by Tria, Jay E.
Songs of Our Breakup
Jay E. Tria
Copyright
Songs of Our Breakup
Jay E. Tria
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any semblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Jay E. Tria
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contact the author: www.jayetria.com, [email protected]
Cover design by Tania Arpa. Photography by Mark Christopher Bayot, featuring Ace Tria.
To poems, live gigs, and playlists.
Table of Contents
April 20, Monday, night
April 21, Tuesday, midnight
Nevermind
April 21, Tuesday, morning
August 18, Friday, three years ago
April 21, Tuesday, night
January 1, Saturday, four years ago
April 23, Thursday, morning
All the Way
April 26, Sunday, morning
November 11, Saturday, three years ago
April 27, Monday, night
January 11, Thursday, two years ago
April 30, Thursday, afternoon
May 8, Friday, night
February 10, Saturday, two years ago
May 10, Sunday, night
Slipstream
March 21, Wednesday, one year ago
Awake
May 11, Monday, midnight
May 11, Monday, morning
February 20, Friday, morning
May 15, Friday, morning
A Habit to Break
May 16, Saturday, morning
May 22, Friday, night
Bright Side
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Songs to Get Over You Excerpt
September 7, Monday, night
April 20, Monday, night
Jill cupped her hands around her eyes: no difference. It was still the same purple haze. She had to concede that it was a pretty thing, this dark blanket of black sky. But a hopeless romantic liked to blink back at the stars. A stupid romantic like her, even more so.
From somewhere behind her there was a crash of steel against metal; the unmistakable sound of guitars being tuned to life. Jill stretched her legs, the soles of her worn sneakers gliding down the Beetle’s lime green paint. In the heat of the summer night, beads of sweat threatened to appear inside her shirt, but the mild breeze held them at bay.
She heard the sound of rubber soles crunching lightly on gravel. Jill lay stone-still, her back balanced on the hood of her car, waiting.
“You’re late,” came Miki’s voice.
“No, I’m not,” Jill retorted.
He perched on the hood beside her. “We’re up next and you’re the only one missing.”
“I’ve been out here for over an hour.” She looked up. Still those stupid pinpricks of lights were a no-show.
Miki inclined his head. His cropped hair swayed over his head like a mini-wave, then kept still. Jill had long wondered how Miki’s hair would look if he grew it out—how thick and massive and dark it would be. But he never wore it longer than it was now. Miki preferred constancy.
“The roadie has his hands on Julia,” he said.
Jill bolted upright. “Let’s go.” She jumped off the hood and started down the gravel drive, past rows and rows of cars, some new, some battle-scarred.
“You know one day you’re going to give that shiny new Beetle a scratch,” Miki said, keeping up with her easily.
“Of course not.” Hurt her beloved car. She wasn’t high.
“That’s what Kim said about his Honda.”
Jill grunted; the official response to any mention of her ex-boyfriend. Miki crunched over the worn stones with measured steps against her heavy stomps.
“Two months and three days since the breakup,” he said clearly.
Jill shot him a glare. “I thought I had to stop counting.”
“You do.” Miki shrugged. “I’m irrelevant.”
Jill growled under her breath. The sound was quickly swallowed by loud chatter when they crossed the braided metal gate. Miki grinned. Of course he still heard it. A few more steps in they were met by a loose crowd assembled around plastic chairs, and wood-and-wrought-iron tables under a canopy roof.
Commute Bar was occupied by its usual work night crowd—a mix of giddy college students and stressed out yuppies, out to celebrate the end of another Monday. Jill and Miki received handshakes, returned high fives, and shy smiles from people they knew and people whose names they might remember one day.
A stranger stepped forward and shook Jill’s hand. She cringed as the guy’s cheek hit her cheekbone with a soft thud. She never liked this part of the job.
Miki opened the door to the bar, waited a second for Jill to move, then gave her back a quick shove.
Jill stumbled, the heat and the noise of the feedback enveloping them both. She straightened her feet, thankful she remembered to wear something without laces tonight.
The stage was just across the entrance, but it really wasn’t much of a stage as it was on the same level of the tiny circular tables and iron stools. The same level as the crowd of patrons that was already on their feet, some stumbling on the cords and the line of speakers littered on the floor.
“Late,” Son said, spinning to face her with his bass guitar hanging from his neck.
“Always the grand entrance.” Nino peered at her from behind his drums, one stick taking a practice swing at the cymbals.
Jill stuck her tongue out at them both like a proper 21-year old adult.
A loud orange shirt moved up from an amplifier, separating from the dancing glare of the little red, blue, and yellow spotlights. Kim gripped the neck of his guitar, his dark eyes meeting hers for a fleeting second.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Her breathing stopped.
Kim faced the crowd, and the crowd pushed closer to the mic stands, calling their names and cheering. Nino counted off—ahonetwothreefour—but to Jill the entire cramped space was a vacuum.
Miki elbowed her side gently. “Your weapon for war, soldier.” He swung the seafoam green Les Paul’s strap over her head.
Jill saw the eager, sweating faces and closed her eyes as nerves crawled through her skin. She recognized the pounding of the drums and realized the exact moment when she had to pluck the strings, press the bar, and sing out the words.
The vacuum broke. Everything moved again.
The floor shook around them, bodies crashing against each other. Julia, the Les Paul Classic electric guitar, sang with Jillian Marie, the lead vocalist. Julia’s metal pitch wove in the humid air with Jill’s raspy mezzo-soprano, and together they danced. With Miki and Son they danced, hearing with acute precision Kim’s deep, raspy voice as he echoed the words to the chorus that he and Jill wrote together.
Jill opened her eyes, swinging Julia’s neck to Nino’s fast, angry beat, and shooed the vacuum farther away.
***
They called themselves Trainman. Son was addicted to manga and anime in high school—an affliction that only got worse when he had money to spend without needing to skip lunch and forgo his fare home. It seemed funny at the time, but then most things do when you’re sixteen. By the time Miki met Jill in their Economics 100 class at university and he too joined the band, the name was set in stone.
&n
bsp; “Why Trainman?” asked the girl sharing their table.
She was another one of those classmates-slash-orgmates-slash-neighbors-slash-strangers-from-Mini-Stop that Nino invited to the gigs. Always the petite type, always not his girlfriend. His actual girlfriend was currently killing her youth away in a twelve-month advertising assignment in Canada.
Jill and Miki exchanged looks. Son plunked his chin on his arm on the table, beer bottle dangling from his hand. He liked acting drunk when the conversation went this way. They think it’s his coping mechanism.
After four years you’d think people would have moved on to the next thrilling question. But maybe for the life of an indie band, four years still made them a baby.
“Because Densha Otoko would have been a mouthful,” Son explained, one hand raking through his mop of curly hair, beer spilling down the front of his shirt.
“And no one would get it,” Miki added.
“Excuse me?” the girl called out, moving an ear closer to them.
Son grinned and gave Miki’s bottle a shaky toast. In the pounding sound of a 90’s grunge hit playing from the speakers, and the heightened decibels of voices of people still striving to have a conversation in this racket, a newbie like this Nino fangirl would never hear.
“Kim likes trains,” Miki hollered.
“Oh.” The girl nodded. “Of course. He’s the leader of the band, right?”
“Sure.” Miki nodded like a yo-yo.
“Just like in Asian boybands,” Jill added, copying the yo-yo.
“J pop rules,” Son slurred.
Jill sipped her beer through sealed lips. Kim hated the train. He thinks it’s too cramped. His skinny ribs could never take the constant elbowing. His idea of a commute was hailing a cab, but only when his Honda was injured, and only as a last resort.
“I like the songs they play there too,” the girl shouted over the noise. “MRT radio. It plays a good mix.” She beamed, like a kid waiting for the teacher to hand out a gold star.
Miki, Jill, and Son looked at her. They picked up their beers in unison and drank deeply.
“Good for you,” Miki said after a gulp.
Jill held on to her bottle and downed the remaining half in two seconds. She brought it down the table with a loud slam, Son’s wary eyes on her, then stood in one abrupt movement.
“You have great musical taste,” she said to the grinning girl.
Jill stalked off, weaving through the thick band of people. It was midnight, Commute’s primetime. At least two more bands were in the lineup and nobody here was thinking of surrendering to sleep, another work day tomorrow be damned.
She found Nino just outside the door, inhaling the second-hand smoke. He preferred that than lighting one himself. Kim was the orange shirt beside him.
“Your new girl’s fabulous,” she hissed in Nino’s ear as she hopped off the last step.
“Her name’s Lisa,” Nino supplied with a grin. Jill cocked one eyebrow at him. “Of course you don’t care.”
Nino was a big guy, six-foot tall he claimed, to no one’s protest. He was the tallest of them five—well over five feet they all were—towering and tan with sharp eyes and a sharp hooked nose, but was more skin and bones than most drummers they knew. Only his hands got muscled, she noticed.
“You should at least endure your fan girls with the rest of us.” Jill scowled at him, one hand on her hip.
“Hey, she’s nice.”
“She likes MRT radio.”
Kim coughed out his beer. Jill’s eyes flicked towards him once.
“I’m so sorry.” Nino started laughing.
“She’s probably back there asking who our musical influences are,” Jill went on.
“And you left Son and Miki to deal with that on their own?”
“You know I don’t interact well with strangers.”
“The pariah strikes again,” Nino said.
Jill shrugged, ignoring the jibe. “Son’s in there playing drunk. Miki’s always been too nice for his own good. They’ll be fine.” She stepped forward and elbowed Nino’s ribcage hard. “If you drive her home I’m telling Suze.”
“Oww. Hey, you’re leaving?”
Jill was already a full meter away. “I have a visitor.”
She trotted off, not looking back, as practiced. It was pathetic to hyper-analyze why Kim couldn’t have at least murmured a goodbye, so she concentrated on how she hated his orange shirt. It was too big on him despite his broad chest, and it made his olive skin darker and his dark eyes smaller. And she didn’t like his new, shorter haircut either.
***
Commute Bar was tucked in the quiet corner of a residential area, far from the noise and pollution of Makati City’s business district. In its hidden corner, the music and revelry were contained within its thick concrete walls, overflowing into the narrow streets only when someone opened the door for a smoke or a whiff of night air.
The thick silence continued in the gravel-paved parking area. Jill usually liked silence, but not tonight. Not since two months and three days.
The bassist from the band who played before them yelled out a hello as Jill walked past his pick-up truck, his head and arms halfway through the holes of a fresh shirt. She heard alcohol-laced chatter from beyond the makeshift metal gates, but it wasn’t enough. The silence made her think of movie tickets, couple shirts, many pairs of socks, and Julia’s birthday.
By the time she reached her car she was running. At least the memories were now coming in flashes, rich yet blurred, not the vivid streaming images they were before.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Miki’s voice and a range of static flowed from the speaker when she took the call.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“As far away as possible.”
“You left us with Girl. How could you?”
Jill popped her trunk, laughing. “But you were handling it so well. A few more minutes of that and she would have switched the object of her affections.”
She peeked under the hood, and checked that Julia was sleeping inside her hard case. With a calmer heart, Jill shut the door.
“You get back in here, woman.”
“I can’t.” Jill spun her car keys around two fingers, the phone pressed against her ear. “I have an errand, remember?”
Miki’s voice was now coming through with a chorus of other voices. “Is it tonight? I thought the flight is Tuesday.”
Jill checked her watch. Quarter past midnight.
“It is Tuesday,” came a voice from the darkness.
“Gah!”
Away flew her car keys and her phone, her heart jumping up her throat and dying there.
“Yo,” followed by laughter.
A grinning face stepped into the flickering light of the lamp posts. It was a radiant smile that Jill hadn’t seen in what felt like too long. It was easy to forget that she was scared into anger, and that her phone and the keys to her car were now missing.
“Jill?” Miki’s voice was cracked and loud. “Hey. You alright?”
She sighed out her first breath in two minutes. “Shinta.”
He walked towards her, a backpack hitched on one shoulder. Did he always have that graceful lope? He stood in front of her now, a full head above her. It looked to Jill like this twenty four year-old grew two more inches, and his chest expanded, full like a tree trunk, after only a matter of months. What did they put in the sake in Japan?
Shinta leaned forward, his mouth within breathing distance when he spoke. “You still scare easily.”
Even his voice moved like gravel. Jill stepped back, her heart ramming against her chest at his closeness. She shook off her daze that was serving as good comedy to her guest.
“I was supposed to pick you up. Did I mess up the time?” She would never hear the end of it from his mother, nor from hers.
“By a very nice coincidence, there was an earlier available flight.” Shinta straightened up and shrugged, plane-like shoulders movin
g. “I figured you’d be here.”
“So you decided to play bait to the airport taxis?”
“Mr. Taxi was very nice. He liked my butchered Filipino. Didn’t mind that I handed over a yen note.”
Jill shook her head. “You just robbed the taxi driver of an early breakfast.”
Shinta laughed, patting the lime green Beetle’s roof like a long missed friend. “Happy to see you too, Jillian Marie.”
Jill cleared her throat, flashing him a smile. “Ohisashiburi.”
Shinta beamed, dark eyes dancing in the light. He dipped his head towards the bar just meters away. “Can’t I come in?”
“Show’s done for the night,” she answered quickly.
Somebody betrayed her and opened the door, freeing the cheering and the first rifts of a new song into the dark humid midnight. A shaky baritone cried out ‘I’m singing until I pass out’ before barging into a screech of lyrics.
Shinta looked at her. Jill looked at the stones on the ground.
Shinta clucked his tongue. “Fine. Your country, your time.” He held out a hand, showing her phone and a bundle of keys held up laboriously by a little patchwork teddy bear. “Buy me coffee. And don’t you dare give me jetlag as an excuse. We both know you don’t have it.”
She scratched her things off his wide palm, opened the car doors, and rushed inside, Shinta sliding into the passenger seat. Just as she locked her seat belt in place she saw Miki through her rearview mirror, rushing down the steps past the braided metal gate. She managed to give him two honks goodbye.
April 21, Tuesday, midnight
She could draw his face easily if she had a drawing hand. The straight nose, eyes rich and deep as dark chocolate, the strong jaw, and the jet black hair that swayed as if remembering the hands of its last stylist.
Idol, indeed.
Jill pulled her coffee tumbler closer to her chest with fists—coffee that Shinta paid for, after all—and took a loud sip. Innumerable swarms of girls in Asia would die of heart failure if they could sit around a small round table in front of him, close enough to see that the long lashes were real. Her own heart was playing a mad drumbeat inside her rib cage. Having known Shinta for years didn’t make him any less godlike in her eyes. It only made her less embarrassed to stare at him.