To a misguided ghost who once guided me,

!!! WARNING: SENTI POSTING/RANT AHEAD. DO NOT READ IF MOMMY ISSUES PYO OFF !!!

Listening to Brand New Eyes hits different when your first exposure to Paramore was your mom driving you to preschool with that's what you get (which is from riot but hey it's the scene I'm trying to paint that counts) playing from the car radio. Songs of that era feel like warm hugs, finger paint stuck in the crevices of nails, and the blanket my mom kept for you me the back of her car.

I will never feel as loved as someone's child as I did hearing only exception from an old speaker while helping her organize my fancy Nancy collection or from when she first taught me the concept of spring cleaning. Every perfunctory hug and beso-beso will never compare to being a five year-old learning the value of kisses to the forehead and bear hugs while rolling around a newly vacuumed Polly Pocket carpet.

I don't think that will never be my mom who'd introduced me to Avril Lavigne and Paramore nor the strong woman that took me to mommy daughter boxing lessons for the sake of teaching me how to be a self-sufficient young lady of the 21st century– but instead she'll just be the lady I have to blast turn it off max volume on my airpods so I don't have to hear her conducting an affair through the bluetooth speakers of her too clean, achingly barren car.

Maybe I took the woman I'd watched movies with for granted as the person beside me at the cinema types away to her not-so-ilicit partner in the phone right as the climax of The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins. Then again, the woman who'd I'd watched Hamilton with cried during the second act and told me she loved me and being,y mother so much– my mom wouldn't reschedule for a hair appointment or a poorly veiled excuse in the form of a girls' trip.

I may never get her back, we'll both grow bitter but maybe in ten or so years when I'm as self-sufficient and accomplished as she once hoped me to be; a children's neurologist in a big, unpolluted city with a lively live music scene– I'll feel like the daughter, or rather the woman, we've bother wanted me to become. I know she doesn't approve of my brashness or my 'pagka-kanal' now, but there's a bittersweet comfort in knowing that I'd have had a dozen mom-daughter trips and heart-to-heart conversations with the woman I grew to admire and eventually forget in place for someone I struggle to find empathy for.