A Conversation with Accompanying Mood Music

The knocks on my bedroom door were curiously out of time with the Beatles. They filled in the gaps between “love” and “ly,” and “me” and “ter.” I guess that’s not too surprising, though, because the Beatles broke up a long time ago, and old sound doesn’t travel quite as fast as new sound. So I cut Paul McCartney off at “maid” while brushing my hair with my fingers and standing up. I was refreshed from a shower and tired, so not exactly in the mood for cheap talk.

She seemed surprised to see me shirtless, shoeless, and in basketball shorts. “Come in,” I said.

When she had plopped onto my bed and adjusted my pillow behind her lazy back, and I had put a somewhat wrinkle-free shirt on, I asked, “How are you today?”

“Oh you know, pretty good,” she said. “You?”

“Pretty much the same.”

I think she could sense the sunrays bouncing around in the grass outside my open window, because she got that half-embarrassed, half-playful, half-cruel little smile on her lips and in her eyes. That made me think of how it was August and I love summer. She said, “I know what you were thinking last night when we were holding hands.”

I gave one of those contented, one syllable murmur-chuckles and asked, “Oh you do?” I also raised a mental eyebrow. That night we had gotten high on sparkling cider and wandered hand-in-hand for hours through downtown.

“You were thinking about stopping time again.”

“Aww, you know me too well.”

She sat up slowly. “What are we going to do in three weeks?”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about this yet.”

“I think it’s time.”

The Beatles started to play in my inner jukebox. One of my feet was the bass drum, and the other was the snare. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about December, when I would come back to her, and the season and weather would be all different.

I said, “Let’s just think about today. We could go run through sprinklers!”

She sank a little deeper into my bed. “I love your romanticism, but it’s just not practical right now.”

“But why end now?”

“Because it’s going to happen sooner than you think.”

“You don’t make sense.” The only thing left playing in my head was a thin strain of melody. I couldn’t remember how the words of the last verse ended. And she still looked so pretty to me.

She got that serious look that girls get when they weigh their female sense on relationships versus the rest of the world. “We just need to start talking about it now, or it will catch us by surprise, okay? No more fake innocence.”

“But we can still have fun?”

“Oh, I guess,” she laughed.

I got up to put a new CD in and tried to imagine the world without music. It would be a pretty terrible place.