Your song, it tarries in the grooves of my heart. Plays on repeat, stuck. Your words, a language spoken by the soul, unintelligible to those outside our bond.

I pen another.

No smile could touch me quite the same. No tears strike the chord yours have found within my heart, swelling a lullaby that cradles me as I sink into the bliss that is you.

And another.

Such sweetness stains, eats away the walls I’ve built. Such devotion drives a track within our lives, carving a future merged from two.

And again.

This gentle soul I’ve found in you, reflected in a thousand mirrors, a million stars lighting your aura that you might cleanse me, free me from these earthly constraints that threaten to drown me in sand and soil.

I flip the page.

Take me to that place, wherever you might be. Come dawn, whisk me to between the worlds where folded together we shall ever be.

Scribble across the unintentional rhyme.

Please, I beg you to hear me scream. My voice echoes in my throat, but does not reach the sky. Lost among the nether clouds where your ship wanders, searching for what, I wonder. Searching for me, I hope.

The thesaurus does not help, so I throw it.

You are my heart, my soul, my world and all the worlds you’ve visited since. I breathe for you. A silent song I can not control pours forth into the starry road you travel.

I scream for real, a shout of pure frustration.

What can I possibly say for you to hear, not with your ears, but with your heart? I yearn to follow you, to chase that winding path you’ve left glowing in your wake.

I let the pen fall. Ink splatters the page, looking like star patches and nebulae and a single half note with its empty belly. There are no words left untarnished by my feeble attempts. I merely repeat myself.

Heart. Soul. Stars. Song. World.

How can I not wrangle these thoughts into something coherent, something I could be proud enough to show him? To watch his eyes flick across the page, faster and faster, as he reads of my emotions.

Outside the roar returns. His ship burning, a high whine settling into a blare of engines that shake the building.

I’m out of time.

I shove the used papers into the trash. Ink bleeds across those pages, muffling the pain in those sentences. I take up the pen one more time. Pull free a fresh piece of paper.

May I come with you?

He would understand.

* * *

I had the first two lines of this story for a very long time, but I didn’t know what to do with them. Second person isn’t my favorite type of POV so I knew I didn’t want to write anything too long, but I couldn’t come up with a way to turn those two lines into anything more.

Then I got to thinking about the way I often brainstorm when I’m stuck trying to come up with a new idea or flesh out an old one. And that is…I write new lines, continuously starting over until I finally pick up the right track and can race forward with the story.

I thought it might be fun to create a flash piece using that method…so thus was born the poet trying to pen a love note and having the worst time of it.

What’s neat is that this is an inside look on how I sometimes get to the right words. There are often a lot of unused words that come first, most of which get tossed in the garbage because either they’re not good enough, don’t move the story or characters in the right direction, or simply don’t convey the message I’m trying to get across.

That being said. I absolutely love the first two lines. I think the poet should have stopped with them.

~Emmi