It’s like playing a record backwards and realising the music is just as beautiful, the meaning still touching, but the confusion overwhelms you so grandly that you can’t help but flip it over and play it properly. It isn’t broken, and it hasn’t slipped from your fingers, slicing the air and tumbling with grace – or without – to the hard floor. Yet you cannot stand to play the record and hear it skip over and over again on that nonexistent scratch. Even though you do play it again and again. You repeat that track at that time, just to watch the skip and marvel at the impossible nature of the mistake.
You’d never consider buying a new record, hands sliding with heartfelt love over the ridged surface. Nor will you take in your record player, sleek and timed in perfection, to see if it were broken itself. You stand mere centimetres from your music and watch as the notes flow from the black shine and spiral into the air with flickering lust, reaching for you and calling you close.
They fill you, sending your mind into twisted ecstasy, filling your thoughts in and out of this world. Sounds play against your soul, twisting and shaping, clutching at your existence and crushing against your being. Supple threads of their spindly tendrils wrapping around everything you are and taking all those things you love so much about yourself to use against you, piercing you in ungauged love. For the music loves you as it leads you on, swirling closer before twirling away, always calling, but never waiting as you stumble to it.
As you fling your body carelessly closer to that which you love beyond all else, the record skips and you awaken from your drugged slumber, falling effortlessly, endlessly against the slick covering of the word into the next. Death merely another song to play while you wait.
