Written for 27 November, 2025.
“Do you ever feel lonely?”
I knew a musician, once.
Once, and now.
When on stage, he would be bombastic and humorous. But the mask is a torn one, warned out by decades of use. The moment he is off-stage he would retreat into himself; disappearing from the roaring party as soon as he physically can.
His eyes, I always avoid.
Melancholy seems the most apt word to describe them.
Too painful for me to look at.
But, sometimes, there would be another kind of smile. When he is lost in his own world, playing tunes he knows by heart. Telling stories he’s so passionate about he could barely contain his joy. Oh, how can I ever describe his amazingly infectious joy. I have never been so happy in all my life to see someone laugh.
When he’s lost in his own world, he has the brightest light sparkling from his eyes.
Those eyes, those laughs, those smiles – I want to gaze at until the end of time.
I know them, all too well.
I know him, I felt, all too well.
It was as if I knew him before I had even met him.
Watching him on that piano in the corner of the crowded green room – I knew him.
A lifetime ago, perhaps. A melody I have heard in another lifetime.
Yet a melody that repeats in every beat of my heart.
He was like someone I had always known.
But, ever since before we met I also knew – I don’t know him at all.
No matter how many concerts I went to, we never talked. Never look each other in the eyes. Never attempt to reach out. As I grew closer to his friends, it still remained the same.
Because – I don’t know him; I don’t understand him.
I could not understand this person who is so wonderful, yet have made and are making choices I could never agree with. Why? I never could bring myself to cross it out of my mind.
He was like someone I had always known – but also someone I could never grow to know at all.
In both, it seems, I stand corrected.
In some ways, I keep both trying to look away and wanting to look at him – because he is like a mirror.
I felt like I had always known him – because I see myself in him.
How our eyes sparkle, quite literally, when we get to talk about things we love. Old songs, nostalgic cartoons, antique Thai films, anything to do with history. How we go on long tangents and cut ourselves mid sentence as soon as another thought enters our brain. How we put on masks and perform on stage, but as soon as we come down we retreat back into silence and solitude.
That solitude, back in that chapter of my life, was all I could ever feel.
Eventually, it eclipsed everything else.
Not only alone, but lonely.
“Do you ever feel lonely?”
That was the question.
Asked in a depressive episode where I felt so alone the only person I felt I could turn to was a musician I barely knew and barely talked with. Someone whom I just send random text to for fun. Low stakes conversation. After all – he didn’t care about me.
Looking back, it was simply a projection of course. I felt that we were alike, but really he was never the lonely one.
Still, that was the question that started it all.
For the first time,
the musician asked me back;
“How are you?”
I remember the first time it struck me.
We were on a music tour trip to some islands, where there are mini concerts every night. I would message him requesting songs for him to sing; too afraid to approach him face to face.
But, one night, he came to our table. Said something brief about “The Days of Wind and Roses” and Henry Mancini. But what remains in my mind was, at the end, how he lingered for a bit. Both of us seemed to want to say more, but couldn’t. So he left.
That awkward silence stays in my mind till this day.
Over the years, no matter how close we have become, that silence remains.
River of silence between us stretching galaxy-wide.
Silence can be many things.
A silence of understanding, perhaps?
I see so much of myself in you. So much I want to help.
But there is a silence of inability. An inability to reach out.
Perhaps there was too much to say – all too late. All too real. All too close. Things we thought should remain unsaid.
And over the years, no matter how much I reach out – I suffocate in the silent air between us when we try to make conversations. I blank out at those texts that never got a response. I drown in that ocean of silence separating us apart.
Sometimes, that silence seems to say – ‘It all doesn’t matter – Just get lost in the song until the end.’
Stars were called The Heavens, once.
Their orbits were believed to generate mathematically perfect harmony – the origin of ‘music.’
I often think of that when I hear him sing.
Like a lyre. Like sunlight dancing through the leaves. Like the warmth of a tear on my cheeks. Like twilight reflecting on clouds above the meadows in my mind. Like the mellowest goodbye.
He sings with a melancholy that touches my soul so deeply I was and is still mesmerised every single time.
Music of the Heavens. Of stars.
I used to think of us like stars, orbiting each other; normally trillion miles apart – but sometimes, for just a moment, align together. Two worlds that are so, so different – yet, somehow, for a brief moment could come so, so close.
The Heavens are cruel that way. Always has been. Inyeon is a captivating concept for many, after all. Lives fated to be a certain way; a certain tragedy already fixed.
It was fixed that we are so alike, yet so different.
It was fixed that we were to come into each other’s life, only for a brief moment.
The Heavens are cruel in that way; to put two alike souls together but separated by things that we cannot change.
I have never before prayed that there be another life – until then.
Desperately, I want there to be a life after this – or another world out there – where things are different. Where choices were different. Where we are different. Where this story could be different.
But, deep down, I also know – it could never be different at all.
His words always ring like a melody.
A melody and a sunset. A Rorschach. A rose with the sharpest thorns.
We were watching a sunset on Samui, once. Purple airbrushed into red above the meandering waves. Purple and red haze. Speck of light, lightbulbs, like stars. Stars in his eyes. I see him against that late twilight sky.
We talked about death. About changes. About how we might never be here again. He said that’s why you have always taken pictures. to remember them by. People. Moments. Eternal.
Against that late twilight sky, looking over the sea, he smiled at me.
“You have a beautiful smile,” he said. “I want to remember it. This moment.”
And I remember it. I remember the breeze on my skin, the warmth in my heart. I remember his smile.
A warmth that my soul seems to seek like the sun.
I know we won’t love each other forever. We won’t love each other the same way all the time. But, I think, there’s something – some kind of thread – that connects us; ever since that first time we smiled at each other in that sea of things unsaid.
I sat alone in my Cambridge room and wrote a song.
It’s a sad song. A song for someone I love, but will never know.
My star, my sunset, my melody. Never could be known or reached. Never could be mine.
Never could be held in my hand, hands in hands. Never could be hugged in my arms, arms reaching and never touching. Never touching some subjects, forever burying and burying and burying just for us to walk together over graves. Over pains and distances and me. Walked over me, burying me. The me that would have cared. The me that held so dearly ideals and virtues. The me that would never have loved someone I could not understand; because how could I understand myself, then?
It’s a tragic song. The same Heavenly tune across centuries. Each character unable to escape their own tragedy. And yet, for a brief moment – found each other.
The possibility that love is not enough is true. Love never could change the ending. Never means anything, never saves anyone.
But I do think back to that crowded green room.
I never could actually finish the song.
No conclusion was reached; no satisfying coda. But I choose to finish it with something.
I thought of that green room.
That musician I met, playing a tune so beautifully on the piano in the corner.
I thought of him, all these years, sitting there.
I thought of those songs.
Those eyes. Those smiles.
I thought of me.
And,
I thought,
how wonderful.
That,
in this life,
Even if for the briefest moments,
We make each other smile.
Doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t save anyone;
But in those songs and those smiles,
in the stars and sunsets and rooms filled with laughter and tears,
across time and across lives,
there will be two souls that make each other smile.
To a musician I knew before I met;
To a friend I will never know;
I love you
Thank you for making me not lonely anymore.
happy 61 ♡
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