The Rains of Castamere

Posted in Fragments, Game of Thrones by

If you’ve seen the ninth episode of the third season, weep with me.

“When you play the game of thrones you win, or you die. There is no middle ground.”

~ Cersei Lannister

Well, they made more heroes than they killed off. 

~ My friend on the Starks

The Rains of Castamere
The National

And who are you, the proud lord said,
That I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a different coat,
That’s all the truth I know.
In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
A lion still has claws,
And mine are long and sharp, my lord,
As long and sharp as yours.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
And not a soul to hear.
And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
That lord of Castamere,
But now the rains weep o’er his hall,
With no one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,
And not a soul to hear.

Farewell, Robb Stark. :’(

I bought myself a cupcake.

Posted in A Lot on My Plate, Fragments by

Not a mochi or a cupcake fan, but I happen to be neighbors with Sophie’s Mom. It’s a good excuse for not bleeding my wallet dry elsewhere that is posh like Sonja’s, although it’s just a little less pricey to go local. But it’s just a stroll away from my rented place, and I was with friends who came over to sightsee what my little cul-de-sac has in store for twentysomethings who, at this point, haven’t gotten used to the grownup things– making a living, keeping their jobs, switching them, settling for rented places, suspending their beliefs that there is more to their lives than the sum of these.

We were infatuated with a studio unit with a picture-window view of Osmeña Highway and a nightly audio perk coming from PNR’s trains. We planned a trip to Cartimar to have our 500 days of summer bikes assembled. I’d thought you only buy pets there. We negotiated the budget in our heads and with each other. We looked forward to this interdependence that is almost always tossed in a package deal with independence. And because that’s just about the pretending, or dip, we can do into this grownup thing, we had to end up at Sophie’s Mom.

Because pink, paisley, saccharine moments with friends, and free WiFi. Younger, we had afforded to dream for ourselves and the world (I want to be a doctor / lawyer / the President to help the poor). Now who are the millennials kidding? We can only afford to be distracted.

Tomorrow I’ll have the unit reserved. I bought myself caramel coffee and a cupcake.

At 25 I took the roundabout and never wrote about it

Posted in Fragments by

Psychobabble #2*

My 23yearold self. WeHeartIt

My 23yearold self. WeHeartIt

Finally digressed into that phase of which my 23-year-old self would be proud: the uninhibited sloughing-off, the undoing of my quarterlife, starting with the mundane, my multipurpose bag for example. Bought a satchel for replacement today, a good bargain. Detailing out its size, color, look is tedious at 11PM, at work no less. So let’s see where else I’m sloughing through:

* WordPress blogs I follow * prolly my Facebook friends (which is currently at 300+; let’s get real, I only have prolly less than 50 friends in real life, a generous [to me] estimate) * the books I hoard * the lies my current purchasing power allows me to stomach (gagbarflaugh Php___ worth of garbage purchase after) * handouts on hatred, war, cynicism, and defeat (yeah, that came straight from a Sarah Kay poem) * real-life friends * job * the clutter on my work desk * zombie dreams * mediocre plans * naïvete

Those slides on my life’s Keynote that nobody really bothers to stare at, let alone speedread, let alone blink awestricken at meriting a second look. So, yeah, am sloughing off the mundane and hopefully the ones that matter more in the history of sloughing off things because I’m turning 26 soon. 25 is lounging on the cusp and in the chasm. I never liked it here, let me go.

* Psychobabble #1

{What had sounded better in my head}

Posted in Fragments by

Everything was necessary.

The absoluteness of your everything distills necessary from … everything.

Everything as necessary is music to my ears, as if notes dancing in and out of their measure, fluid, alighting with grace on the train platform, guiding the curious incongruence between my point A and point B, not bothered by the mess that by now has been wrought by my mixed metaphors.

*****

My heart was first officially broken at nine years old. I had no witness, but God knows how hard I cried over a boy, and the only reason I mention this is not so I could legitimize the pain I felt at nine, which now would seem so juvenile, but so I could ask, then, if time heals anything how come pain feels the same all the time? 

Because that’s my heart right there, on the train platform now, beating for twenty-five years, and I have all the right to protect it, don’t I? No, not from the train commuters shoving up their asses to this modern carriage, because I don’t know any of them from Adam. Neither from the others down there whose commute just parallels mine; lives I’ll never meet. But yes– yes from those I plotted my point-A-to-point-B coordinates with, those I planned to bring with me from here to there, North to South stations and back, those I shoved up my ass to a spot on a crowded train for, and this the source of my collapse, those who would have done these same things for me. And the pain at twenty-five is reminiscent of the pain when I was nine. If time heals all pain how come it hasn’t cured mine?

Silence. Metaphors still mixing. I wouldn’t ride into the commotion if I could help myself, but there are days I take the train so I can help myself. To conjure answers when life has thrown my way nothing, as when I write, patching old wounds with the gauze of my words. Old wounds should have turned into scars by now but I keep picking off the scab. But, hear me, I keep blaming time. I keep feeling the pain so I keep blaming it on time. Sometimes I blame it on my amygdala, too. But there is always an external entity, or an intangible to blame, because it’s easier to deal with pain if you divide the blame by two. And if you write in past tense about those you know and in present tense the strangers. If you keep asking the question for which you can conjure an answer, answers even, for even the clichés could work wonders sometimes. And if you keep hurting for the younger versions of yourself when all you have is one, the now, the one that is all confused in the wtf-ness of the now. But perhaps even your predisposition is necessary. And your too-often broken heart.

*****

And he says everything was necessary.

Daenerys Stormborn and damning the odds

Posted in Eureka Moments, Game of Thrones by

First season, tenth episode. The reel is my memory. I remember flaming torches that could rival the number of those lit in all Survivor versions, forming a ring in the middle of the desert as in a sacrificial rite. The Dothraki and Ser Jorah Mormont behind. Daenerys– widowed, lost a child, lost a brother, having a handful of Dothraki slaves for warriors, barely eighteen but burdened by longing for home, no family, no iron throne, no kingdom to return to to begin with– stood in between facing the fire, ready to be consumed by it.

We first saw Daenerys in Magister Illyrio’s grand mansion in the Free City of Pentos. That’s as far as we can get from King’s Landing, the capital of Westeros. She and her big brother Viserys, the self-proclaimed last dragon and true heir of the iron throne, were living off the magister’s kindness and hospitality, which were actual investments into favors that can be claimed when ripe from the ‘future and one true king’. Now Viserys needed an army to reclaim King’s Landing from Robert Baratheon, so he was marrying his sister off to Khal Drogo, a Dothraki lord who was known for being undefeated in battles and who would be his provider of a strong khalasar (army): I’d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand men, and their horses too if that’s what it took to get my army.

800px-Viserys_Daenerys_Targaryen_hbo

Dany, as she was also called, followed suit because she did not want to awaken the dragon in her brother. She bedded with Drogo, spoke with her handmaidens to master the Dothraki tongue, learned ways to pleasure her husband with lessons from them, learned to love him, too, sure enough to carry his son in her womb. Tall orders for a little princess. Or not. Because a little princess she never was, or felt she was– her mother died giving birth to her on Dragonstone, leaving two orphans to the care of a few loyal servants and to one day desiring in very different manners to avenge the death of the Father she never knew, the Mad King Aerys Targaryen. Now she was a khaleesi, the ascent coming in with three dragon’s eggs as a gift from the magister, the allegiance of the exiled Ser Jorah Mormont, the khal’s growing gentle love, a horse to mount at the head of the movable tribe whereas Viserys rode in the neck or midsection that it didn’t matter anymore, and the pulsating realization that she was Daenerys Stormborm, Princess of Dragonstone, of the blood and seed of Aegan the Conqueror, of the blood of the dragon.

Soon she was bearing within her Drogo’s heir, on which Viserys grew impatient as he had shown no regard for Dothraki customs and pace with things, and ventured upon insulting the khal for keeping his end of the bargain unfulfilled. In a feast to celebrate the khaleesi with child, the last dragon dared his sister’s husband before other khals to give him the crown he’d been promised. Bloodriders thereby brought their leader molten gold to pour onto half the head of the impertinent future king of Westeros. When the gold was half-melted and running, Drogo snagged a stew pot from the fire pit and crowned the upended thing on Viserys, who died painfully quick and proving something to his little sister once and all. He was no dragon. With a curious calm she pondered. Fire cannot kill a dragon.

Until his last breath, which was without a curl of smoke, she loved his brother. But his death made the fire raze all the quicker from her veins to her heart, and she found it in her to truly love her husband, to dream a future with him and their son, to raise her voice at the abuse of women and children in their tribe’s raids, to spite some of his bloodriders for their bias and injustice, which cost her husband his life, and to make hard decisions regarding supernatural solutions to save him, which then cost her the child. Just what the maesters (men who acted like medical practitioners in Westeros) ordered for a khaleesi– but she had become more than that.

First season, tenth episode. I remember the fire dying, wisps of smoke filling the desert air, and Daenerys Targaryen rising to her feet. Fire did not consume the last Targaryen. She consumed the fire. Naked and covered with soot, she seemed unhurt. Two dragons suckled at her breasts, while the third was draped across her shoulders. They were making music that had been unheard of in a hundred years. The music of dragons.