Dashboard Conventional

Homecoming is sugared melancholy. You negotiate the windswept streets drained of commuters, strangers and faces without proper names. Epiphanies dawn upon you like obscure comprehensions suddenly unfastened: It is how it feels to be orphaned. No one and nothing is there but skins of pavements to bear witness to your hovering thoughts, or the degree of silence that amplifies the rising and falling of your breath. A certain ache nestles deep inside you as you resume your departure from necessities, obligations and wants.

Your heartbeat subsides into steady inflections; pacifying your inner storms, leading you into wakeful awareness of your sunken poverties and your only momentary abundance, rain.

The translucent dashboard sifts beads of light flickering from hushed lampposts and distant windows. Their glimmers race after you like reluctant waves of goodbye.

You commence on pondering the perplexing necessity of downpours or the vacillating weights of indecision clashing at the margins of your descending exhaustion.

Maybe I should call him.
No way, I called him the last time;
I shouldn’t be giving in this time.

But you miss him.
So? Let him suppose I am fatigued from constant regards,
now immune to his preciousness.

How about a text message? A SMS should be harmless.
It’s past one in the morning, you inconsiderate,
needful dunce. Need you importune him of one goofy message? Go ahead; unhinge him from the soundness of sleep.

Right. I do miss him.
I know. *Nod* Me too.

A sentimental song floats from the stereo. You want to reach out and switch into something cynical but the alphabets creep into your faculties like flimsy fingertips gliding down your spine. It is maudlin, because it is true. In a darkened room somewhere another soul is listening to the same sappy song and cries himself to sleep; or another tender wound soothed by the compassionate comfort coating the saccharine melodies and tender lyrics spinning oaths of possibility at another dance.

Rain hasn’t diminished. For the first time you strain to hear their muffled songs.

Their chorus is conventional. Honest, simplistic, saccharine and true.