onlinealiasnu

[onlinealiasnu]

music in narnia - pt. 3

what is music to me now? although i have fallen out of the constant obsession with music i had a few years ago when all i could do was listen to music, i still immensely appreciate what it can do for me. even though my minutes of listening have dropped down from over 99,000 minutes a year to around 85,000 a year (thank you to spotify wrapped for these statistics), the roles my favorite artists and songs play in my life have never been diminished.

even still, i can track my growth through the music i listen to and have listened to over the years. from obsessively looping mitski songs to playing old 2010s and rnb songs now, i’ve realized that i’ve matured and stopped caring about other people’s opinions. i’ve let myself become who i am and listen to the songs i want to, disregarding the popular opinions from everyone else of my generation. 

music not only signifies my growth, but still contributes to my everyday life in a way that makes each day more meaningful that the next. i think one of my favorite hobbies over the summer has been talking long walks from 30 minutes to an hour long each, while listening to my favorite songs. this was something that i started doing after all my closest friends started moving away to attend college and there was no one to hang out with or busy myself with anymore. during that time—being one of the last to leave the neighborhood—i spent time by myself. i painted more and read more and walked more and did some more walking, all while listening to music. it’s almost like music occupied its own little section in my brain.

through music, i learned to listen more closely to what people said—at first being through lyrics, then through actual words that came out of people’s mouths. i learned to be more emotional, something i’ve had trouble with for a long time, and more empathetic, which has served me well in understanding the world and making friends. i learned how to appreciate the people i love as well as seek people that i know are important to me. i learned to appreciate the little things, to admire the beauty of small things that people don’t normally pay attention to. i learned to be more observant, picking up smaller details that no one else notices. i learned to forge strong bonds with people, finding friends that i will have for a lifetime. i learned of a vast world that i’ve barely stepped foot into, barely had any experience in. most importantly, i learned to appreciate myself and be confident in what i know i can do without overlooking my own talents.

so when i say i love music, i don’t mean i’m a musician in any way. i most certainly am not—i can’t play any instrument and my singing is subpar at most. but even with those technicalities, music is still vital to my being and something i love with my whole heart. i mean, i guess it would be nice to learn an actual instrument. if i had to choose one, it would have to be bass or guitar. who knows? maybe one day, i’ll be up on that stage performing songs either solo or with a band, singing my heart out to songs that i create with mountains of meaning associated with them. or maybe, i’ll just be an ordinary office worker coming home from a nine to five, easing into the evening with a glass of wine and a slow ballad before making dinner for myself. i guess the only way to end this off is to say i’m both completely uncertain where life takes me and certain i’ll do fine whatever happens in the end. so thank you to music for making me self-assurant enough to believe that whatever happens will happen and that in the end, everything will be okay.

because seriously, everything will be okay.

[onlinealiasnu]

music in narnia - pt. 2

that’s probably what kickstarted my love for music. it’s the songs of my childhood that nurtured my appreciation for sounds and music. honestly, growing up, i started falling out of my love for music at first. i remember using my family’s only computer at the time to open youtube and watch lyric videos of the songs i loved as though i was watching an entrapping television show. in actuality, i was watching the lyric video for “you belong with me.”

in sophomore year of high school, once quarantine started and the age of loneliness started, i felt myself more and more attracted to the appeal of music. i started scoping out spotify for a favorite genre or favorite artist for me that i knew was out there but didn’t know about before. i wanted to have a niche music taste that i curated for myself, something so special to me that no one else could relate to. and due to the nature of quarantining and not being able to step outside, i had all the time in the world to do so. so it began: the journey of my acquired music taste and the many playlists i would create and destroy in my attempt to seek this.

i know it all sounds so superficial: my wanting of a niche interest that make me stand-out from the rest of the dingy teenagers that could not compare to my music taste. i wanted to have an “elite” taste that i could feel proud about and that i could define my personality around. i will admit, this thought was incredibly superficial at first, but it was due to this desire for an acquired taste that i began to truly appreciate music for what it did for me.

me and my group of friends spent hours customizing our spotifys to look exactly the way we wanted them to. we would spend hours looping certain songs on repeat, to demonstrate to the world our love for those songs and to tell each other how much we projected onto those songs. throughout this time period, there were certain moments that have truly defined the person i am today and stick out as special memories to this day.

i remember spending my nights up till four or five a.m. on voice calls with my friends. we would discuss monotonous things, and aspects of our lives that we would delve into a psychoanalyze. we would talk about our love for critiques, video essays, and deeper thinking while geeking out over pieces of media we really loved. we played games up until the sun rose, keeping our screams silent as to not wake up our families. we giggled, laughed, and snorted together and even though none of this was in-person, we felt truly connected through the music that would play in the background of it all.

we took turns queuing up songs, humming and singing along to them while doing all the things previously aforementioned. i remember sharing tens of tens of playlists that i made, each for a specific purpose and fleeting feeling that i felt was important enough to create a playlist around. we would go and share songs, ones we loved and others we had “unpopular opinions” about. we bonded over songs by the 1975 and 88rising, sharing videos of our favorite artists on live.

i remember spending nights doing homework and studying for exams, which i would procrastinate until after midnight. after settling down by grabbing a bowl of cereal to munch on as i grinded out assignments and projects, i put on my headphones and turned the volume up, putting on my favorite playlists. while finding the values of x and writing cornell notes for ap world, songs would continuously play for hours on end so i wouldn’t lose my sanity. my most precious moments of quarantine came out of this. there was this tradition that developed between my friend and i where we would not start our week-long and weekly assignments for ap world until the day before. we would call each other while silently working on each of our assignments, music playing in the background. even as the streets became quiet and the sun started rising, we continued working, not letting ourselves succumb to the heaviness of our drooping eyelids and the slowness of our brains. once the clock hit 7 a.m., we would reach the last stretch of our assignment and once we hit the last enter on the document, we rejoiced, saying our goodbyes and shutting off our laptops to crawl into bed for the much-needed half-hour of sleep we would get before class started again.

i remember days spent doing nothing, even with the piles upon piles of responsibilities i was expected to fulfill. i would feel so overwhelmed that i wanted to forget it all and just cease existing—not in the way that i was majorly depressed or anything because whatever i had going on was nothing compared to everyone else’s, but in the way that i just wanted an out so my responsibilities meant nothing to me. but i knew that wasn’t possible. just like time will keep going on, the world never stops turning and i realized that in utter defeat. so on those days, when i wanted an escape, i found myself starting up at the ceiling. no words said, no notifications to bother me. i kept the lights turned off, laying down on the childhood bed next to all my plushies i’d accumulated over the years. i would lay there, next to the wrinkles on my bedsheets, my baby blue bear blanket thrusted in a corner on the foot of my bed. my floor would be a mess, clothing sprawled everywhere and fallen books scattered about. i would cut myself from contact for those couple hours staring at the holes in my ceiling, with the only voice cutting through that silence being the singing of melodies quietly echoing from the speakers of my phone to the rest of my room. eventually, my eyes would slowly close and the muscles of my face would relax, as i drifted away to nothingness. and when i would wake up, i would be greeted by the quiet hum from my phone once again.

i remember yearning and dreaming of better times, listening to the cheesiest songs to ever exist and quiet upbeat ones that lightened my mood. i spent hours talking with my friends, to songs like “fall in love with you in every 4 am” by friday night plans, talking moreso with friends i became extremely close with. i found people that i trusted and people that i knew i wanted to keep in my life, thanks to the dreamy melodies that would accompany my interactions with them. i learned to romanticize what i could, to keep my head afloat and myself motivated. i was lucky to have developed this mentality because my experience in such utter loneliness was not as lonely as other people’s.

so that time, spent with friends—though not in-person—and music, had nurtured me to become the person i am today: someone that truly cares about people.

[onlinealiasnu]

music in narnia - pt.1

there’s a special place in my heart—a place that none will ever match up to, no matter how extravagant or extraordinary or magnificent or, well, you get the deal. and i’m sure it’s not just me with this same yearning feeling for a place that’s so mundane yet so tender in memory. this place isn’t just a static one; it’s like narnia—if you get the reference. it’s the feeling that encapsulates all the magic in the air and the snow under your feet. narnia is that feeling, not the closet from where it came from.

it’s just that. not the belt parkway—the physical place of origin—but the feeling of spending summer nights in a car under bright lights speeding away in an old honda civic. it was this feeling—windows rolled down, 99.1 fm turned all the way up on the radio, and the cutting humid breeze slapping the sides of my face—that made up my “special place.”

i don’t exactly remember how my family got in this tradition. well, to take a step back, this was barely tradition, as i rarely spent time with both my parents in the same room due to the nature of their work. so riding in my dad’s car became a tradition within my head, a special place where i was surrounded by my entire family and was in the company of a lulling state of mind where nothing else mattered.

my dad would announce for us kids to keep the house out of trouble, as he packed up his things and slipped on his running shoes. almost always, my sister and i perked up, eyes glistening and legs excitedly skipping, and all that nonsense. we knew the implication of our dad leaving at exactly 10 p.m. on monday nights. this meant our mom was finally done with work and he was heading out to pick her up, all the way from one borough to the edge of another. 

noticing our excitement, he would ask us who wanted to tag along in his adventure and my sister and i never hesitated to say yes at the prospect of us staying awake past our bedtime. throwing on thin sweaters and our nike sneakers, we rushed out of the house to claim our seats in the car. like always, i sat on the right side in the backseat, a spot i’d proclaimed to myself and only myself after one day of revelation. we would forget to put on our seatbelts, to which our dad would lightly scold us for. we would try to peek our heads out the window as he pulled out the driveway and began driving towards the freeway. my sister would go on and on and on talking about anything and everything her mind came across (which happened to be everything in the whole world apparently from the sheer amount she would talk). my hands would trace the impurities and stains across the window as my cheek rested against the cold pane of glass. i would grip the two handlebars of the front seat’s headrest, pulling myself closer to the front and peering through the gap between the headrest and seat to admire the sea of red taillights staining my view. then, it would start raining and we would quickly roll the windows back up, still managing to get splashes of rainwater on our faces. we would ask our dad to turn the radio up on songs we hollered our voices out to, songs that we knew and loved by our hearts. as the rain pattered against the windows, songs like maroon 5’s “sugar” blasted against the drum of the water.

still, the real fun didn’t begin until our drive back home, after agonizing minutes of waiting for her to wrap up and join us in the car. she would tell us she was done, but that soon turned into almost done and another five minutes and then another twenty minutes. we would groan and complain until she actually finished cleaning up and closing up shop then complain about our hunger when she got in the car with us. on those nights, when we left for home close to midnight and the only places open were the gas stations and shady motels, we opted to buy a huge bucket of popeyes fried chicken home to satiate our hunger. pulling out of the drive through, my sister and i could barely repress the growls of our stomachs and were forced to keep our hands away from the food so we could wait till home to eat.

here, marked the most important turns of our drive. from my mom’s workplace to our house was a 45 minute stretch of driving that was filled with endless singing, bickering between my sister and i, and our parents grunts of exhaustion waiting for our energy to wear out. we hollered to “mirrors” by justin timberlake and solemnly sung along to “sparks” by coldplay. we clutched our chests and sung low to ed sheeran’s “thinking out loud” while dancing along to any bruno mars song that came on. it was this moment that was euphoric: karaoking along to the songs on the radio as we raced past the pier on the freeway, going 65 mph and feeling as though time would never stop.