Can I help that you find my gravity irresistible?

We sat feet tucked under, beneath a dusty starless sky. I braided your fingers and you played your beat on my ribs – or was it my knees? 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 6. To the beat of six you said, and I couldn’t quite hold it. Rhythms are hard, I said. But you were just swaying to it, you said, feeling the wiggle of my toes in your belly through layers of jacket and inners.

Why were you leaning in on me like that? It’s not very platonic, I said later, feeling slightly displaced and awkward, shifting on my axis ever so slightly. Away not closer. Gravity is a hard fact of life and defying it takes volumes of reserve and experience.

Not at all, you uttered, genuinely shocked because your youth allows you to be confused about such things. We’re just chilling. I have a girlfriend. She’s a dentist, you know.

I know. I said. And I’m a writer. An underconfident plumber of words. And once you are done chilling platonically, drumming on my knees, your warm hand leading my cold fingers in the dark, and my innards have been patted and thrummed into a ripened persimmon, you may take your leave to get your fucking teeth probed.

***

I’m so angry with you, duck. None of this would happen if you’d just play along with physics. 

On music

Don’t you wish to just consume some pieces of music – fuse them with your atoms and motives, so their intricate compositions infect your being thoroughly?

No?

Ok.

***

I’m unable to tether sound to memory. So that pretty sound you created yesterday? It unravelled itself from your elaborate arrangement and drifted away the moment you released it. All I was left with was a sense of you playing, the tenderness you put into it and of course, the memory of finding it enchanting – this intimate drama of you, your softly flitting fingers and the prettiness of the sound – you created such a moment of magic. This will stay with me. Not the music.

***

To emerge from the safe shallow silence of ignorance into a world of music is bewildering. It is alarming. It is frightening. It is, possibly, also liberating.

***

You have no idea how defenceless I am, do you?

With your fucking crotchets and quavers and your sixteenth fucking notes, you wield your melodies and rhythms with impunity while I cower in cold spots, my skin hanging off me in bags, collecting sweaty pools of incompetence.

***

I would relinquish a few words, about 250 grams of precious punctuation plus an inch of grammar to be able to sing mellifluously to the beat of your flawless rhythm, sweet merry music maker.

***

Music can make you write pretentious things without shame. It is that classy and irreverent.