The first note echoes in my ear, piano keys dancing in my stomach, trumpets tingling my skin, and the guitar plucking my heartstrings, conducting an orchestra of my heart.
My feet are aching. And your back is pretty tired.
Its tune tunes out the talk in the record store. I thumb my way through each dust sleeve and think if you were with me, it’d be your fingertips rummaging through it. I pick up a record I know you’d love, anxious to learn and play it for you. Stepping out, the pre-chorus begins and I feel the overcast of the clouds bouncing off the moods of the passersby. They nod their heads and wave, holding eye contact a second too long.
Oh, girl, it’s you that I lie with.
I start the trek home with the song in my earphones, surrounding the backdrop of trees, thinking of the way you’d dance to the beautiful noise I’d play on the piano, swaying until your feet begin to ache and your back tires out. Our laughter drowned out the sound of the keys as you stumble your way to me, wrapping your arms around my neck. Tucking a fly away behind your ear, your eyes sparkled against the moonlight, our lips beaming with it.
And as the Earth burns to the ground.
Our track continues, but your words wear away the lyrics of the music. The piano strings stretch out, the pitch rising, and the glass sitting on its cover shakes. “I’m sorry,” your eyes reflect the wilted flowers; no feeling of warmth when it meets mine, “it’s better this way.” The ceiling cracks and so does my heart–attached to a memory.
I’m still turning the key’s lock when the door bursts open and your hands reach my body to tug me in to be together again. You drag me toward the couch in front of the television and we lie next to each other.
As the song melts away, so does the image I hope would have happened. But it hasn’t, because as the melody dies out, so does our love built from ashes of a church. And in the caving of our world, my ribcage hugs my heart into the pieces that formed our memory.
The atom bomb locks in.
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