It’s really like a symphony, if you listen close enough. Deep enough. Drunk enough. The difference is, I liked classical music, until I met you. I never liked beer, until the taste was like your lips meeting mine, the first time when we were shy. It felt uncomfortable in an exhilarating way. The millions of miles of skin that were still unknown. The lives and the friends and the habits and the way you moved in bed, worried to wake me, unsure of my sleeping patterns or how I’d like to be held. And the feeling of your body, returning to the sheets still damp with soap and a shower taken before waking hours. I would have liked to love you then. Would have liked to picture us standing still, eyes awake and unchanging while the blurred lines of light and lives and memory rushed by us. I would have loved to watch our bodies tumble down the years, gracious and quiet. And on the first night, I dreamt you had changed your mind, and so I buried my head into your back and spent a minute just memorizing the moment. The feeling of your breath shaking your soft frame, and of the mingling of our skin, and the smell of you, and the delicate morning hesitating to push forward. But life moves heavy and quickly and the streets empty and fill like the sea and the waning moon, and small and large things grow steadily, and we are of no consequence. We do not listen to voices in sleep who whisper our mistakes. In another time perhaps, we would have mourned the past, and prayed and shaken the coating of winter from our shoulders, hushed and cold, and moved ahead to the sound of the ritual spring. But instead we gathered our clothes, arranged the morning and made remarks about the future, like it was a living thing that belonged to us. And from the kitchen I could hear the road soaking up the rain and see the mist soaring upwards each time a car or truck passed through. And soon all these things, and all the others would be fragments, nonsensical and vague. Part of a distant time. Mixed up with things that should not have been there. Cluttered halls, and strip malls and afterhours, and the moon, and bars, and cafes, and desperation, and routine, and strangers, and city lights, and admissions, and guilt, and the cold.
It’s really like a symphony, if you listen close enough.