and Words
Por dejar escapar
El encanto de un tesoro
Fuimos un par de locos
Por dejarnos tirar a matar
No vamos a encontrar
Otra playa que tenga palmeras moviéndose al viento
No vamos a lograr
Un amor a medida otra vez
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
As I grew up, there was always a variety show on television called “Siempre en Domingo”. It literally means “Always on Sunday” in Spanish and played for hours every Sunday. It was just ‘a thing’ the way we may think of General Hospital, it was so consistent that you can set your calendar by it. While it ran from the late 60’s, I remember it most vividly during the 80’s while my sister tuned it. While she clung on to her Spanish roots, I generally ignored it, if even shunned it a bit. Naturally, the show played mostly Spanish artists.
My sister recorded it on the VCR occasionally, to play it back later. During a weekend night, when I was home from college, she played back one of these sessions. They played a concert clip with three young women on the stage. A large stadium crowd filled the seats as the young women sang on a stage, their statures dwarfed by the sheer size of the stage. The group called Flans (a Spanish custard) played this song “Las Mil Y Una Noches” (The Thousand and One Nights). The audience sang in blissful synchronicity to the words.
This moment brought me back to my Spanish roots but in a renewed way. In a way, it was a return to that childhood home, one that I all but expunged from my life.
Flans is a Mexican girl group trio, perhaps the easiest way to describe them are like a female Mexican Backstreet Boys. Their music touched me in a way that no other music did. This was still the 1980’s however, and streaming music on demand was not yet available. Additionally, their music was unavailable in most conventional music stores. Fortunately, Lily’s Records, a small music store in Little Havana, catered to Spanish music. It sat in an otherwise unremarkable shopping center. The Spanish music industry lagged in technology. I found most of their releases on record, but they were unavailable on CD. I still bought them and recorded them onto cassette.
This particular song spoke about a young couple who spends a thousand and one nights together. It describes in sad, regretful detail how this young romance eventually ends. It speaks to allowing the enchantment to escape. They spoke to being insane to allow it to end. It even reminisces about never again finding another beach with the palm trees waving with the wind. They’re all words that still resonate with me.
This renewal coincided with my attending the University of Miami. I routinely packed my semester full of seventeen credits in order to maximize my tuition dollars. My days were therefore packed with attending classes, labs, and study sessions. As our classes became more specific, our classmates became the same familiar faces over and over. My time at school became a years-long marathon, composed of mad dashes to the end of each semester. Different struggles filled each semester, each with their own nuances, but ultimately, I got through it all.
Interspersed with days filled with school, I needed to work on weekends. Upon each Friday afternoon, I drove back to Fort Lauderdale to work. I’d bring my books and some change of clothes and would often drive directly to the restaurant where I waited on tables. Those tips funded books and whatever else I needed for school. Occasionally, I’d indulge in something that fed my soul, like music. To this day, I carry fond memories of my time waiting on tables and appreciate how difficult the work is. I aspire to never take them for granted.
On an occasional weekend night, I’d also meet with friends. We were a collection of Asian-Americans teens and twenty-somethings. Strangely, we didn’t find each other in high school, but it felt that we magically connected once we graduated. For someone who had always been an ‘other’, finding people like me was transformational; I wasn’t alone. Many weekend nights were spent with these friends. Initially, we met at a party, but we continued through the years. We moved from our ‘Chinky’ parties to a theater that played ‘Chinky’ movies. Sometimes we’d meet at a club, and still sometimes we’d stay at a Denny’s until unspeakably late hours.
It was among this group that I met a young woman who was both Asian and Honduran (and now also American). If you had asked me then if I loved her, I would’ve responded with “yes”. Though life (or love) with the mental and emotional capacity of two teenagers is its own form of madness. For years we did this dance, both literally and figuratively, but then abruptly it all ended.
I often reflect back on this song and those stolen fragments of romance from decades ago. Like the song, I spent about a thousand and one nights, give or take, with her in my heart. Similarly, the lyrics (translated) bluntly articulate that:
The moonlight brought us together, but neither you nor I knew how to fly
The moonlight tore us apart, but neither you nor I knew how to cry
We gathered in the same friend group mostly at night, and late night at that. Poetically, the moon was our chaperone spanning all those years. Pragmatically, between full-time school and part-time work, I had little left to give. However, that didn’t stop my college-age self from hoping for more. While it’s clear that we both spent time and energy finding each other, neither had the courage to say, “I love you”. That might’ve crossed the threshold, or alternatively popped that bubble.
As the same set of friends congregated years later, we sat down for dinner together. The two of us were polite and friendly and as always, didn’t mention anything else. It’s as if even the mention of how we felt, then or now, would’ve crushed us from its sheer weight.
Do I sometimes wonder what might have been if the circumstances had been different? I do, but most people would. The more interesting question is, “If I could live it again, unable to change the outcome, would I?” I think I might.
This now remains a chapter in my life that shall remain melancholically closed.