SITTING, WAITING, WISHING

B. McGILLICUDDY

Just one song...or two, she said, moving from the bed to the iHome on her shelf, wearing nothing but my favorite shirt, the one with the Shakespearean skull, snake, broken crown and broken chain of pearls etched, like a woodblock print on it. She started singing with the song: lies, they’re lies, they’re lies, your plans are never finalized...you said our love would never die...nothing is clear. She sang the song all the way through, a cappella after a while--the file on her iPod came from a scratched CD.

She likes the sound of men singers. I like the sound of women singers, because they remind me that there are some drugs that you don’t have to take, but that can take you, that can invade your ears and break your heart, like the voice of a woman scorned.

She lifted my t-shirt up and over her breasts, the stud in her right nipple glimmered, and the reflection of the cool morning swimming through the window caught my eye in it. It was simple in the moonlight now it’s so complicated, she sang with the second song, now dolled up in a crimson shirt that made her lips look even rosier than I remember them, and that brought out the luster of her dream-spattered eyes.

I saw a long, dusty road stretching over sandy plains in my mind just then, for some reason--some disjointed, disgruntled reason. It must matter, because I’ll déjà vu it eventually.

Then she put on Incubus. I hate Incubus. But I’d never tell her that, she loves them. She knows all the words to all the songs on her iPod, but she sings to Incubus with a look in her eyes she only has when she’s forgotten I’m there, staring at her forgetting about me, and some intoxicating moment of her life flashes in her mind’s eye.

She came back to me about mid-song and blew me a kiss. I kissed back as an electric feel crawled up my spine and into my head, but a quick smile of content was all I allowed my mouth to show. Because that volleyed kiss meant something like “love”, and I love her like they say it in dictionaries and romance novels, but I can’t say it when I feel it because the words water down the oily, mortifying, kinetic, distant and ever-present fact of it.

The song ended and she whispered, that’s the song that I was looking for. The playlist rolled on and Jack Johnson came next, my favorite of his songs, and I slung my head back and listened to her sing every word to me in a voice she says makes her seem more boyish than her girly heart feels. But it’s like acid to my ears--tonal LSD.

B. McGILLICUDDY