Chapter Text
The morning I transfer to Chayada University, I wake up at six and lie on my back looking at the hotel ceiling for a while.
It is a very average ceiling. White, or near enough to white that the difference is academic. There is a water stain near the light fixture shaped like nothing in particular, trying hard, and a small crack running from the cornice to a point above the wardrobe that probably has a structural explanation and almost certainly does not. I look at it the way I always look at ceilings on first mornings in new places, which is to say: carefully, and without expectation.
I have looked at a lot of ceilings in new places. I am twenty years old, and I have had, by my count, eleven separate first mornings in rooms I had not been in before, not counting hotel stopovers or the two weeks I spent at my aunt's apartment in Bangkok during a visa processing delay, which felt like a ceiling category of its own. Eleven proper first mornings: the kind where the ceiling is going to be your ceiling for the foreseeable future, and you are taking its measure.
I am good at this. I am good at arriving.
This is either a quality of character or a coping mechanism, and the older I get, the less I care to distinguish between the two.
Six years ago I was fourteen and the ceiling I woke up looking at was in Ankara, in an apartment on a street whose name I could not yet pronounce. My stepfather had been posted there. My mother had told me about it six weeks before we left, sitting at the kitchen table in Bangkok with the particular careful tone of an adult who needs a child to be fine about something that the child has not been consulted on. She said it would be an adventure. She meant: I am sorry, and I need you to be all right, and I believe you are going to be all right. She was correct on both counts. I was sorry, and I was all right.
The ceiling in that Ankara apartment was also unremarkable. I lay under it for six years in the particular state of a person who is learning everything at once: a new language, a new set of social rules, a new geography, a new version of myself to be, since the old one had specific references that did not translate. By the end of the first year, I could speak Turkish well enough to get through a school day without incident. By the end of the second, I could get through it without noticing. By the end of the fourth, I was thinking in it, which is the stage nobody tells you about, the strange moment when the new language stops being a code you are translating and becomes a place you actually live.
I stayed six years. I got trilingual. I grew into someone who could walk into any room in any country and identify the social architecture within ninety seconds and know how to operate inside it. I developed good instincts about people, the kind you only develop through years of reading people across language barriers: the specific attention of someone for whom body language and context have to carry more of the load than words do, because words are still sometimes slippery. I made friends who were real and friends who were circumstantial, and after enough time, I could tell them apart.
None of this made me feel at home.
This is the particular loneliness of being good at adapting: you adapt so well that from the outside you appear fine, and from the inside you are fine, and fine is not nothing, but fine is also not the same as home. The ceiling in Ankara was my ceiling for six years, and I can still tell you exactly where the crack was and how the light from the window moved across it on winter mornings, and I was fine, and I was also, in a way I did not always have words for, always slightly waiting for something.
I play guitar. I have played guitar since I was eight years old, and it has been, in every room I have been in and under every ceiling I have stared at, the constant that does not require translation. A chord progression means the same thing in Bangkok or Ankara or wherever I happen to be. A minor seventh resolves the same way in Turkish as in Thai. When everything else in my life was in the process of becoming something new, I could sit down with my guitar and be, briefly and completely, exactly who I was. Nobody had to speak the same language for the music to be the same music.
I started posting content to TikTok when I was eighteen. I started because I was lonely and the loneliness had to go somewhere, and the guitar was where it went, and the phone camera was the most available witness. I filmed covers in my bedroom in Ankara: the late-night ones, just voice and guitar and the specific acoustic of a small room at midnight, with the particular intimacy that comes from something made with no audience in mind and therefore carries an honesty that performed content cannot entirely replicate.
People found the videos. Not immediately, not in a flood: gradually, in the way that content finds its people when the content is specific enough to mean something. The comment sections were, from the beginning, a conversation rather than a noise. People asked about the songs I chose. People asked about the next original. People argued, respectfully and at length, about whether a particular chord change in a cover I had done was better or worse than the original's choice, and both sides had points, and I replied to most of them, and the comment sections became, over the years, a place I went to think out loud to people who were paying attention.
I have approximately seventy thousand followers from this. It is a number that feels, depending on my mood and the time of day, like evidence of something real or evidence of nothing at all. On good days, it is a community. On honest days, it is a number. On the days when I am most clear-eyed about it, it is both: real enough to matter, not real enough to be sufficient. I have seventy thousand people who know my name, and not one of them could have rung my doorbell in Ankara. There is a gap in that sentence that I am still working out how to fill.
I have a guitar case in the corner of this hotel room with stickers from two music venues and a university society fair in Ankara. The stickers are: a small round one from a basement venue in Kızılay, which was the venue where I played my first live set to twelve people and immediately, retroactively re-evaluated my understanding of what good meant. A rectangular one from a record shop on the Bağdat Caddesi, the kind of shop that was already slightly old-fashioned when I found it and felt, as a result, like somewhere I could exist in peace. And the society fair sticker, bright blue, slightly peeling at the upper left corner, from my first year at the university in Ankara.
I stopped removing stickers at some point because the accumulation of them began to feel like the most honest biography of me. More honest than my CV. More honest than the profile sections of social media accounts, which require you to describe yourself in a format and are therefore always slightly wrong by the nature of being formatted. The guitar case does not lie about where it has been.
I also have a notebook. Currently in my bag. Black cover, wide-ruled, three-quarters full of the first lines of songs I have not finished. I have been writing the first lines of songs for years. I am better at the beginnings of things than the middles, which is probably a meaningful piece of self-knowledge that I have not yet done anything useful with.
I have three passport photographs and my paperwork in a folder. I have the temporary student card I collected at the Chayada administration office last week when I submitted my documents in person, because submitting them in person rather than by post reduces the chance of processing delays by a statistically significant margin. I have Pond Naravit's number in my phone contacts from eight years ago, which is almost certainly the wrong number now, because phone numbers change and six years is a long time, but I have not deleted it because you do not delete the numbers of people who were important to you, even when the connection has been long-distance and silent for years. You keep them the way you keep receipts for purchases you no longer have: not for any practical purpose, but because discarding them would be a kind of erasure.
I sit up. Outside the window, the campus is three streets away. I cannot see it from here, but I know exactly where it is, because I have read the map approximately fifteen times in the past week, which is what I do before I move to a new place. I read the map until the geography feels owned rather than borrowed. I identify the important buildings and their relative positions. I work out the routes. I do this so that the first day is a little less like falling and a little more like a controlled descent.
I know where the transfer student registration desk is. I know the music building, the media department, the library and the canteen. I know there is a café called The Metronome, which I found in the mentions of my own TikTok comment section when I posted the announcement that I was transferring to Chayada, because several people replied immediately with the specific enthusiasm of current students making recommendations, and The Metronome came up four separate times, which is data. There is a piano in the back room, one of them said, with the specificity of someone who knew I would find this relevant.
I do not know what it is going to feel like to be here. I never know that in advance. All the research in the world cannot give you the feeling of a place. That only comes from being in it.
I shower and dress and eat the hotel breakfast, which is functional rather than joyful, and I pick up my folder and my guitar case and my duffel bag, and I walk out into the October light.
✦
Chayada University, in person, is larger than the map suggested.
This is true of all places: the map is a diagram of a thing, not the thing itself, and the thing itself has weight and texture and smell and the particular quality of lived-in space that does not survive translation into two dimensions. The campus has a specific kind of October morning quality, the light doing something between warm and cool without committing to either, and students moving through it in the patterns that campuses generate: the purposeful, the lost, the comfortable, the recently enrolled, and the ones who are somehow all four at once. I walk through the main gates with my guitar case and my duffel bag and the particular composed anxiety of someone who has done this before and knows that it gets easier and also knows that easier is not a synonym for easy.
I do the thing I always do in new spaces, which is to pick a direction that seems broadly correct and move with enough confidence that I look like I know where I am going until I actually do. I find the lobby. I join the queue.
The transfer student registration desk is in the far left corner of the main lobby, positioned, as I had expected from the map, as though the university placed it there in the hope that no one would notice it. It is a folding table staffed by two administrative clerks who have the air of people who have processed every kind of transfer student paperwork in every kind of condition and have long since stopped being surprised by anything. The fluorescent light above the desk flickers approximately twice a minute. I watch it flicker and decide this is either an omen or a malfunctioning fluorescent tube, and in my experience, when you are deciding between an omen and a mundane explanation, the mundane explanation is correct about ninety-five per cent of the time.
I adjust my guitar case to my other shoulder and look around the lobby.
It is a good lobby, as university lobbies go. High ceilings, which I note for acoustic reasons before I note them for any other. A long wall of windows letting in the particular October light that cannot decide between warm and cool. Students move through in their distinct patterns. Near the main doors, someone has set up a student union welcome table decorated with banners of a yellow so aggressively cheerful it suggests they were chosen by committee, several rounds deep, as a compromise. The person staffing the table is wearing a red cap and is in the middle of filming a TikTok transition.
I clock this immediately, the way you clock things that belong to your own area of competence. The ring light, clipped to the phone at a specific angle that clears it from the frame whilst illuminating the subject. The tripod was positioned with thought, not just placed. The wide-arc camera movement, which is a transition type that requires the framing to be exactly right or it reads as amateur, and this person is getting it right. There is a competence to the setup that belongs to someone who has been doing this seriously for long enough that it is no longer effortful. I notice this in the half-second before I notice the face.
And then I notice the face.
In six years, I have not forgotten it. This is the thing about the people you grew up with: they live in you at the age when impressions go deepest, and they stay there at exactly that age, so the face I am looking at is simultaneously the face of the person standing across the lobby and the face of the twelve-year-old boy who once spent an entire summer convincing me we were going to start a band and did not register that neither of us had the skills for it yet. Both versions are true. Both versions are present. My brain is attempting to reconcile them and is, for a moment, running slightly behind real time.
Pond Naravit is staring at me from across the lobby.
The camera has frozen mid-arc. He has gone very still in the particular way of someone who has been hit with something they did not see coming and whose body is still processing the impact before the brain has finished working out what it is.
I raise a hand.
It is the only thing the body produces under conditions of genuine shock, and it is, I am aware, even as I do it, a completely inadequate response to seeing someone you have not seen in six years. But the hand is up, and the gesture has been made, and there is nothing to do but inhabit it.
Pond says into the microphone of his phone, which is still recording: 'You did not just transfer to my university.'
His voice is the same. This is the second thing that hits. Lower, slightly: six years does things to a voice. But the rhythm of it, the specific quality of the flat delivery that precedes everything else and then gives way to something more layered, is exactly as I remember it from every summer and every argument about music and every plan made on the street outside our houses that we were never quite old enough to follow through on. It is the rhythm of someone I know.
'I didn't know it was your university,' I say.
'It is very much my university. I have been here a year and a half. I have claimed it.' He puts the phone down on the table, still rolling, pointed at the ceiling, and crosses the lobby. He does this the way I remember him crossing rooms: with slightly more forward momentum than the situation strictly requires, as though he is always already three seconds ahead of wherever he is. He stops in front of me. He looks at me the way you look at something you recognise but are still computing. 'How are you here?'
'The usual process. Application. A great deal of translated documentation.'
'That is not what I mean, and you know it.'
The composed expression cracks. I can feel it happening, the internal collapse of the face I wear when I am navigating the completely unknown, replaced by something that is less constructed. Something that belongs to the street in Bangkok we both grew up on, rather than to the six countries and cities and ceilings since. 'Creative Media and Music Production. It's a better programme than the one I was on in Ankara. My adviser suggested applying. The application window opened in July, so I applied in July.'
'You applied in July.'
'I was accepted in August.'
'And you did not tell me.'
I look at him evenly. 'I wasn't sure it would work out,' I say. 'The visa processing took a long time. I didn't want to say anything until I knew I'd actually be here.' Then add as an afterthought, 'And I wasn't sure the number I had from six years ago was the one you still used or whether it had changed.'
He stares at me. He is, I can see, doing several kinds of arithmetic simultaneously. The arithmetic of probability, I imagine: the staggering coincidence of a childhood friend materialising at your university via a separately arrived-at decision. The arithmetic of time: how it can be six years and also, somehow, not feel like six years in the specific way that the people who knew you before you started performing yourself tend to compress that distance without effort.
Then: 'This is content,' he says.
He picks up his phone. The camera has been recording the ceiling for the past two minutes, which means it has captured two minutes of fluorescent light and ambient lobby noise and will capture none of what just happened between us standing here, which is probably for the best because the thing that just happened is the kind of thing that reads differently on screen than in person. What he has is my face when the expression cracked. He has that, and he knows it, because he pointed the camera at me first.
'Tell me why my childhood best friend just materialised at my university.' He turns the camera to me. 'Say something.'
I am aware of being filmed. I have been filmed by my own phone camera in my own bedroom at one in the morning more times than I can count, and I know what it means to perform to a lens, and I know what it means to simply be recorded, and these are different things, and being recorded by someone else's camera in an unfamiliar lobby is neither of them. What it is, mostly, is the moment where I make a choice. About what I am going to be in this video, about what register I am going to perform in.
I look at Pond's profile. I look at the ring light. I look at the forty-odd people in the lobby who have begun to register that something is happening at the welcome table and are glancing over with varying degrees of interest. I choose, with the deliberate care of someone who has spent three years thinking about how things read on a screen and has developed opinions about it, to say: 'I am standing in a queue.'
Pond laughs.
It is the same laugh. Across six years and two countries and approximately eleven different ceilings, it is exactly the same: the particular bright-edged sound of it, the way it does not build from a smaller version of itself but simply arrives at full volume, as though laughter does not need a run-up. When we were twelve, that laugh meant yes, this is the good kind of stupid plan. Right now, standing in this lobby with my guitar case and my folder of translated documents, it means something I am not entirely ready to look at directly. It means familiar. It means: something in this new place is recognisable.
I have not had that in a long time.
'That's going in,' he says.
It goes up thirty seconds later: tell me why my childhood best friend just materialised at my university, two stunned-face emojis, one guitar. He holds the phone out so I can watch the view count tick upward in real time whilst the remaining people in the queue move forward without the administrative clerks and us, to their credit, simply continue processing paperwork and do not comment. Four hundred views before I reach the desk. Nine hundred by the time the first clerk cross-references my documents and, inevitably, sends me to the second desk. I collect my temporary student card and my campus map with three thousand views on a video I did not consent to and have already decided to be philosophical about.
The comment section is already forming its opinions.
'Eight thousand,' Pond says, reading his phone. 'They're calling it chemistry.'
'It's a registration queue.'
'Chemistry doesn't care what's around it,' he says. 'Give me your number. I'll add you to everything.'
I give him my number. He adds me to something that appears to be a group chat already populated with several people, which I note and do not ask about yet because there is a limit to how much new information a person should absorb in the first hour of a new place.
'Campus tour?' he says.
'Please,' I say.
✦
Pond's unofficial campus tour takes approximately four minutes.
This is not a function of the campus being small. It is a function of Pond having very strong opinions about what information is actually necessary and delivering it in the order of relevance to him rather than the order of geographical convenience. I get the music building first, because it is the most important one. The media department second, the other important one. The library is third, which is large. The canteen fourth, which is acceptable on three days of the week, not on the other four, and the days rotate, and he will send me the schedule.
And then the café.
'The Metronome,' he says, as though announcing something. 'Five minutes from the music building. Khun Sataporn runs it. Everyone calls him P'Tha. It has good coffee, good acoustics in the back room, and he does not seem to mind us filming there, which you will come to understand is a non-trivial quality in a venue.' He pauses. 'Also, there's a piano.'
'In the café.'
'In the back room. P'Tha acquired it at some point, and nobody is entirely sure why, but it is there, and it is in tune, which I know because I had someone check.'
I look at him. 'You had someone check whether the café piano is in tune?'
'I wanted to know. Do you still play piano?'
'Guitar is my main instrument. Piano is just for thinking.'
'Right,' he says, in the way that means he has filed this, and we are not going to discuss it further unless I bring it up first. Pond has always had the specific quality of knowing when to drop something and when to pursue it. When we were twelve, I found this sometimes frustrating, because I wanted to be pressed on things I was not ready to talk about. Now I find it considerate.
We are walking along the main campus path, past the arts building, and the morning is properly in motion now, students everywhere with the specific mid-semester energy of people who have been here long enough to be comfortable but not long enough to be tired. There is music coming from somewhere: a practice room window open to the October air, someone on violin running the same four bars over and over in the methodical way that means the bars are almost right and they know it.
I notice a girl on the steps of the media department who is doing something with a camera and a reflector that is technically proficient in a way that is interesting to watch. I notice two people on the bench outside the library who have the look of people studying but are actually talking, and who will study after this conversation ends. I notice a boy near the music building door who is carrying a guitar case that is older and more battered than mine and who is wearing the particular expression of someone who has written a new song and is keeping it in their head until they get to a room with an instrument in it.
I have always noticed people like this. It is not surveillance, exactly, and it is not nosiness: it is closer to the way a songwriter notices things, which is to say at a slight distance, observing and accumulating until there is enough material to understand the shape of what you are in. Ankara taught me to do this more and better. When you cannot rely entirely on language, you develop the other things.
I am in the middle of thinking about this when Pond says, 'Phuwin,' with the tone of someone who has seen something convenient.
I look up. Coming towards us on the path is someone about our age, unhurried, carrying a bag over one shoulder and holding his phone loosely in a way that suggests he was in the middle of something and has paused it for the duration of the next few minutes. He moves through the space with the ease of someone who is comfortable in his own body and in his own campus, neither taking up more room than necessary nor making himself smaller than he is. He looks at Pond with the easy recognition of someone who encounters him regularly and is neither surprised nor especially excited by the fact, because surprise and excitement require some degree of unexpectedness, and Pond's appearance on this path is entirely expected.
'Heading to the library?' Pond says.
'Reading week prep,' Phuwin says. He has looked at me with the kind of curiosity that is open rather than assessing, the look of someone who is genuinely interested in new information rather than categorising it. 'You're the Turkey guy.'
'I'm already the Turkey guy?'
'The clip has eleven thousand views,' Pond says, beside me.
'The comment sections have decided,' Phuwin says, with a slight warmth in his voice that suggests he has been watching the comment sections develop their opinions and is not without views on this. 'Also, Pond has been talking about you for a year and a half, so some of us were already briefed.' He holds out his hand. 'Phuwin Tangsakyuen.'
'Joong Archen.' His handshake is the kind that gives exactly what is appropriate, nothing performed about it. 'What did he say?'
'That you are the one person who would always tell him when an idea was bad, so naturally he misses you approximately twice a week.'
Pond, on my right, 'That is an editorialised summary.'
'It is the accurate essence,' Phuwin says, without heat. He says it with the ease of someone who has said similar things before and knows that Pond will not actually dispute the accuracy, only the framing.
Something passes between them after this. Not a long look, a brief one, the kind that belongs to people who have been talking to each other for long enough that whole sentences can live in two seconds of eye contact. I cannot read the specific content of it. I watch it happen the way I watch everything in a new place, which is with attention and without conclusion, because conclusions require more data than I currently have.
'Pond,' Phuwin says, 'your message about Thursday. I can do Thursday.'
'Perfect.' Pond says this without elaborating, and Phuwin nods without asking for elaboration, and this exchange has the quality of a conversation that is one line long on the surface and considerably longer underneath, which is a specific feature of people who have been communicating in shorthand for years.
Phuwin turns to me. His expression is warm in the straightforward way of someone who does not use warmth as a social performance but as a genuine register. 'It's good to have you here,' he says. 'Pond talks about you a lot, actually. I'm glad you came back.'
'Welcome back,' he adds, and means it.
There is something very specific about being welcomed back to a place you have not, technically, been before. This campus is not one I was ever at. But Bangkok is where I am from, and Thai is my first language, and the rhythm of this place is a rhythm I was raised in and spent years away from, and Phuwin seems to understand this, or to mean it in a way that encompasses all of that. I say thank you. I mean it back.
Phuwin and Pond exchange one more of those brief looks, the kind that contains a conversation, and then Phuwin says he will see Pond at dinner, the usual time, and continues on his way towards the library.
I watch him go.
He moves through the campus crowd with the same easy competence he moves through everything: not effortful, not performed. There is something about the way he and Pond exist near each other, even briefly, that I file without immediately naming. The ease of it. The way Pond's frequency shifted, very slightly, when they saw each other, in the specific way that people shift when they are near someone they know well. The shorthand. The dinner at the usual time, which has the sound of something that happens regularly enough to have become a structure.
'He seems great,' I say.
'He is,' Pond says, simply, with a smile lighting up his whole face and in the tone of something true and complete that does not require or invite a longer explanation.
We keep walking. I put Phuwin Tangsakyuen under Pond's closest friend, years of shared ground and move on.
✦
We reach The Metronome at ten past ten. Pond wants coffee and this is also, clearly, a destination on the tour, and the two motivations are indistinguishable from each other in the same way that for Pond most things are both practical and intentional simultaneously.
The café is on the ground floor of a building that was probably built for something else. It has the particular warmth of a space that has been shaped by use rather than designed towards a specific atmosphere: the accumulated warmth of being somewhere people want to be, which is different from the engineered warmth of a space that has been told to feel welcoming. Tables at various heights, not matching. Walls that have been painted over more than once. A counter with a pastry display that has been curated with genuine thought about what is actually good rather than what looks impressive.
The lighting is the first thing I register properly, because the lighting is remarkable. It is warm in the specific way that good video lighting is warm, which is not flattering-soft but true, the kind that renders surfaces and faces accurately rather than prettily. Someone put these lights here with thought. I notice the placement of the windows, the angle of morning light coming through them and where it will move to by afternoon, the way the exposed brick on the far wall catches and holds the warm tone. I do this before I am fully aware I am doing it. It has been a habit for three years.
The second thing I notice is the piano.
It is in the back corner, which is where Pond said it would be. An upright, not a grand, with the proportions of a quality instrument that has been in regular use for years: the legs have the particular scuffs that come from being bumped by chairs and cases and the general traffic of a space that is used by musicians. The wood has a patina that is not neglect but age, the kind of patina that an instrument develops when someone cares about it without being precious about it. The fallboard is down. The bench is pulled back at an angle that suggests someone has been sitting at it recently and has not yet pushed it back.
I look at it for two seconds. I look away. I do not say anything.
I am very practised at not saying anything about pianos in new places. The piano is the instrument I think in. Not the instrument I perform on, not the one I record on: those are both guitar now, have been for years. But when something is stuck, when a song has reached the point where the words and the chords are both present and there is something wrong between them that I cannot locate, I go to a piano and I play the thing in a different register and the problem usually surfaces. I had one in my room in Ankara for my last two years there. I have not had access to one since I left.
I notice every piano I walk past. I do not say anything about any of them, because saying there is a piano is the beginning of a sentence that ends somewhere more specific than I am always ready to arrive at.
Pond orders at the counter. He is recognisably a regular: the barista moves before Pond has finished his sentence, because the sentence is not new information. I order a black coffee. The barista makes it with the efficiency of someone who considers their job a craft rather than a service, and the result, when I take the first sip, is the kind of coffee that is trying to be the best version of what it is rather than something else entirely. I appreciate this more than I could easily explain.
'You still have it black?' Pond says.
'I've always had it black.'
'I know. I thought maybe Turkey changed you.'
'Turkey changed a great many things. The coffee is not one of them. You cannot spend six years in a country that invented coffee as a cultural practice and emerge with a preference for adding things to it. It would be disrespectful.'
He grins at this. We sit down at the corner table near the window, which Pond occupies with the authority of someone in his own territory, gesturing me to the seat opposite with the easy ownership of someone for whom this table is a fixed point. I sit down.
From here I can see the piano. I look at it once, the way you glance at something you have noticed and are filing, and then I look at my coffee.
Pond, I realise, has been watching me look at the piano and look away.
He does not say anything about this. Instead he starts talking, and I let him talk, because what he is talking about is the reason I am here, or part of it.
He tells me about JASP.ER. Not in those words yet, because the name does not exist yet, but the shape of it: the plan that has been forming since the car park video, the two people he has already found or is in the process of finding. Santa Pongsapak: a first-year, competition winner at sixteen, K-pop trainee in Seoul, who has a technical precision and a content intelligence that Pond speaks of with the specific warmth of someone who has found an unexpected equal. And the fourth-year, the drummer.
'He does a back flip in the middle of solos,' Pond says.
'You have mentioned this.'
'I have mentioned it because it is the most important fact. Without the back flip, the rest of it is still excellent. With the back flip it becomes something that has no category.' He looks at me. 'We need him and he does not fully know it yet.'
I note the yet. Pond's relationship with the future tense has always been interesting to me. He does not exactly predict things. He locates things that are going to happen and treats them as current information.
'And where do I fit in this?' I ask.
He looks at me with the expression of someone who considers this the most obviously answered question of the day. 'You came back,' he says. 'You play guitar. You write songs. You have a presence on camera that twenty-six thousand views in the first three hours is currently making a very strong case for.' He pauses. 'Twenty-nine thousand. Sorry, I was checking whilst you were looking at the piano.'
I let that go. 'I haven't agreed to anything.'
'You haven't disagreed with anything. Which from you has always meant yes, you just need more information.' He picks up his coffee cup. 'The information is: Thursday. The back room here. Bring the guitar.'
I look around the back room. The piano in the corner. The exposed pipework along the ceiling. The particular acoustic of a small room where the surfaces are varied and the ceiling is low. A room where things would sound close and warm and slightly imperfect in exactly the way that honesty often sounds slightly imperfect when set against performance.
I look at the piano one more time.
'Thursday,' I say.
✦
The afternoon is practical.
The dormitory office is in the south building, which I find without difficulty because I read the map fifteen times. The key collection involves two signatures and a deposit. The resident assistant is a third-year called Godji, who has the efficient warmth of someone who does this part of the job well because she has decided to do it well rather than because it is her favourite part. She shows me the floor, the laundry room, the fire exit, the communal kitchen, and the practice room at the end of the corridor, which she mentions with the specific deliberateness of someone who knows what kind of student she is inducting. I thank her and mean it.
The room is on the third floor, overlooking the courtyard. It has a window, a desk, a wardrobe, and a bed, and enough space for a guitar case against the wall without obstructing anything, which is the spatial calculation I always make first.
I put the guitar case in the corner. I lean it against the wall, stickers facing outward, and look at it for a moment. The Kızılay venue sticker. The record shop sticker. The society fair sticker with its peeling corner. They are, as I have noted on other mornings in other rooms, the most honest biography of the past six years.
I unpack the way I always unpack, which is from the most necessary items to the least. The notebook goes on the desk first. Laptop next to it, charger beneath the desk. The books I carry travel with me not because I will necessarily read them here, but because their specific combination of weight and title provides a particular kind of portable context for who I am, and I am not ready to be entirely contextless. They go in the wardrobe, spine out, the way books should sit on a shelf: legible.
I make the bed. There is something about making the bed on the first day in a new room that I have always treated as a commitment: the unmade bed is the state of not yet having decided whether to stay, and the made bed is the state of saying, however provisionally, I am here, and I am staying for the duration. I make it with the same care I make every bed in every new room, and when it is done, the room looks less provisional.
I message my mother. She replies in under four minutes, which means she has been holding her phone. We are both people who hold our phones when someone we love is doing something new somewhere far away. I have inherited this from her. We talk briefly about the room and the campus and the October light, and she asks if I have eaten something, and I tell her about the hotel breakfast and she accepts this and says good, and we say goodbye, and I feel the particular warmth of a connection that does not require proximity to be real.
Then I open TikTok.
Forty-eight thousand views.
I look at this number for a long moment. Forty-eight thousand in less than twelve hours, which is considerably faster than anything I have posted from Ankara has moved. I open the comment section.
The top comment is about the chemistry. Twelve thousand likes. Underneath it, the reply thread has reached three hundred and seven entries, most of which are variations on agreement with variations of the original observation, as comment sections tend to go. The second major thread is about the guitar case, specifically the stickers, specifically whether anyone can identify the venues. Several people have, correctly, identified the Kızılay venue sticker and are now discussing what this means about where I have been, which is mildly surreal: strangers reading my luggage like a text. The third thread is about my voice. A subset of my existing follower base has found the video via the algorithm and is now explaining, with the proprietary enthusiasm of a fanbase who feels contextually relevant, that this is what I always sound like, which is a sentence I am going to need to think about.
The fourth thread is arguing, with remarkable conviction, about whether my expression when I said I am standing in a queue was a smirk or something more existential. Both sides have made compelling points. I screenshot this and send it to Pond.
He replies immediately: the smirk thread is my finest achievement.
It is not a smirk, I reply.
It absolutely is and you know it is, he says. Come to the car park. Tonight. Ring light.
I put the phone down. I pick up the notebook.
There are eight unfinished first lines in the current notebook. Seven of them came from Ankara, spread across the last year: the specific kind of writing that happens at the end of days when something has been present in the room that was not named, when the song tries to begin but does not yet know where it is going. The eighth came on the flight here, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, and I wrote it in the margin of an in-flight magazine because my notebook was in the overhead locker and the line was not willing to wait.
The sky is the same at thirty thousand feet regardless of which direction you're going.
I transcribe it to the notebook now, on a fresh page, and sit with it for a while. It is not quite the beginning of anything yet. It has the quality of an observation that is reaching towards something it cannot yet see the shape of, which is the state in which most songs live before they know what they are.
I write underneath it:
but what's below keeps changing
and you have to keep learning the landmarks
and at some point you stop calling it strange
and start calling it life
I look at this. I cross out the last line and write:
until the day you recognise something
I close the notebook. Some things want to be left alone for a while. The forcing of a song that is not ready is the surest way to produce something that sounds forced, and I have done this enough times to know the difference between the productive sit-with-it and the unproductive one.
I check TikTok again. Fifty-three thousand.
The view count has the quality of information I do not know what to do with yet. In Ankara, my highest-performing post reached forty-two thousand and I spent three days in a state of low-level disorientation, not from the number itself but from the feeling that the number was evidence of something real and also that I could not entirely locate what the real thing was. Fifty-three thousand in less than a day is a different kind of disorientation.
I put the phone in my bag.
I look around the room. The guitar case in the corner with its stickers. The notebook on the desk. The books in the wardrobe, spines out. The window with its view of the courtyard, where two students are sitting on a bench with the end-of-day ease of people who have finished what they were doing and have not yet decided what comes next.
I have a temporary student card. I have Pond's number. I have a piano to think with, across campus in a café I have visited for fourteen minutes, with a bench that someone keeps at an angle as though they keep returning to it.
I have Thursday.
✦
The car park behind the dormitory block is, at eleven thirty-eight in the night, lit by two functioning lights and one that is having an argument with itself about whether to stay on. The tarmac is cracked in a long diagonal from the wall to the second drain. The wall behind us is the particular grey of something that has been many colours and has forgotten all of them.
Pond has set up a ring light, a tripod, and his phone. He is adjusting the angle of the tripod with the focused attention of someone for whom this matters, which means it is correct that it matters, because Pond's instincts about this are reliable in a way I have been able to confirm this afternoon via several hundred comment section observations. I stand to one side holding the bass guitar he has produced, which is a Squier Precision, slightly battered, with a strap repaired at two points with electrical tape. I adjust the strap so it sits at the right height. I run my thumb across the strings to check the tuning, because checking the tuning of an unfamiliar instrument is the first thing you do, always, before anything else.
'You don't have to tune it,' Pond says. 'We're going for something raw.'
'I'm going to tune it anyway.'
He watches me do it without comment. I tune it by ear, quickly, the way you tune when the instrument is close to right and only needs small adjustments. It takes fifty seconds.
'What key?' I say.
'F sharp minor. Do you know the song?'
'I know of the song. I know the structure from the original. Show me the tempo.'
He shows me. I play the root note, then a simple walking line, then the walking line with a small variation that fits better under his vocal range. He watches this without saying anything. Then he says: 'Ready?'
'I am categorically not ready,' I say. 'Shall we go?'
What happens next is, by any measurable technical standard, a disaster, and it is one of the most enjoyable things I have done in six months.
I lose the chord pattern twice in the first verse. The first time is a clean error: wrong finger position, half a bar of something approximate, recovery on the next phrase. The second time is the one that matters. I look up to check the camera because I am still getting my bearings relative to the lens, and the eye contact is direct and unplanned, and in the moment of registering this, I laugh, the full-face laugh, the involuntary one that happens when something is absurd enough and close enough to real to be genuinely funny. I do not recover in the usual way: I lean into the bar, finish it badly, and move forward.
Pond's rap in the bridge is something apart from everything else that happens in the two minutes and seventeen seconds of the video. I have been making content for three years, and I know what it sounds like when someone is doing something that belongs to them, and what Pond does with that bridge is his in the way that very few things in the world get to be genuinely someone's. The rhythm is clean, and the cadence has the particular ease of someone for whom the structure of language is an instrument. He moves through it with the settled comfort of someone doing the thing they are best at in the place where they are most themselves.
Underneath it, my bass line is erratic and approximate and sounds, against all reasonable odds, like it might be intentional. This is the mystery of chemistry in music, which resists explanation and delivers its verdict without asking. We post it at eleven forty-seven.
I go back inside. I eat the remaining instant noodles from this morning's hotel breakfast and lie on my back on the dormitory floor, which is a different ceiling-looking experience from the bed, because the angle is different and the distance is greater, and I have always found the floor a better place to look at a ceiling than the bed when I am trying to think clearly.
My phone is in my hand. I am not looking at it. I am looking at the ceiling of my new room, which has its own unremarkable qualities: a light fitting of no particular interest, a small shadow in the far corner where the plaster does not quite meet, the specific white of a room that has been repainted in recent memory. It will be my ceiling, I suppose, for the next year and a half. I am beginning the process of learning it.
My phone buzzes. Pond: fourteen thousand views. go to sleep.
I do not go to sleep immediately. I lie there for a while longer, turning things over.
I think about the piano in the back corner of The Metronome. The fallboard down. The bench at its angle. The scuff marks from years of other people's instruments, other people's arrivals and departures. There is something about a piano in a room that is used by musicians: it accrues a kind of presence from being near music even when no one is playing it, the way places accrue the qualities of what happens in them over time.
I think about Pond laughing in the lobby this morning, the way it was the same laugh, the twelve-year-old laugh, the laugh that meant yes, this is the good kind of stupid plan. I think about what it is to have someone know who you were before you started performing yourself. Before six years of becoming fluent in adaptation, of learning to arrive gracefully in new places and leave them without making it too much of a thing. The people who knew you before all of that are, in some sense, in possession of a version of you that you cannot fully access yourself, because you were in the process of becoming it at the time and did not observe it clearly. Pond has that version of me. I have his.
I think about Phuwin Tangsakyuen saying welcome back with the warmth of someone who meant it even on a first meeting, and the way Pond's whole frequency shifted on the path, and the dinner at the usual time.
I think about Thursday.
I sit up. I reach for the notebook and open it to the unfinished song. I look at the lines I wrote this afternoon.
The sky is the same at thirty thousand feet regardless of which direction you're going.
but what's below keeps changing
and you have to keep learning the landmarks
until the day you recognise something
I write underneath this, quickly, before I can think about it too much:
and the landmark says: here.
you were always going here.
I look at it. It is not finished. It will not be finished tonight. But it is more than it was this morning, which is the only progress available to unfinished things, and I will take it.
I close the notebook. I put it on the desk next to the laptop.
I lie back down. The guitar case is in the corner, stickers catching the faint light from the window. The curtains are open because I always leave them open on the first night in a new place: I want to know what the night looks like from here, what colour the sky is, what kind of light the campus generates at two in the morning.
The campus at two in the morning generates a specific kind of low amber light, the kind that means people are still inside doing things that matter to them. It comes through the window at an angle and makes a shape on the wall above the wardrobe that is not quite a rectangle, the particular imprecision of a shape that comes from a window with a slight lean in the frame.
I check TikTok one more time. Not the number. The comment sections.
The smirk-or-something-more-existential thread has reached two hundred and fourteen replies and has not reached a conclusion, which suggests it is going to run for a while. Underneath it, someone new has replied: I have been following this person for two years and can confirm this is his default expression when he is choosing his words carefully and the words are funnier than expected. it's not a smirk. It's a decision. This has, in the seven minutes since it was posted, received four hundred and twelve likes.
I look at this for a moment. A decision. That is more accurate, actually, than either smirk or something-more-existential. The person who said it has watched enough of my content to see the seam between the face I perform and the face I make when I am not performing, and they have named it correctly. That is the strange intimacy of an audience that has been paying attention: they know things about you that you have not told them, because the camera shows you to yourself from outside, and you do not always see what it sees.
I put the phone down.
I look at the ceiling one more time. It is the same ceiling it was this morning. White, slightly off-white, the light fitting of no particular interest. In a year and a half it will be a ceiling I know: the specific way the morning light moves across it, the shadow from the window, the particular crack if one develops, the small imperfections that accumulate meaning through daily repetition.
I have not had a ceiling I know since Ankara.
Okay, I think. Let's see.
End of Chapter One.