Waffles and guns

We’re in the rooms where women come and go and the radio announces, crackled voice of authority, that we’re in a montage scene, a fade-out, a blur. I had forgotten how, many years ago, I sang this song to someone, in a dark room, in a telephone that wasn’t mine. How this song, and that gesture, was one step on the way to finding another: and we were young, and we believed in forevers, and we believed that we would go against the world, together. We did. So many years of talking shit about one another’s love lifes and finding union in anger and misery. Fade-out. Cut.

In the rooms where people wait and wait. Music, music is never the plot, we know this. But it sneaks up on you from previous paragraphs; a cheap storytelling technique, nearly a plot device. Sneaks up on you:

In the rooms where people avoid one another’s glances, the music which tells a story of your past unfolds itself, and you don’t get a warning, and you think if this was visual media you would be unaffected and the effects would merely be there for your audience’s sake, but you are your audience, and you are watching yourself, in the light of the songs that were with you when you learned how to dream.

You wish, even if briefly, that you were less familiar with the storyteller’s tricks and intentions.