This dirty little town. I’m here but I’m thinking of someplace else.
You laughed when you heard my hoarded tunes, at Mayhem and T-Swift, Morricone and Fairport and Eric B. and Rakim. I never got the joke, though now I have an inkling: you thought I was being showily eclectic and I just thought I was loving music. How right you were when you called me naïve.
I saw the last shadow of you disappear on the blasted concrete of the Bellwether, by the fractal Pleiades diamonds of the glittering bay, a pitiless sun lasering all and everything. You were humming a Kate Bush song, which trailed in your wake like a muted rainbow, and I remembered at that moment how your fingers often fought each other and your voice was always raw until you gargled lukewarm genmaicha and lemon, which first you bought and later you looted from Trader Joe’s. You were gloriously high maintenance before the illusion subsided—a wild, wild rose—and I loved you as much after that.
Then you were gone, in the wake of some awful reckoning, that joyless penumbra blanketing all of what was and most of what now is. A dimension dissolved, a trance undreamed.
Walmart and Costco are convulsed nuclei clustered within the membranes of their vast deserted lots, cars no longer parked in their hardscrabble orbits, other than the burned-out kind like dead neutrinos.
The last time we saw a train pass through, Galbraith was still young. Galbraith, who tattooed Let It Bleed on the inside of her upper arm like Courtney. Hard to reconcile the chromium crone we see now with the aching maiden so many knew back then.
We all have our talents. Mine is debatable. Scavenging cells to make this ancient iPod work. For some, it seems to count, but whatever... I get that it’s hardly wringing nutrients from topsoil, but you’d think music would matter all the same.
You said, “Don’t tell me the story of your dream. But tell me how it felt.”
“Um. It felt like walking into an aftermath, the battlefield still smoking and reeking of viscera, and finding a kitten, a very pissed off kitten, outraged at all these shenanigans, and also a train moaned far away.”
“Now that’s a dream I wish I had.”
“You could have it. I’ll write it down.”
“Nah, you’re hungry, and I need to find us some food. And you have chores of your own. We can’t take pauses like we once could. But tell me about a song when I come home, yes? Something new and full of things.”
Fuck, we could talk forever. True is true is true. Negotiation and the echoes of the world. Lord, I miss you, girl.