In my head, I hear the percussive rhythms of the early summer rain. It drowns the silence, and makes me long to move my body, to join in time with its beat. Dancers hear rhythm in nature, just like musicians hear symphonies in traffic.
Today, though, I have work to do. I sit in the empty loft, my fingers sifting through what was once our life. Pictures, film reels, ticket stubs, papers—the only thing separating this from a pile of trash unchecked by the protesting garbage men is me. I am the only one left to see the value of the mundane.
Among it, I find a tape recorder. Roger used this to record rough versions of new songs. I used it to leave him sexy messages. I assume the cassette inside contains one or both of the previously mentioned, but instead, I find a message from the dead.
Heavy breathing, distorted and scared. A familiar voice, low and shaking: "I, uh, I don't know why I'm doin' this. I just feel like I can't really talk…I don't know." A pause, and then "Let me just start at the beginning. Let me just talk."
"I never really loved April. Not the way I love Mimi, I mean. But still…that night I came home and found her…it stopped my life. I wish I could say it was because my girlfriend was dead, but it wasn't. Not completely. That's what I can't tell them—anyone. I shut down for six months not just because she was dead, but because I basically was too. Her suicide was my death sentence: those four letters bleeding from the mirror in lipstick.
"And now I dream of her. No, no—I mean she comes to me in dreams. There's a difference, definitely, because I don't want this. It's not what they say—I don't see a white light, and there aren't harps and cherubs. It's dark, and I can't see very well. I don't know where I am. I feel scared. Then there she is, and she's taking my hand, and she's pulling me along. I don't want to go, but I follow her. I talk to her. I ask her where we are, where we're going. She looks at me and says that I'll know soon. Any question I ask her, that's how she always responds. 'You'll know soon, Roger.' And I can only follow her, until I finally wake up.
"Each time it happens, I walk a little farther with her. I get a little farther from my world—maybe even from life itself—and descend into hers. I don't want to go, but I don't have a choice. I know that one day I won't return. Because just like the last time I ever saw her, lying there in the bathtub, she is my mortality. One night I'll lay down with Mimi, and April will take me away."
I shut off the tape recorder. I can't deal with this now. No, I can't deal with this ever, so I eject the tape and crush it with the heel of my boot. His last message to me, and it boarders on psychotic. I don't want to remember him this way, so I won't. No one will.
Understandably, I begin to suffer from insomnia. Some weeks after finding the tape, I finally fall into a normal, sober sleep. I enter lucidity, and feel a calloused hand take mine. I can see his rough features cutting through the darkness, and although I don't want to, I ask it anyway.
"Where are we? Where are you taking me?"
I hear him answer in my head: "You'll know soon, Mimi."