blue. (ii)

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this will be short. i'm tired, and i need to sleep, and i'm getting up in about 5 hours.

this is about the song, firefly (faye wong). great song. in chinese, though, so be sure to get the translated lyrics. it's worth it. the song is good; the lyrics make it great.

this is about this line, to be precise:

by day you don't even see me/but by night there is only you and i

you kinda need to read it in context of the rest of the song, so i'll tack the entirety of the lyrics to the end.

is it just me, or that an incredibly evocative line? i know, i associate all the songs i love with 1) sex or 2) tragedy. but there's already been an entry on why that is, and the link between sex tragedy emotion and music.

no need to go over old topics.

but come on now. by day you don't even see me. by night there is only you and i.

fucking sad! i can't explain it, but i'm sure you know what i mean. and so...imageristic. haha, i made a new word. but like, listening to it, i can almost see it: daytime, busy-ness, big city, skyscrapers, two people; somehow related, see each other often...casual lovers, or so the guy thinks, never for a moment imagining it could be more (or maybe knowing it, but ignoring it) - the way their eyes don't ever really meet; the way her eyes seek his out, but his gloss right over her like she wasn't even there, moving on to smile at someone else.

then, night: light's gone, no moon, no stars. inside, bedroom, everything's pitch black, utterly black, and all there is, is silence and ragged/languorous....fuck i can't spell that word - you know what i mean - breathing; touching, skin on skin, and the brief green flares of light behind the eyelids sparked by the caress of a lover. nothing else in all the world. and in those moments he knows she loves him, and he knows he loves her, too, but what does it matter? the sun comes up; he forgets.

by day you don't even see me, she tells him, but he doesn't hear it. by night, there is only you and i.

ag! i can't put it into words.

another subject, just something i want to jot down before i forget again. there was a girl in my third-grade class who sat next to me a lot. in retrospect, a startlingly pretty little girl. blonde hair, slender and small...blue eyes. that's the key - her blue eyes, which were the bluest eyes i have ever seen before or after.

her name was vanessa. i shouldn't forget that.

i've spoken of the winter sky here in the bay before, i think - that's the only blue i can compare it to, though the two shades are nothing alike. hers were a deeper blue, and clearer; the sky is a hard-edged, flat/deep thing, without facets - or the whole thing is a facet too big to see the edges of. her eyes weren't like that. i know i've read it somewhere, limpid blue pools for eyes, and it's so stupid and cliche, but that's exactly how her eyes were. unbelievable, the color. even now i can close my eyes and seen them in perfect clarity (blue - not electric, not shocking - just...so vibrant, clear, but dark too, and with a large dark pupil, threads of dark interlaced among the deep, rich, full, bright hue; god, it's hard to describe), though i've forgotten the details of her face.

it's easy to blow this out of proportion. it's so easy to call her my first crush. it'd be so much more dramatic and bittersweet. but i have to be honest and say she wasn't. she didn't like me much, and i didn't particularly care about her, i don't think. it's easy for me to wax poetic on the hue of her eyes, too, but that's only because i can't put it into words, so i use a vast abundance to try to make up for it.

i'll say this much, and this will be the last on the subject of the color itself: SURREAL.

so anyway, one day, i was sitting next to her - i remember this clearly - on the floor, while our teacher, Ms. Redling, was teaching us something, or reading a story, or something. that doesn't matter much. i wasn't listening anyway.

i was looking at her eyes. god knows why. this was before puppy love, btw, so i had a healthy contempt of girls, and while i think i did understand that her eyes were beautiful, it didn't really matter. she was still a girl (ew, gross), etc...but still, i was looking at her, at her eyes.

and all of a sudden, i had this thought: so that's what blue eyes are really like. it wasn't profound, and it wasn't melodramatic. bells didn't ring in my head. it wasn't an epiphany. it was very natural, just a passing thought i happen to remember. i, very simply, honestly thought that i had never really seen blue eyes before after all. i honestly thought i had been fooled all along, and had suddenly discovered what blue eyes were REALLY like, and all that i had thought were blue before that was just another shade of gray, duller, not as real.

i thought the shade of her eyes defined blueness. there was never a doubt in my mind; her eyes were the real deal. blue. all else that had come before was only a very paltry imitation.

san francisco.

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I had an insomniac night of sorts. Couldn't sleep until 4am. 'Course, that was my fault, because I was listening to my old CD mixes...you know, those CDs you burn yourself with a million great songs on 'em, only you never really listen again after the first few weeks because you can't remember which songs are on which and don't really care to squint at all them teeny track names written on the CD surface?

Yeah. Those.

It occurred to me, you know, that I'm not going to live in San Francisco forever. I can't. It's one of those cities where you only really realize how much you love it when you're away from it. Like last night, I was listening to that (admittedly retarded, but still really pretty) song by what's his name. The San Francisco song? When you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair - that one.

That SF doesn't exist anymore, not really - the whole summer of love thing is behind us. But the sort of love that drove that song still exists, very much. You can tell. The words are corny and hippie-idealistic, but the melody is beautiful and wistful. See, it's a leaving-San-Francisco kind of song. You don't really know what you have unless you can't really have it.

God, how many cities, really, inspires songs? And I don't mean songs like that Viva Las Vegas song, those party songs. I mean songs - love songs, practically, sung to so much steel and concrete. What makes a city more than the sum of its materials and ingredients?

Evening fog, sunlight, skyline, bridges, distance.

Distance.

Heh, I really love the city. I don't think it's something I can explain, but come to the City, live here a few months, and you'll understand. Well - no. Don't live here. Live across the Bay where you see it shining in the sunset every night. Or live down in San Jose, or even Palo Alto (if you can afford it). You'll be amazed at the feelings that churn in your gut every time you round that last bend and see the city rising up before you, white in the day, golden in the sunset, sparkling in the night.

But like I was saying, if you live there too long, it's like living in Hershey, Pennsylvania. You get used to it. While SF's charm isn't anything so easily defined as a smell (though, to be honest, just how easy is it to define a smell? Really define it?), it's the same concept. You get inured to it.

So, yeah. I'll live here through my residency years. Then, when I'm in my thirties or whatever, I'll go wherever my job takes me. And then I'll look back on these days as a sort of golden age lived in the city I love.