Singing Peter Gabriel songs to you out loud

& killing old versions of you

The sound of the clock ticking hurts my ears. The speakers in my headphones are cheap, dirty, always filled with some sort of dirt or random substance spilled into the bottom of my purse. It squeaks, trying to plunge out of the wires as if there was somewhere the sound can land. It sits in my hands and buzzes. I twitch in the same way it moves in my fingers, rubbing the plastic covered wire around my fingers like straw, or thick hair. When I closed my eyes I would see the way he would rub his pointer and his thumb together. 

Never out of nervousness. The movement felt timed or rhythmic, I watched the way clenched fists became softened fingers stuck to the same ugly body. The pointer, middle, and the thumb gliding, clammy and never making the same noises twice. I never minded looking at the way he held his hands, sat in the middle of his lap, clicking random metal on his jeans or touching the fabric of his shirt, how the sight of his hand moving would prove his mind was working to make him a better talker or a more positive flirt. Everything is in its right place. He was thinking about something. Nothing ever too larger than life, if anything it was probably not worth talking about out loud at all. I never got to find out. I always wondered what it was that kept his fingers dancing in that pattern, the same way that I wondered what it was that blew the leaves off the trees or stopped a heart from beating. 

I often got close to finding it out but never close enough. The same familiar snaps kept the pace of a conversation I was always so excited to finally have and he was always too scared to contribute. I give, he takes. 

I like sitting in large groups of people. To use my energy and having spent my time listening to the sounds of the voices of the people I love is a gift I treasure and a privilege I often find myself taking advantage of. I love sleeping with my friends in the room, to use them as cushions or blankets or placeholders in my dreams. I’m a very intimate girl, that’s the thing about me. I feel like used cheesecloth sometimes, I’ll fall apart right in your hands. Just a sad, soggy little thing. She’s a monster crafted from nothing but silence, like the sounds you hear in a seashell. I want to take up all your space and vice versa, if you allow it. It means the world to me to sit in your car, your bed, your dining room table, and listen. This is a very particular gift. I have always experienced very little. What do you go through everyday? How can I love you more than I already do? I have a hard time staying clean. I brought you a sticker, or a smile, or a hug. Don't mind if I do. Can I sit down on your chest? If I measured correctly then my whole body should fit in the dead space inside of your ribs. I place my feet firmly on the fabric and watch you lift up. 

It’s joyous. 

I used to love how silence would swallow you up, somewhere not too off-center to what I was used to, normalizing verbal abuses between a split cigarette or trying something new like healthy conversation and telling you I think I knew you in a past life. We would sit in the February sun, too cold to take our jackets off but faces burning from the warmth. What does it mean to be burdened by all that has happened to us up until that point forward? Would there have been any use in talking about it then? Did you care to see the shades of green fade? I have lost five pairs of headphones since I met you. Isn’t that crazy? 

I hold other people’s hands, cling to their imaginations and dreamscapes, I hold onto you much like a teenage girl moving houses clings onto a baby blanket. I’ll never keep that version of you. I like to think that I know better now. Clean-cut, with so much love to give. I swear to God it used to spill out of you. All that adrenaline drills neons, unique colors I’d never even seen before, into the most average of walls, you could tear down entire skyscrapers with the amount of energy it took to make you tired throughout the day. Always bathing in it, the attention and admiration of others, a dreamer for nothing but the best. I held onto the way you would rub my head against yours if I sighed in the wrong tone. The sun came out for you, the seasons changed to try and make you happy, and sometimes they would succeed. Imagine that we live in a world where I didn’t try everything once. Imagine that we live in a world where you tried to take it all and I let you have it. This is the same world where the knife goes through you and I apologize and you say “It’s okay,” and nothing terrible falls on our house and I go to CVS to get you that gauze you asked for five hours ago.

I once asked you why your heart was beating so fast and you began to cry, or at least that's how I remember it. The light used to pour into your windows like a prayer and I would watch how the leaves would move, how blue the sky was. Sometimes in your sleep you’d twitch, say names or words, you were always so scared. A fragile thing: running, falling. Ugly and desperate. It’s 7:28 in the morning and your hand is in my hair. You are not supposed to know me, obviously. That’s the worst part.

There’s no expectation in anything he does anymore because of a cut powerline, something like I watched him saw off the end of our tin-can cellphone situation and then walk down stairs, never closing that window. It stung like a bitch. I mean, hell, even my mother was confused. I sat there for 5 months and never saw the front door open, or the gate swinging like I remember watching it in the summertime. Instead, the seasons passed in agonizing waves of emotion and that window stayed open. That doesn't mean I didn't move. I tried, really tried. Sticking out sore thumbs, planting pots in your driveway because I missed how blooming flowers made you point out the colors. It was a ploy to hear the sound of your voice. Vibrancy in the way your cheeks matched my cheeks in the wintertime and how I always think if I love someone enough then our blood runs the same. 

Recently God has been proving that I’m not always the sick one, I’m not always holding the gun, I’m on the other side. I made it finally to a place of solace, an alleyway you can't get to in which I sink my teeth into softer objects and forget to call him back when I told him that I would. Oh God, it used to eat me alive. Evil girls make their mothers cry. I used to think one day I could get you to do that. A checkpoint of my undoubtedly clear talents, proof that I could do something real. I needed to see you break like lightning, always wanting to see you at the foot of it. Role reversal was a pill I forced down because it made me feel good, it was a crucial part in the understanding of what it meant to be bigger because I had just never experienced it. I wanted to take it from you, the same way you took it from me. I never get the chance to react the way I always thought I would. I would dream of making you cry, not bleed. I’m not as big as the monster I paint myself to be, just freakish and disgusting enough to make you too scared to want to grab it with both hands. It just made me feel bad. I always wanted to be a martyr for a cause. There was something glowing in you that I thought I could die for. It was like swapping teeth. There’s parts of you I try to take with me now, just because I can. I tried for that gold medal, I came this far, I won that. Fair and square.

I have a hunkering sweet tooth for situations I know I couldn’t fix even if God graced me with a Midas touch. There are no more bones left to break for you to have a good day. Someone will try really hard and succeed. It’s going to be cloudy that day, but no chance of rain or ambulance sirens or the sounds of pleading. 

I can never be replenished because I never run out. I’m only as useful as other people make me, and the stories and conflicting viewpoints and blistering tears that always made your face burn were all parts of the same cycle, ready to start anew. Today I woke up and laid it to rest. 

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be overcast. Don’t ask me for anything. Okay?