7For the past week she'd been sitting at that same seat on the bus, reading the same book and never getting more than twenty pages into it before she'd start talking to me. I remember the first time she did it it took me a second or two before I realized that she was addressing me.
"What book are you reading?" I heard a voice say. I looked up and saw her across the aisle, looking at me.
"Uh. . ." I stumbled a moment. "Are you talking to me?"
"Yeah you. There isn't anyone else on the bus, is there?"
I raised my head and glanced around.
"I guess you're right." I mumbled.
"—so, what book are you reading?" I lifted the cover from against my knees to show her. She was smiling a knowing smile.
"Mmmhmmmm. . . . ." She nodded in a perfect imitation of Freud. "The Odyssey."
"What?" she gave me an obvious glance.
"Well, people usually only read the Odyssey for a few reasons. One, they like the way it makes them look intellectual while everyone around them kinda looks at them in admiration holding copies of their Danielle Steele paperbacks. Two—" she scooched closer to the aisle in her seat, as if stepping up to another level on her soapbox.
"—you have to read for college, which seems like a pretty doubtful reason to me in the age of sparknotes. Three, you could be genuinely interested in the story, which is also doubtful since most people who are in it for the plot will nowadays just wait until the movie comes out. They're turning every book into a movie these days. Nothing's left original in cinema.. . . ."
She paused a moment, glancing upward in thought, trying to find her way back to her original point.
"Or four, you could be thinking like you're on some kind of a personal Odyssey yourself, and you need the advice of old Homer." She leaned back against the window of the bus, facing me down from the gap in between her seat and mine. I just stared back in silence.
". . .So which is it?"
I coughed.
"Which is what?"
"The reason you're reading the book."
"I dunno."
"Sure you do."
"No, I don't."
"Yeah, you do."
"No. . . . I really don't."
I just wanted to get back to reading said book and out of this conversation. A moment went by before she spoke again, a little more timid than before.
"You sure you don't know?"
"Yes. Positive." I said, getting agitated.
"Fine." she said, and tilted her head down to her book once more.
"Coming up on seventh street!" the driver yelled from the front. The bus shook to a halt in the frontwards backwards way it always does. She stood up and dog-eared her book. She hadn't even gotten to turn her page before she had to stand for her stop.
"That's me." she said to no one in particular. I had a feeling she was talking to me again, but I refused to look up from the pages and acknowledge her.
The next day when I boarded the bus she was there again, in the same spot. She looked up from her book at me when I sat down. She hadn't gotten any further than she had yesterday.
"Hey Odysseus." she said.
"Hey."
"What's new?"
"Not much since yesterday." I said in monotone.
"Yesterday afternoon my friend broke her leg at the gym"
"That sucks." I said. I couldn't think of any other response.
"Yeah." she said softly, tucked a piece of her curly brown hair behind an ear. "The weird thing was, she wasn't even really doing anything. She just tripped while she was walking out, and she hit her leg against a treadmill while it was still moving."
"Ouch." I winced.
"Treadmills kinda freak me out."
I looked at her strangely a minute.
". . .Because you're afraid of breaking your leg on one?" I asked the obvious, taking shallowness to new heights.
"No." she made a face. "I dunno. . . I guess it just kinda freaks me out—the idea that you keep running and running without every actually getting anywhere. It's like you're perpetually being chased but you're never going to be able to escape. You're just in this constant state of pursuit, but it never goes anywhere."
She stared off into space a moment. Then she cocked her head to the side quizzically and looked at me again.
"That made no sense, did it?" she said, laughing, a little nervously, at herself.
"No, actually." I said, half laughing. "Strangely enough, it made a lot of sense."
She laughed at me, shaking her hand in front of her.
"It's alright, you don't have too—"
"No, I'm not kidding. I'll never look at exercise equipment the same way again."
She laughed again, a real one this time, fizzing out from deep in her chest.
"You're funny."
I nodded a moment, and just looked at her. That was weird. Interesting, but weird.
"What was your friend's name?" I asked.
"I don't know, actually."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"Well, she wasn't really my friend. I was just hanging out outside the health club and I saw it happen from the window."
"Mmmmhmmm. . ." my eyebrow furrowed and I put my fingers to my chin.
"What?"
"Nothing."
She looked at me a moment with a smile strangely contorted, and then promptly changed the subject.
"Why won't you tell me why you're reading the Odyssey?"
"I dunno. Give me the reasons again."
"You remember what they are, you're just stalling."
"No, I'm—" I started to negate her reasoning when the driver interrupted, bellowing out a street name. The bus shook and stopped..
"Amherst Avenue!" the driver called out again.
"That's my stop." she said, putting her book back into her black backpack. The folded corner still hadn't advanced any more pages.
"I thought you got off at Seventh." I said as she walked away from me towards the door.
"Ha! You were listening yesterday!" she called out, not really answering my question.
When the bus opened its doors with a hiss the next day, she looked up and waved before I'd even taken two steps.
"What's new today Odysseus?" she asked, sliding over to the edge of her seat and facing me with a conspiratorial grin.
"Things are about the same."
"That can't be true, that nothing's changed in your life."
"Well, it is."
"Then you'd better change something."
"Like what?"
"I dunno, that's for you to decide."
I rolled my eyes.
"What was that for?" she asked abruptly. My eyes rested on her with a sidelong view of skepticism.
"I'm still trying to figure out if you're a guru on a mountaintop or some overzealous Hello Kitty enthusiast." She laughed like bells and threw her head back in the air.
"I'm neither," she said when she resurfaced. "In the words of Jack Johnson, I'm just a fortunate fool."
"So what makes you so fortunate?"
"I don't know—what makes me a fool?"
I shook my head and looked out the window. The rain on the window made the colors of the world swim together into a blotch of grey.
"Have you ever listened to Jack Johnson?" she asked.
"A little." I said, not taking my eyes off the window.
"I like his stuff." she said matter-of-factly, following my eyes to the window.
"But do you know what my favorite song is?" This was the inevitable game. She would tell me no matter what I said.
"What?"
"Your Song, by Elton John." she said in a half whisper. "It's really human, you know?"
"Yeah."
"Whenever I get freaked out about y'know, just being alive. . . I listen to that song. It makes me feel like somebody, y'know?"
"Yeah."
She paused a moment.
"What are you looking at out there?" she asked.
"I'm watching the world melt away."
"Wow." she said with surprising quiet. "That's beautiful."
I heard her scuffle and move to the seat behind me, and then I felt her breath above me, ruffling my hair..
"There," she said. "Now things can't be the same."
"What?" I broke out of my rainy window spell.
"You said before that things were about the same. Well, now I've changed something." she hung her head and arms over the back of my seat and looked at me sideways. "Now I'm sitting here instead of there."
"I guess you're right," I blinked a moment, looking at her. "I guess now things aren't the same."
Her frayed paperback book was still swaying in between her two fingers.
"How long have you been reading that?" I asked.
"I started it. . ." she focused up on the ceiling in thought. ". . . about seven months ago."
I looked at the book, then up at her again.
"—and you're still only 20 pages into it?"
"Yeah." she said. "The most frustrating thing is that I keep reading the same section over and over and over again every time I pick it up, but then I have to put it down again before I can move on. I've ended up reading this same section probably about a bzillion times. I'm always reading it, but I always end up getting distracted by something, you know?"
"Maybe you just hate to finish things." I said. She looked at me a moment with an expression I couldn't quite place. Her smile was still nailed onto her face like a shabby wooden sign swinging in the wind, but her eyes were looking at me with something different. The closest I could come to explaining it would be fear.
She looked odd there, with only her head and arms hanging over the edge of the seat, and the rest disappeared. Like she was in the stocks.
"Coming up on Third Street!" the driver called.
"That's my stop," she said hurriedly, breaking my gaze and slamming her book haphazardly in her bag.
"Be careful, you might lose your place." I said, laughing a little as she stood.
"Wouldn't matter," she mumbled, and got off the bus.
Twenty-four hours later the rain had stopped but the sky was still a swirl of white and grey.
"So what book are you reading? Or should I say, what twenty pages of a book have you read?" I asked. She was hanging over the back of my seat again.
"It's a book by Jack Kerouac. On the Road."
"That's a good book."
"Have you read it?" she asked.
"Parts of it."
"Me too." she said. I smiled.
"So what part are you stuck on?" I asked.
"It's this part where he's hanging around New York with his friend Dean and Dean's friend. And Dean and the other guy are dancing along the street, and he's not really a part of it but he's kinda on the outside looking in and watching them dance around on the pavement, fascinated."
"That's kinda how I always felt about things." I said, surprising myself by what I was willing to say. "Like I was always on the outside, just watching everybody else. Not really a part of things, just observing."
I leaned back against the corner where the window and the back of my seat met up. Slowly, with a bittersweet smile on her face, she raised up her hand and placed it on top of my head, ruffling my hair.
"I can confidently say," she whispered, "that you are part of this moment, Odysseus."
The corners of my lips turned upward into a small smile.
"Thanks."
She gazed out the window, with her hand still on my head, and started to laugh. In the middle though, her face suddenly contorted into openmouthed seriousness and then disappeared behind the backrest.
"What?" My head shot up and I looked around, out the window to see what had freaked her out. Just a few people sitting on a park bench on the corner. Nothing out of the ordinary.
"Just need something out of my bags." Her voice sounded like a warped record.
"Fischer Avenue!" I heard the driver call. There was a scuffling noise behind, and she was hurrying down the aisle of the bus.
"This is my stop, I gotta go!" she cried frantically.
"Wait! What's the matter?" I stood up, and then fell down into my seat immediately as the bus shook in its stop. She turned back a moment and looked at me, and I could see her eyes glisten in a glassy film of tears.
"I gotta go." she said, almost inaudibly. A hiss of the doors opening and then she was gone. I turned around frantically at the seat behind me, as if she should still be there and this sudden change hadn't just happened, but she was gone. It was nonplussing.
All that was left on the seat was a worn, torn ten-cent paperback of On The Road.
A week ago she was sitting in that same seat, reading the same twenty pages of a book she couldn't finish. Now I'm sitting alone, rereading a Kerouac book and wondering.
She wrote fifty million scattered thoughts in the margin of each of these twenty pages. Some I can understand, others are too random for me to follow. She writes sort of frantically, like there's only thirty seconds for the message to be written down before the apocalypse.
It's Tuesday, three days after she made her escape. The silence is deafening. I can't get comfortable and I can't figure out why. I pull out On the Road for the tenth time in five minutes and instead of reading begin to simply riffle my fingers through the pages, just looking at the paper. Tons and tons of words pouring out tons and tons of thoughts. I don't think it would be possible for me to fill an entire book with my thoughts. A vignette maybe. Or a limerick. But not an entire novel.
My finger flips to the last soft paper page and out of the corner of my eye I see a scratch of frantic ballpoint. My hand immediately stops flipping pages and I open the book up wide to the spot, creasing the cover.
I don't belong to you! It says. I laugh out loud, and keep reading:
If you find me ownerless, please drop me off at the Stark Street Veterinary Clinic. Address 1465 SW Stark St.
I smile. Stark Street is two stops away from here.
The windows of the clinic are painted with puppies sliding down rainbows. They're faded, and in places the paint has begun to chip off. I push the glass door open and here the bell on the handle ring out. The office is full of animal smells. A few people sit waiting for the doctor—a German Shepard, and a calico cat in a carrying case. I don't know exactly what I'd expected to find.
I'm staring at the German Shepard and watching it stare back at me, the book still clutched in my hands, when I hear the receptionist address me.
"Is there something I can do for you sir?" she asks me. I look back at her a moment before I snap out of it and remember to start speaking.
"Um, yeah," I say. I hold up the book. "A girl dropped this the other day, and it says on the inside cover to return it here if it's lost." The receptionist takes it from me a minute and reads the writing on the cover.
"What was the girl's name, do you know?" she says, not looking up.
"Um—actually, no." I say, somewhat surprised to realize that I don't know her name.
"Well. . . what did she look like?" she asks. It takes me a second to bring up a picture of her in my head. I mainly remember her words, not her appearance.
"Uh. . . she had brown hair, kinda curly. Probably about five and a half feet tall. . . in her early twenties. She wears green sneakers." I look up at the receptionist, feeling like a complete idiot. The look on her face seems to suggest that she shares my sentiment.
"Aside from the green sneakers, that description could fit half the people in this town." she sighs and hands the book back to me. "—but, as far as I know, there isn't anyone who works around here that would list this as a place to return a book."
I smile and thank her as I walk out. My voice sounds a little weighted with disappointment. As I open the door the crisp air of fall blasts out across my face. I lean up against the brick wall beside the shop, taking a moment to think. I stare at the sky. The clouds are threatening to wring themselves out and weep on the earth with rain.
I hear the scrape of shoes against pavement in the cold, but I don't look away from where my eyes are fixed on the horizon. The shoes stop beside me.
"Thanks for bringing my book back."
I turn and see her leaning against the wall next to me, smiling mischievous and melancholy all at the same time. My eyes widen, a little surprised, but deep down I kinda expected this as well. A small part of me has the urge to wrap her in a sudden hug, but somehow that wouldn't fit us. Instead I mirror her smile with my own and just continue to drink her in with my eyes.
"Why, of all places," I start, laughing a little, "did you pick a veterinary clinic to return your book to?"
"I liked the pictures I guess."
"The Pictures on the windows?"
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you just address the book to your house?"
She pauses, reading me a moment. I meet her eyes and hold them in a standoff.
"Why were you reading the Odyssey?" she asks.
"I don't know."
"Yes you do."
"No, I don't."
"Yes, you do."
"No, I don't."
"Don't lie." she says after a beat.
"Why not? You do all the time." I retort.
"I'm allowed to lie, but you're not."
"That's a little hypocritical, don't you think?"
She stops speaking, and the wind takes its chance in the silence and catches a piece of her hair tucked behind her ear. As it dances in front of her face like a ghost caught in a tree, I hear the rain begin to tap at a million intervals against the sidewalk. It is a solace to listen to it, from our protected place here beneath the overhang.
"If people were honest with themselves, they'd realize that everyone's a hypocrite." she says.
"Isn't that kind of an oxymoron?" I ask her with my eyebrows raised.
"Doesn't mean it doesn't make sense." she shrugs. In a sense I understand she's right, but for some reason I feel the need to push at something, see something give.
"So what you're saying is it makes sense to be a liar." I answer bitterly.
"I didn't say that—"
"Sure you did. You needed to find some way to justify the fact that all you do is sit there and lie and evade your way out of a real conversation." I'm snapping at her now. Her smile is beginning to disappear now, and her eyes are searching my face to try and find something I don't know what. In my chest, I feel a sudden sharp stab of regret.
"Why are you saying that?" she says, looking a little angry. I sigh.
"What do you mean?" I ask her.
"What reason did you have to say what you just said? What was the motivation there?" she asks, raising her voice a little more.
"I dunno, I—"
"But you do!" she interrupts. "You know why you said it just like you know why you're reading the Odyssey, just like you know why you didn't look up when I said goodbye the first time we had a conversation!" She slaps her fist against the pavement. "Don't you just wish sometimes that people could just cut through all that bullshit and just get around to what they really want to say?" She took a sharp breath in. Whether it was from panic or the precursor to a tear I don't know, but it was starting to make me a little frantic as well.
"—this whole business of people walking up to each other going, 'Hi-how-are-you-?' 'Fine-how-bout-you-?' 'Fine'. . . . Nobody's really fine, but it doesn't matter because the people who asked never meant anything by it in the first place, they don't even really care. . . Nobody really cares anymore, you know?" She's breathing fast now. "It's like that bit in the book—we all just kinda watch, and we might be fascinated, but we're never a part of anything."
Her eyes have gone like glass, and I have a sense that she could shatter just as easily. Softly, I take hold of her hand and give it a squeeze.
"You're a part of this." I whisper. She gives me a small smile.
"Why did you leave the bus so quick the other day?" I ask her after a few minutes have passed.
"Why were you reading the Odyssey?" she counters.
"You know, you don't have to evade every single question I ask you." I say with a soft misplaced laugh.
"You didn't have to hunt me down and bring me back my book."
"True," I say, giving in. "But then again, weren't you the one who was just ranting about wishing you could cut through all the bullshit that people say?"
"So you're saying that everything I've said up until now has been bullshit?" she glances at me sarcastically.
"You know that's not what I meant." I say. She smiles at me, relinquishing this fact. "Actually, you have provided some of the only real conversations that I've had in a long time." I take a breath, and watch it turn to steam in the cold.
"I think maybe that's why I went looking for you after you left. There's a lot of truth in all that bullshit that you spout out." I watch her nose crinkle as she grins. "I guess I just didn't want to lose that."
We both turn our heads out to the parking lot in front of us, where the rain continues dancing on the pavement, bouncing off in a field of little splashes. The cement has grown darker with the water washing over it.
"So. . ." I whisper, not looking at her. "Why did you run off the bus so scared the other day?"
She inhales a moment, as if trying to drink in the scent of the rain. When she finally speaks, her voice sounds dry, like dead leaves scraping across a street in the wind.
"I saw my cousin out the window."
I turn my head towards her.
"What?"
"I saw my cousin. Out the window—that's the reason I got off the bus."
"No—I got that. I just don't get why that would drive you off of a bus."
"I thought she might recognize me." she explains.
"Is there some kind of a family feud going on between all of you or something?" I venture.
"No. . ." her voice is high and strained. I suddenly wish it would just crack and then maybe the tears would come and wash away whatever the hell it was that she was so afraid of.
I squint a few seconds at her profile.
"I just realized why I lashed out at you a few minutes earlier." I say with a sudden realization, and she exhales, grateful for a moment that the spotlight is no longer shining in her face.
"Why?" she asks, and genuinely sounds interested. I fixate on her face, my eyes alight with realization.
"We're cutting out the bullshit now, right?" I ask tentatively.
"Yeah."
"Alright then." I say, a little hesitant still. "I wanted to break something."
Her eyes squint at me in misunderstanding.
"It felt like you were on the edge of something, you know?" I tried to explain. "Like two steps away from falling down and breaking into a bunch of little pieces—I just kinda wanted to push you that extra two steps and see what it looked like when you shattered. . . . . I dunno, I just kinda had this feeling like maybe after it happened, I would be able to see something real in all those little pieces."
I tap tap of the rain lightens a moment. She isn't speaking. My eyes scatter over her face, trying to read her expression, hoping to God that she isn't angry.
"People become obsessed with that a lot." she says absentmindedly.
"With what?"
"Destroying things." she says.
"—Kids build sandcastles and have the most fun knocking them down," she continues. "Instead of leaving a flower blooming in the grass, our first predisposition is to pick it. A person is more fascinated by the fire that destroys the house to cinders in an hour than watching that same house be built up again. We rip things, we chop things down—"
"We pop the bubble wrap in packages," I assist. We're falling back on the usual banter.
"Exactly." she says, raising a hand up for emphasis. For an instant she just sits there and stares at her own hand lifted, examining it like is a work of art. Then slowly she lets it drop.
"I never really knew why people were so mesmerized by destruction," she continues in a quieter voice. "But you might be on to something." I see her eyes raise to mine.
". . .Maybe the reason we do all that is just to find some speck of truth in something." she speaks without breath, still focusing on me.
"Something authentic." I add.
"Yeah."
She touches my hand again with a gradual shy softness. I hold onto the opportunity awhile before speaking.
"So you were saying, about your cousin. . ."
Her hand flinched involuntarily under mine as I say it.
"C'mon. . ." I gently press. "Finish what you start."
Her eyes slide to the horizon again. The sun has started to set, and even this grey palette of a sky is now being highlighted in an orange tinge.
"I don't even know what she's doing here. . . . They don't live anywhere near here. None of them do."
"None of who?"
"My family." she says a little bluntly. I keep my mouth shut for a moment before trying to pry her open a little more.
"Did they beat you or something?" I ask finally, a little afraid of my own question.
She rolls her eyes and I can see tears hanging over the precipice again. I can almost hear her thoughts. You don't understand.
"No. . . ." she starts, sounding a little insulted. "Jesus, you're making this seem like a Lifetime Original Movie. My parents didn't beat on me, they didn't neglect me, they didn't verbally abuse me or cause me to develop an eating disorder or anything like that. It's not some melodrama."
At this point, I'm feeling a little annoyed at my own assumptions.
"Well then why the hell are you not hanging out with them anymore?" I snap. She shifts her body toward me angrily and prods a finger at my chest.
"God, does everything with you have to have categorical reason?!" she retorts through gritted teeth. Almost there. The tears are almost there, dangling ready to fall. "Everything's gotta be black and white—no such thing as grey?"
"Sure there is!" I shout back waving a hand sporadically at the overcast grey of the sky.
"You know what I mean!" she says, her mouth starting to contort. Her hands take on a life of their own as the punch and slash through the air around her head, trying to help prove her point.
"Well then, why'd you leave?!" I slam a frustrated fist against the sidewalk.
"Haven't you ever just wanted to get away?" she removes her arms from her face, and her eyes are red and tortured now and the tears have finally started to fall in time with the rain.
"What—" I start.
"You know what I mean!" she repeats in my face, her voice like the squeal of tires against gravel. "Haven't you ever gotten into a car and gotten the sudden inclination to just keep driving and leave?! Just keep going!"
She squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head back and forth, beating away imaginary foes.
"Just going and going and going. . ." she murmurs without a voice as her face bows down.
I hear her let out a frustrated scream, but my eyes still stay focused on the grey in the sky. A desperate sort of pain in my chest is forming. I look back at her and I can't see her face. She wrapped her arms tight around her legs and burrowed her head into her knees, her entire body shaking and pulling in tighter. I get the feeling like maybe she's trying to solidify herself.
"Forget it." I hear her whisper inaudibly. She still hasn't resurfaced.
"No, you were right." I say, sliding myself closer to her huddled form and laying a hand on her shivering back. "I've known what you meant all along."
He head remains buried in the folds of her arms.
"I'm sorry." I try.
We sit like this for a long time in silence. She stops shaking, but her face remains submerged. The sun has gone and the rain has stopped, but no stars appear through the clouds.
"It was reason number four." I can feel her hold her breath a moment from where my hand is, still stoic on her back.
". . . The Odyssey." I continue. "I was thinking of myself as on my own personal Odyssey, I guess. If I had to pick any reason, that would be it."
"Doesn't seem like a good reason to try and keep people from knowing why you're reading it." she says from between her knees. I smile to hear her voice calm again.
"I guess I was thinking of it as an Odyssey that I could only accomplish on my own."
I laugh softly at myself, and she joins in after a beat. Life is hilarious to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
"So did you get anywhere with yourself?" she sniffs a little as she says it.
"I dunno. . . ." I start. "I mean, I got somewhere, but I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I was right about it being an Odyssey alone."
I shut my mouth a minute to think.
"I guess it's hard to say—I mean, the way I see it I guess, is that I wouldn't have gotten anywhere on my own, because there was all these things around me that were influencing me and helping me figure shit out. . . But then, at the same time, it was something I did on my own, because it was my own choice as to whether or not I picked up on everything that was going on around me." I stop and squint, hearing what I just said, and without meaning to, laugh a little.
"—like you starting a conversation with me on the bus."
"What started the whole Odyssey with you then?" From what I can see of her head, her hair has frizzed a little in the damp air, creating a halo around her head.
"Same things that got you going, I guess." I say, my eyes drawn in by the air in front of me. "The expectations of the world around me, the feeling that I was trapped in my own life." I let out a breath. She's started shaking again, very minutely, but I can feel it in the warmth underneath my palm.
"I just woke up the other day and realized that I was living my life entirely for things I didn't care about." My voice has receded to an astounded whisper as I hear what I'm saying. I've never really consciously thought about this before, but everything's pouring out in buckets now. My hand slides off her back gradually as her head finally raises like a child being born. She turns and faces me.
Her eyes are still wet and raw from crying. In a flash it strikes me how beautiful she looks this way—so real and so fascinating. I can't tear my eyes away from hers.
"I know what you mean." she breathes out in a whispered strain. Her voice still won't come. She shakes again. In an impulsive jolt from deep inside my chest, I suddenly grab hold of her shoulders and pull her into me, holding onto her like a tree in a hurricane. In my head, for some reason, I'm convinced that I have to hold her together, like if I let go she'll fly off in a thousand different directions.
"Shhh. . . ." I say. "Just close your eyes and it'll all be fine." It's what my mother always used to say to me when I was sick in the middle of the night. I don't know why I thought to say that.
"I hate closing my eyes." she says into my shoulder. "I scares me to death."
"Why?"
"I'm afraid of what I'll see when I open them again." I look down at her and slowly bend my head down to kiss her on the cheek. She huddles deeper into the wrinkles of my blue cotton sweatshirt, inhaling it. I bury my nose into her hair. It smells like coconut and almonds.
"It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside. . . ." I sing softly. I can feel her cheeks smiling against my chest.
We will continue to hold onto each other until we both fall asleep, sometime late late in the night.