Title taken from Bob Dylan's "Percy's Song." He owns those words; the ones written below are my own.
She sits there
on the edge of the hotel's worn chair
and I wonder when he last held her.
She's trying so desperately,
so sweetly,
to please him.
Her guitar is perched in her young, bony lap.
Those delicate doe-eyes are wider than ever
beneath a brow furrowed in
concentration deeper than I have ever known.
She plucks strings in gentle rhythms
and she sings with another's wisdom
sending gold into the atmosphere
of the smoky hotel room.
And as the song goes on and on,
she sings louder, stronger, sweeter.
The walls shake with her crooning,
with her molasses tongue and smile.
And still, he sits there, giving
nothing.
Typing relentlessly.
For the longest time, it seems
that he's forgotten her entirely,
as he slips into dimensions that he holds inside his mind,
holds aside for those occasions
when he needs somewhere to hide.
But then,
just for a minute,
he pauses,
hovers above the keys,
then draws his hands into his lap.
It is the only sign in all this time
that he knows that
she is there.
For as she sings,
he dances,
shifting to and fro in his chair,
ever-odd and so ungraceful.
He mumbles, too, the song with her.
His song.
He relaxes as she sings to him,
breathes slow as she sings to him,
though the moment is not
long.
Even when the song is done,
she sits and waits for him
in childish innocence.
She longs so obviously
for him to
turn around from where he sits
from where he clicks at
typewriter keys,
to take her face in his artist's hands,
to kiss along her nose and brow,
to say,
"My good girl, how well you've done."
"My love, my love, my only one."
"Come here to me, baby."
She wants more than anything for him
to set, gently, her guitar aside,
to pull her onto his lap,
to praise her even more between
kisses to her lips.
To pick her up,
as small as he is,
and bring her to bed.
To kiss her neck as he
snuggles her up from behind.
To love her.
He doesn't.
He sits there, in a trance,
unaware of her shaky longing.
Unaware that his snark, his teasing
makes her want to
break, to
cry.
Unaware that his ignorance is what will
crack her in the end, is what will make her
get on that plane
a few days from now,
away from London City,
never quite the same.
She's the target of his friends'
rough, drunken
advances.
She's the vibrant mascot of
their era;
she's his cheerleader, she's his billboard;
she longs to be his muse.
She loves him more than anything.
And this is why,
at the end of the night
as he continues to type,
she goes to him,
and engraves her love on the top of his head
with a kiss to his untamable curls.
She leaves there,
and he stays and he writes in his chair,
and my heart shatters for her all over.
