing you’d come sweeping in the way you did before.
how many times in a life does a person think about someone, long so achingly for someone that they stare at a door thinking, what if he or she walked in right this moment? Even if it meant a transcendence of time and space?
but it never happens. you always wonder, “what if?” but there’s always reality to contend with.
he asked me what would i do if he had walked in. i told him i would believe in everything.
i always said that if i dropped my keys into the ocean and found them again years later unexpectedly on some distant land, i would believe in god and universe. if he’d walk through those doors today, somehow managing to surmount time/space and appear, i would have believed the unbelievable. i would have believed our minds are stronger than the world we live in, and we can create our own worlds and make them habitable. it would have gone beyond just proof of magic. i would have found proof of belief. and i would have taken it as the universe giving me permission to unleash.
but it didn’t happen. reality marched on.
he asked me what i would do if he had walked in. i told him i would believe in everything.
i’m not everything, he said.
what are you?, i asked.
something, he said. special to you someday.
something, someday, somewhere.
isn’t it always?