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TREMOLO was written some time throughout the winter of 2018, leading into the spring of 2019.
This was an incredibly monumental piece of creative writing for me and my life trajectory. At the point of this writing, it was 2018, and I was about one year into moving to the United States.
At that point, I remembered still being way too deep in my own set of vast and complex feelings that accompany the move. It was such a stark transition from the world I was oh so familiar with, in pretty much all aspects. Being uprooted from my place of birth and all of the communities of families, friends, relatives, and even simply friendly faces I had called home for so long due to the immigration process, I also went through a not-so-breakup breakup of a puppy love high school not-so-relationship relationship that was an entire shitshow of a situationship. On top of that, what I had recounted in the songpiece sheet music I crafted below was going to take a lot longer than two years to get over with, and as I wallowed in a sea of despair and negative emotions and the physical drain of my first true heavy-snow winter depression, the vivid daydreamed memories of all of what seemed to be an entirely past life had rendered me unable to step foot out of my own tiny dorm complex for several months straight outside of regular school schedules. My depressive routine would be the endless cycle of preparing instant food in the dorm microwave, showering, changing from one pair of pajamas to another, and hugging my blanket as tightly as possible as I took giant gulps of hot chocolate to hopefully drown out the internal multidimensional cold. I still remembered observations I made of the younger kids I prefected at the dorm complex, and staring blankly at them having their families visit every two or three weeks, and wishing so badly to be the recipient of those warm embraces, the promises of seeing each other again after those few short weeks would have gone past, those snack resupplies and missing item deliveries from home. Even those kids who shared with me during small talk conversations that they’d already known so many of each other within the campus community, and how so desperately envious I was of being able to utter the exact same words during those moments back to them just to brag about my admittedly decorated social abilities from the days past.
In every sense of the word, I was lonely. So incredibly lonely.
I remembered tiptoeing out of the room late at night to not disturb by sleeping roommate and sneaking out to the empty streets of the town, where my go-to spot was the front porch of this abandoned condo complex that was away from all the snow, with my guitar on my back, warm winterwear, a pair of handwarmers, and those cheap white easy-to-tangle iPhone earphones. I would play for hours and hours on end, being lost in negativity and intentionally forgetting to keep track of the time. For those couple of years, dorm curfew was enforced to be 10:30 PM and students were required to be checked into the dorm (usually checking in with me or another dorm prefect), and I would very often get into trouble for not being present for dorm supervision duty or failing to check in in time if it wasn’t my duty days. But I couldn’t really help it. Solitude and artistic self-reflection was my coping mechanism, and the remedy for the void I felt like I would never be able to escape from.
One of the winter nights, knowing that the town was very reasonably safe, I checked myself out of the dorm before 10:30 PM using a fake excuse of parental pickup and a fake signature. I was intending to just stay and play guitar and walk around the town past midnight as a self-therapy practice. I walked to the town lake, the iconic lake that extends from the town’s downtown into some parts of the school campus. I can now only vividly remember playing guitar until both my hands and arms were tingling sore, and waking up the next morning at almost 5 AM to me hugging my guitar having fallen asleep by the park bench by the lakeside. A tune of a classical guitar piece still lingered throughout the sensation of half-awakeness, a piece that did follow me throughout my very lengthy dream.
It was a dream where I got to visit my passed past soul-bond. My best friend Jimmy. We saw each other again after what felt like multiple eternities. The subconscious reunion happened by the side of an enormous picturesque lake, and we just walked and talked for what seemed like multiple days, or even weeks. There was so much I needed to catch up with him on. It was a strange feeling to have known that if you had talked for that long and with that amount of passion with a friend, realistically you would have ran out of breath and made to sound like a toy squeaker after a while, and that’s how I knew I was in my own lucid dream.
I awoke from my dream and immediately ran back to my room and to my laptop. I knew I had to race the clock and write everything down before the song was going to fade away. I had to preserve that tune I adored way too much.
I printed it out and spent another month relearning and perfecting the piece on guitar on my own. Then I borrowed recording equipment and a rehearsal room from the music department of my school and performed it into a finished recording.
That piece of recording was the sole inspiration for the creative writing I crafted below for my final project of an Honors English course. It was the perfect outlet and the perfect motivator for me to significantly process such a tragic event of my life. The writing was eventually awarded the first perfect score in that class’ history, and even though through every reread I kept spotting more and more flaws and unbearable corny-ness and cheesiness in the writing that makes me cringe every time I reread it or remember that this piece is forever pinned on the walls of the school’s English department, it was the corn and cheese that I absolutely needed to express during those dark times of mine. And for that I don’t think I will ever tamper with it and change another single thing from the original writing. Let the flawed writing capture the rawest emotions and emotional processing I was going through at that point in time. It will forever act as a time-capsule reflection for me to remind myself how far I have come, wherever I go, and however I go.
I hope I did you justice with this journey, Jimmy. I miss you every single day.