MY FIRST LOVE HAS ALWAYS BEEN MAKATI. We met when I was a child, but I fell in love with it when I was in Uni, after a late evening affair where I met the first band which would then introduce me to the scene: Imago. My parents thought I was at a friend’s house hard at work with a project; I did not know it was one of the many further sneaking arounds that I would do in my life just to support my rendezvous.
To understand my love affair with Makati is like finding that one poem or story that stuck with you the whole time–you know the verses very well, but each time you revisit is a completely different experience, and you fall in love over and over again. Hard.
It was a lover of sorts. In the mornings, it would show me how fucked up life can get, but while staring at its peaks from the 26th floor of one of its towers, it’s kind of hard not to forgive it for making you understand that there’s more to this life that you’ve yet to achieve. And then at night, when there’s only the remnants of the bustling streets and the beer bottles clinking at every other street, it serenades you into submission, almost like apologizing for the hard day it has given you. And you try to suppress a smile but as it whispers to you softly there’s a tickle that just makes it hard to keep a hard facade.
You keep falling. Hard.
Last Saturday was a beautiful day. I went out to try getting a pending project started which I was planning to give to my mother, but I didn’t realize some of the logistics were a little hard–they required a lot of patience. I started a few blocks away from my work place in Raffles Place, and walked all the way to the Marina Area, then went on to Bras Basah. I blended in easily with the tourists, and it was easy to pretend like I’m seeing these places for the first time.
Singapore has been nursing me for quite some months now. It is easy to understand why falling in love with this place is effortless: you can walk around almost safely, with controlled pollution and its majestic buildings. They don’t have jeeps but they have very efficient methods of transportation that’s mostly reliable.
Being in the city is a different ball game: it’s an intimidating hub where everyone came from everywhere to be someone. It was easy to see that their buildings, rarely unkempt and often shiny, were meant to house people who would not settle for anything less. Even at night, the sounds were always fast paced; often I wonder how people in the city even sleep what with the city’s hushed whispers almost screaming at you to get moving.
It is a completely different type of beauty. It exhausts you to consume it, but Singapore is a completely different kind of drug.
Today, I’m mailing this to the universe to let my lover know that I miss it: I miss its busy streets, its chaos, its dirt. But it will be a while before we meet again, and I want it to know I’m being taken care of.
Love,
Jayce
