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 ^{(it's beta!)}

I miss being told to change; I miss every moment where I wasn’t myself and she was happy because of it. Atmospheric music plays, almost baroque, verging on chamber pop, except there’s an MC and he’s too intense to let it play out like that. I’m sitting at the dining room table in boxers and an A shirt smoking a cigarette and the ashes fall into the clouded milk left over from a bowl of Special K. They float there and I wipe my eyes with my left hand.

In another time Marie laughs real quiet as I curse about pants not fitting; maybe another time she cries real alone because I’m not any help and it’s a bad time and all my little pleas for attention just add more and more unneeded tension. My coffee gets cold regardless of time and place and I sip it from a metal thermos with a jagged bottom that cuts the palm if held wrong. I tried to pull out the defect but it would not come. It won’t leave.

Lying alone produces an atonal noise; a grinding, piercing, grating sound, without the gentle peace of mutual warmth, affection, attention there is nothing but those quiet thoughts so suppressed by the outside noise; what was once an undercurrent of displeasure and dissatisfaction now becomes a riptide, a pull into the ocean, the departure from the comfortable noise of a world filled with people into the quiet undulating pulse of nature at it’s most terrible.

Waits used the ocean three times; once in a spoken word ballad to a suicide left undone by nature, again to describe a man finalizing his feelings concerning marriage, and finally in a traditional where a miller kills a girl by pushing her into the ocean for five gold rings. The ocean just lies there, waiting, uncontrollable yet maybe we can force ourselves in from time to time. Marie would go swimming while I lie on the beach one summer, waving calmly from the tide while I read a book and watch the girls walk by.

Your heart, how is it, does it beat with intensity or does it lull there, working beneath the surface to ensure your survival; do you feel it only when you let yourself lose the autonomy, those moments where the extra is all that gets through, or do you feel it in every breath? No one is that cold or that pure anyhow, I miss that smile and that laugh, realize all there is sometimes is the pulse, the gentle continuum only noted when it’s disturbed, accelerated or conversely, the comfortable pace losing out to bodily rigor.

I lay like a child against her chest, listening for that gentle drum, except her heart would not stop screaming, her skin grew too warm and burned me, and as I took my ear from her she reached for my hand caressing the still slightly open wound from the thermos, and I recoiled in pain. It wasn’t a good night, and I lay there, seeking some sort of forgiveness until the morning interrupted the night, and I lay there as she put on her clothes and kissed me goodbye.

Maybe I don’t know, and the milk is bitter now; my coffee is lukewarm and time will not stop. Outside the hotel the wind blows soft, breaking waves against the shoreline as no one notices how gentle this world is if you don’t take part.