In Continuum.

Remnants Of Her Voice

Still a little bit of your taste in my mouth
Still a little bit of you laced with my doubts
Still a little hard to say
What's going on?

A friend in distress, the red alarm blared and the sound pierced silently into the youthful night. There we were, on the computer from either side of our cozy homes, but there I was feeling the anguish and the frustrations through her long pauses and hesitations before the reply of every sentences. I offered to talk to her on the phone, for that was the closest we could get in the deeps of the night. And so we did that, the first time in age since I talked on the phone with anybody, and it felt good. No, it was more than good. It was great.

But it was all oddly familiar last night, the smell of melancholia in the air was thick. Like poisonous fume that floats upon a dead marsh, choking my throat and lungs as I breathed them in voluntarily, willingly indulged in the whirlwind of the past. Almost helpless too, but on the phone with a friend that needed comforting, I couldn't show any signs of weakness, or perhaps a hint of nostalgia too. After all, you want to trust the person you are talking to, the person you are taking comfort in. You want to know that he is capable of handling your situation with a certain level of emotional strength and maturity, and not somebody still brooding over the past and wondering about the unknown future with foolish hopes. So I kept silent about my woes, the way the voice crackled over the phone reminded me of things, things that were buried underneath those layers of dust that covered the handset. The things that should have been buried there, for ever.

Still a little bit of your ghost, your weakness
Still a little bit of your face I haven't kissed
You step a little closer each day
Still I can't say what's going on

I remember the way the phone emerged from the darkness of the closet. It has been there ever since my mother decided that two phones in the living room was one phone too many. The lights from the outside filled the insides of the closet underneath the altar, and it smelled like candle wax and old paper. My mother reached in for the dust covered box and pulled out the old phone, and the two of us proceeded to re-wire the phone lines to my room. I brushed off the dust upon the receiver, and smiled at myself for no apparent reasons then. But now that I think of it, I probably smiled because of all the good times that we were going to spend on that very receiver, the kind of sweet talks and soft whispers of affection that'd be transmitted through the little holes at the end of the receiver. I was excited for the new phone installed in my room, but I never prepared the emergency first-aid kit. Nor did I put masking tapes across the windows of my house, or sandbags at the entrance to my home's door. Because when the storm came, when the rain finally arrived and the wind blew strong, the flood came into my house with so much force, everything was washed away - everything happy.

We pulled the gray cable from my sister's room and made a detour of it around the frame of my door. It went upwards towards the dividing board on top, then down the left side and eventually into the socket of my same old brand new phone. I tested the phone, and there was dial tone. I was glad, and the first person I called was her, for the phone was painstakingly dug out from the deeper end of my home for the sake of her. Nobody wants to have lovey-dovey talks in the living room, people always prefer the privacy of their bedrooms. And there is something alluring about the curled phone chord, and the way your finger fits through the loops almost perfectly. I remember the first conversation we had in my room on the new phone, and how the receiver felt so warm after I hung up. My ears were bright red then, and they were throbbing with a kind of pain like the ones you feel in your feet after a long run. But there was a smile, a smile to redeem everything else. And there I was in my room, happy and ignorant.

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall
When you float like a cannonball

Last night was the first night after that fateful night, I decided to pick up the phone once again. Like before, there was a thin layer of fine dust on the receiver, and I cursed the construction downstairs once more for all the mess it has been causing. My mother noticed it first, claiming that the house has to be cleaned twice a day because of all the dust in the air. People sneezed without control in my house these days, and secretly we all wished for the construction to finish as soon as possible.

I reconnected the phone line to the bottom of the phone in the dark. It was all set for a nice long conversation yesterday. The lights were dimmed, leaving the yellow lamp turned on as usual. And the fan was spinning away as the stubborn air-conditioning refused to do its job. There was a soft music in the background, something from my Bossa Nova collection I recall, and in the dark I dialed her number and the call went through.

Still a little bit of your song in my ear
Still a little bit of your words I long to hear
You step a little closer to me
So close that I can't see what's going on

There was a click, followed by the ruffling of the phone against the ear of the person that picked up the phone. But right before she managed to say 'Hello', I was afraid. For some reason, some foolish reason, I was afraid of the voice I'd hear from the other side of the phone. To be honest, I was terrified of the remnants of her voice, as if the receiver has some kind of automatic recall button to play the voice of the last person you talked on the phone. The truth was, if I pressed redial on that phone, it would've gone through to the old love for sure. Because as of last night, it has been exactly sixty five days since I last used it. I remember the sound of the phone line being plucked out of the socket, and the way it hung like a dead fish at the side of my table. It nodded away in midair, as if to remind me of the predicament that I was facing, agreeing that everything was the end, everything was done for.

There was a line of light in the phone line, an imaginary one. It retracted from the end of the broken line up towards the frame of the door, backing up slowly into the corner of my room. It was her, it was her spirit in the phone, slowly retreating from me, from my life. I watched, and vowed never to pick up that phone again. Because it'd remind me of the good times, but mostly just the bad times that we've had. The nights when we held each other through the phone, comforted and convinced each other that everything was going to be fine. How innocent, how juvenile that love was. But love it was, and now it remains as voices buried under the thin layer of old dust.

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall
When you float like a cannon

We talked till a little after four in the morning, and it was the longest phone call the friend of mine ever had. It wasn't for me though, for my own personal record is close to about six hours in the autumn of 2004. But anyway, that was a long time ago, and something I am capable of looking back with a smile, though not the other memories to be honest. The conversation we had on the phone shifted from her problems to mine, then it went on to mindless things about school, about life, about death, and about everything in between really. It eventually circled back to her problem, but we decided that if we were to delve into the issue more, we wouldn't have had time to sleep at all. Besides, she was having a sore throat and I a sore left ear. But still, the feeling was good, and it was great to talk to someone on the phone like that, all over again.

Like the ritual that I have been doing in the past months, I successfully exorcised the phone as well. I wonder how it'd be like, if I were to accidentally press her phone number instead of somebody else's, what would be the voice from the other side of the line be like. Would it be a voice of surprise, despise, or disgust? Probably a bit of both at the end of the day, since I left without a lovable impression. I still wonder, what am I to you these days, if you still feel guilty, still remorseful - if you ever was. And for a moment, I wanted that voice to be back on the phone to answer me those very questions. They are not pressing questions, I will live and breathe still with them in my mind. But I'd just like to know, I'd just like to know. Even if curiosity kills a cat, I'd still like to know. Is that alright with you?

Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to cry
So come on courage, teach me to be shy
'Cause it's not hard to fall
And I don't want to scare her

The twisted irony is, I still remember the shape of calling her. Tracing it out on my paper with a 3x3 box, it looked kind of like a black ribbon of sorts, or two white flags crossed after a losing battle. It takes time for numbers such as this to be forgotten, to die in one's mind. After all, they are embedded in my head like my own birthday, and who the hell can forget their own birthdays? I need dust, a lot of dust, memory ones, to cover everything up. Ignorance is a kind of bliss isn't it? And I guess at times, exorcism isn't nearly enough.

Oh, old love. To pull this sword out from my heart or not, that is the dilemma. It hurts to have it stuck in my chest like that, sticking out like a sore thumb. But pulling it out, my heart shall bleed to death. So what is it going to be? What is it going to be? Or am I lost, truly?

It's not hard to fall
And I don't wanna lose
It's not hard to grow
And you know that you just don't know