She Wasn’t Playing the Guitar. She Was Holding It Hostage

She Wasn’t Playing the Guitar. She Was Holding It Hostage

Jesus Christ, the sun was crawling in like a fugitive and not breaking dawn, bleeding it. One of those molasses mornings where light doesn’t so much pour in as leak, slow and apologetic, through crooked blinds and bad decisions. That golden hour of shame and serenity. And there she was. Or maybe she wasn’t. Hell, I can’t be sure if she was real or just another hallucination stitched together from absinthe, feedback, and unpaid therapy sessions.

She was a silhouette carved in contradictions, half-dressed, wholly untouchable. The kind of woman who doesn’t need an audience, just a plugged-in guitar and a moment. No shirt, no apologies. Black underwear, soft defiance.

Sitting on the edge of some no-name mattress that still remembered better nights. The room itself looked like it had survived a war waged between a poet and a pyromaniac. Twisted bedsheets, dead air, and the remnants of last night’s sermon folded under a hangover you could bite into.

That guitar, man. Black. Hollow. Plugged in and humming with the kind of quiet threat usually reserved for switchblades and seductions. The cable snaked along the floor like a live wire, red and reckless, the sort of thing you trip over on your way to ruin or revelation. She didn’t strum it. Not yet. She just held it like a confession too hot for the church and too honest for the shrink.

And her eyes, well, I couldn’t see her eyes. But I could feel them. Looking out the window like they were staring down the ghosts of everyone who ever told her to put some clothes on, be nice, sit still, smile more. She wasn’t smiling.

She was remembering. Or maybe she was plotting. Either way, you’d be a fool to interrupt her.

The air had texture. Velvet and static, and some unnameable scent that lingered like a song never released. A few notes of sweat, cigarette ash, vintage vinyl, and whatever perfume they stopped making in 1995. The room wasn’t hot, but it was heavy. Like something was about to happen. Or had just finished happening and wasn’t quite done echoing yet.

She shifted. A shoulder-blade caught the light like a blade. The guitar groaned. And for one goddamn second, I could hear it all her heartbreak, her history, her hunger.

Not in words, no. In the pregnant pause before sound. The breath you take before everything goes to hell or heaven or both. The kind of moment that smells like lightning and tastes like déjà vu.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. The song was coming. Not a melody, but a reckoning. One chord at a time.

And I was just the lucky bastard who saw it before it came.

- JSPC (Some godless morning in the 2000s, after too many pills and not enough bullets)

0 comments

Leave a comment