I like sitting in a dark room, lights low, listening to your music. As I lay sprawling like an old friend on your bed, without asking your permission, there is only a strange calm that demands nothing of me.
The room is all dark now, except for the blue twilight peeking through your shutters and a table light, florescent, which you keep on, perhaps for sanity; or for fear that in darkness, your hands have a life of their own.
It is this that I love about you, my personal DJ who senses I want something darker on the stereo.You started out with your happy songs and I made jokes about them: saying if I were a company’s CEO, I would develop an exercise routine to fit your sunny songs, then make my workers do it everyday before they jump into the grind. And so you sense my hint to turn off the florescent tunes.
Instead you play me a darker wave: the sounds of alley gazes and hair, manically kissed and loved; bodies pinned flat against a brick wall, in ecstasy.
Such is you and your collection of music for every mood.
By the corner of my eye, I see you leaning back on your rolling chair, dangerous and inches away from doing a backflip. Ever since I’ve known you, it’s been in your nature to live on the edge, to learn from losing tickets and keys,and breaking your back in bumpy falls.Even your closet is a haphazard of clothes thrown around, crumpled and sitting, because disorder is the only natural order to us.
The shelves, though, are a little more promising. Terry Pratchett discworld( because we’re all still little boys), Bertrand Russell “The History of Philosophy” and Henry James classics: still sticking to the arts student’s diet all these years, still, appearing to be a voracious reader.
And then Tom Holt on your pillow, ” Dont lose the page!” you exclaim when I pick up the book, and ” Don’t put the book like that!” when I put it down.I could use a friend like that, who treats every single book as a Bible.
Of course, you’re not great and golden all the time. Sometimes the silence still pours between us, as a waterfall.But stranger, I choose to remember you in snapshots, in moments where I find a world– our world, which will soon fade, and only be starkest,as words on a journal.
