Where were you calling me from? Your voice was like fireworks, misfiring and then hitting every wrong beat on their way down. I could hear something behind you—or was it to the left?—and it made your words distort queerly, like shadows coming through a glass of water and bending in shapes I didn’t recognize.
I thought it was a girl, another girl. For a minute. But then you sounded alone. Maybe I won’t ever know; maybe I will. But you’ll have to be the one to tell, won’t you? And there’s so much you don’t tell. All your words line up like pearls at the bottom of a sea, out of their oysters, but drowned, like they don’t want to be found.
I can’t find my keys, Britt, I think. But keys sounded like breeze. That didn’t make sense to me, but you sometimes don’t make any kind of sense when you’re drunk. I couldn’t make your words fit with my ears, but I could hear the tequila, and I thought for a minute I could smell it in the air in my room, too. But that wasn’t true—my room was empty, it was only me there, and all the space left behind that used to be filled up with your laugh and your words and your smell.
Sorry I called, you said at the end, and that was the only thing I was sure of. Your laugh was tinny and I thought again of the fireworks, set off at the wrong moment, broken, leaking the colors out in the wrong order, all wrong.
It’s ok, Santana. Where are you?
I think you laughed again, but the other girl-noise was back, and I don’t know. Maybe it was a sigh. The call cut out and I still thought maybe I could hear you in the silence left after.
The metaphors here are so beautiful!
