VIII: Sforzando | Searchlight Song: "Storm Warning"
Sea of thousands in ecru, sash of red and green. In the midst of the noise I made a quiet vow: shifting my Sablay from right shoulder to left, I promised myself I’d only ever write about the masses. Each word rang true and unscathed against the string ensemble’s graduation march—and later that day, with every fresh graduate’s fist and voice rising into our university hymn.
For six years, over and over, they told us: “serve the people”. The chorus was a comfort-harmony, endless and easy to play by ear. When I reached the outro, moving my Sablay at graduation, I knew sure as lightning that I could—that I would—keep its melody alive. That was a song I could march to, eyes on the horizon in an endless sea: to follow the hymn, to serve without compromise.
/
I avoided calling myself an activist. The letters felt so angry on my tongue; I couldn’t trust the roof of my mouth to contain the consonants, my lips to stop the vowels from dripping like ghosts to the floor. Maybe part of me—all of me, even—wanted to claim that anthem. But never enough to break my neck for it.
Besides, from the other side of the sand I could still hear the people march to their protest songs, could still taste their pleas, their rage. I could wipe the saltwater from my eyes and see them: driving jeepneys, selling at wet markets, cleaning public restrooms, guarding buildings, waiting tables, asking passersby for spare change, the day-to-day hum of just getting by. From the middle ground the hymn was still audible, strings shivering to a chant, guitars and violins echoing over and over, these are the people to serve.
Yet hard as I tried, I couldn’t make myself wade into the water, open my mouth to sing alongside them. Maybe I was terrified that I wouldn’t do their melodies justice, or unsure whether to whisper or scream, or furious with myself when my voice broke (too often, always too often). We walked the same pavements, yes, but I kept myself ever at arm’s reach, safe and dry. Grazing flesh, but barely. Never fully grasping.
/
So I turned to words, those pulse-points of light which had never failed me before. If I couldn’t sing, I could at least write: about the people, for the people, telling their stories loud and brilliant. I’d be the voice of the voiceless, I told myself, hubris spilling into imagined saviorhood. If I couldn’t muster the courage to march in the streets, to memorize protest songs, to throw my fists in the air and live my people’s splintering alongside them—I would write my solidarity instead. It was enough, right?
/
Enough is a difficult thing. The reality hit too quickly, like a truck to roadkill: the words might have sufficed as their own form of activism but they certainly weren’t enough to pay rent, to put food on the table. It was important, I was told, to further my cultural capital. (This is, of course, a prettier way of saying befriend the moneyed.) I came to understand that my diploma was in fact a binding contract: be a good citizen, join the workforce, grow the economy, sell your labor. So there was no choice but to participate in a broken system. But I spat out the thought as soon as it hit me. I refused to believe that I had to succumb to the noise.
The trouble was that, to the world, I was just another young woman: dreams too big for my skills, stealing songs from old records and mixing them into the basest definition of music. I didn’t know yet what I had to apologize for. I thought that if I just danced long enough to reach the last act, if I just paddled hard enough to break my ankles but stay afloat, I might somehow survive.
Someone said to me once that people born wanting to change the world learn either to avoid the currents or to be swallowed whole. No one worships the martyr who suffers under the delusion of her own competence. It’s a fool who believes she can drink down the sea, sing it serene and quiet. The storm screams us all apart eventually.
/
In the middle of posh Ayala Avenue I stared at the magazine cover posted on the wall at the open mouth of my new home. The daughter of a former dictator grinned down at me in a blood-red gown, all teeth and Photoshop, barren eyes and too-tight skin. I couldn’t stop thinking of that vow I’d made at graduation as our university hymn rose like smoke around me. How had I come to this place, and would I end here too? Could a promise bend without breaking?
I signed the contract and felt the first drop of rain hit my face. It was a full-time position, well-paid, for which I’d conveniently profile the country’s 1% in glossy-paged bylines. I’d mingle with high society celebrities, the CEOs of controversial brands with poor labor conditions and worse wages. Could a promise bend without breaking? And how long until the inevitable crash?
I only lasted four months. Each day coming into work the clouds gathered, the thunder rumbled, the hymn I’d sung at graduation fractured further. Strings broke one by one. Chimes morphed into cymbals, banging without care for a beat. And one day the clouds broke, and the overture in the back of my mind snapped completely: out of tune, out of rhythm, music into noise, with nothing I could do to stop the rush. I was earning enough for myself, but something in me had broken. I couldn’t shut out the cacophony. Song, smashed and shattered, reverberated against the four walls of the office, against auditorium seats and concert hall spotlights, against studio cameras and production screens. Everywhere I went it followed me like rain on the sea, sighing and shrieking, a ghost of my own making.
/
At the end of my probation period I couldn’t do it anymore. I turned in my resignation and chased after release, swam to freedom from the gnawing ache, the unceasing blows of noise.
The next job was better in some ways. I was a co-editor here, with more agency over what I wrote—unabashed work, critical work, work that served as social commentary on a broken society that I loved more than anything. Telling the stories of the people I had once upon a time sworn to serve.
But I was fooling myself if I thought that I could finally find some quiet. I was tricking myself if I thought I could rebuild the song in my head that had fragmented little by little and then—suddenly, terrifyingly—all at once.
As I scrambled to stay afloat on choppy water, to spin all this noise into something beautiful again, I came to understand how easy it was to name myself a messiah, a voice of the voiceless. It was so easy to accept the burden of a self-proclaimed curse, lodging the seeds of inherited trauma between my teeth, focusing so desperately on singing that I forgot to hear the choir already behind me. The people had never been mute. The only problem was what mattered in the world of corporate media I had thrown myself into: not the song but the noise, not the sea but the storm, not what was true but what would sell.
/
When the masses cry out now I have no time to grapple with my own privilege, to parse out whether I can afford to let my voice break as I sing along. Instead I capture moments in SEO keywords, in catchy hashtags. I shed light on the stories of the oppressed only by finding a middle-class person to speak for them. I repackage pain into content, define ache as a social media analytic. When I open mass-printed magazines and newspapers and find my words inside, I know the whole world is consuming them except their subjects, who have access to neither print nor phone.
The shattering of song into noise loop continues without end, without sympathy. My memory fails me—how did the string ensemble once sound? What was the tune of the hymn I sang at graduation? I find myself unmoored, lost in broken water, working against the purpose I proclaimed so many years ago. Someone said to me once that people born wanting to change the world paddle to their deaths in a violent sea. But even still I wake up and latch onto that graduation song, the bright and inchoate hope that nature remembers how to forgive. Maybe this is all I can do to find my way back from breakage.
So I wake up. I write. I sing. I pick up the pieces. And I force the hands of the clock in the opposite direction. I’m still searching for that time when the music made sense, the violins soaring, guitars reverberating, over and over, a melody that despite everything I can’t let myself turn my back on: these are the people to serve. You can serve still. The song is not over. There is time left.
/
(Searchlight Song is a column, originally written by Christina Im and now by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro, about the music behind identity: how it shapes us, explains us, and finds us when we are stumbling in the dark. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando. It is available for preorder now.)