Friday, January 6, 2012

you're all the pretty music that i need.

We were driving home from a wedding and it was December, but unseasonably warm. I was hungover, with that shaky, tired, blah feeling. It has started to sink into the entire day following a night punctuated with any amount of drinking. Old at 25.

He sat behind the wheel of my Jeep and maneuvered us through the cities' grid and leisurely steered our way toward the highway. Toward home. Two hundred miles to go.

We'd had an explosive fight the evening before, midway through the reception.  The drinking had been fuel for the fire. Threats had been made, but without the umph behind them that carry enough weight to bring out tears and desperation. Still, it was ugly. And then, just like that, minutes or maybe a half an hour later the storm passed. We were drinking beers again, rolling our eyes to each other in secret alliance. He bought me a hot dog from a vendor on the way back to the hotel. We curled up and tucked in and slept in a cloud of fluffy white, then cuddled as sun steeped in through the floor to ceiling window overlooking an Orthodox synagogue below.

I was feeling a bit silly, as I often do when cooped in a car for long, or let's be honest, short periods of time.  I slouched down in my seat and banged my feet against the dash to the rhythm of the music. I threw my voice all over the range it would stretch to, and boogied in my seat.

Suddenly he grabbed one of my feet. The left one, closer to his place in the drivers' seat. He started singing into it for a couple of lines, until he flung it back to the dash and took both hands to the wheel, smiling, but otherwise acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred. 

No one has ever made my foot into a microphone before.

I wondered, in that instant, and still: Is this what love is? Those fleeting moments that you remember when you're screaming at each other across the room, that keep you from hurling those certain words and phrases that would surely tear the whole thing down?

A microphone foot. Love. It must look different for everyone.

No comments:

Post a Comment