Break-Up Breakdown

My song for the week is by the Pet Shop Boys. One of the first things I did upon returning to Manila was to listen to my CDs. This song is from their album Please.

When I first heard Love Is A Catastrophe, I thought, wow, how perceptive their insights were. But since it’s been a looooo– (take a deep breath) –ooooo– (another deep breath) –oooong time since I’ve last experienced this deep pain that comes with a bad break-up, I just filed it away in my mental jukebox.

For some strange reason when I listened to the album again after arriving from Bohol, something stirred in me while this song was playing. Was it sadness? Was it regret? Was it loneliness? Was it just gas? Whatever it was, this song kept playing in my head the past few days. Especially the following words: so naïve / To think I could believe / In love as the kindest law / not as a declaration of war.

Love is a catastrophe
Look what it’s done to me
Brought me down here so low
stranded, nowhere to go

No concentration
just rerunning conversation
Trying to understand
how I fell into this quicksand

What happens next?
With life I’m unimpressed
Pain like a cutter’s knife
Never been lonelier in my life

Who issued the instruction
for this mad act of destruction?
An end to equilibrium
Fate laughs:
“Look what we’ve done to him!”

High wind through the trees
Falling November leaves
A weak sun hanging low
Summer seems so long ago

All my former dreams
tender romantic schemes
revealed as so naive
To think I could believe
In love as the kindest law
not as a declaration of war
on my life and sanity
Now I know at last for me
love is a catastrophe

Another break-up song from the same album that keeps playing in my inner jukebox is I Get Along:

I’ve been trying not to cry
when I’m in the public eye
Stuck here with the shame
and taking
my share of the blame
while making
sudden plans that don’t include you

I get along, get along
without you very well
I get along very well

Ewan ko ba kung bakit break-up ang mode ko, eh wala naman akong jowa ever. Hindi rin naman ako Almodovar-esque: a “woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown.” Maybe I was just too relaxed; maybe all my angsts are now ganging up on me, saying, “How dare you take a vacation from us?!”

Whatever.