This Story Sounds Familiar:
A Modern Romance Playlist

By Cattleya Mariano

I

Tonight is a manic, furious flurry of lights and sound that makes your fingertips tingle with the distant hum of impending doom. Your legs strain from standing too long, but for the first time in longer than you care to remember, the overwhelming sense of exhaustion you’ve deemed “normal” seems distant, as if its traded its aches and pains in for a pleasant rush of blood. Your spine bows and bends along with the tide of the evening, and your heart keeps time by the bassline, thrilled after months of disuse.

Lips purse and curl around the mouth of a beer bottle, a thorn grows into a rose in a stranger’s side, and the next thing you know you are gazing absently out the window of your cab home, a telling smile on your lips. You press two fingers to them, as if by transferring it onto more of your flesh, you’ll remember it better.

II

Silence has a sound, you insist, and they laugh. A whole person, separate and independent of you but not quite, not anymore and at the very least not right now, settles themselves into the palm of your hand, and you can almost forget how the spaces of your fingers ever felt without theirs in between.

If there is a learning curve to loving this person, you think, let it move ever upward.

III

Words are weapons, only as powerful as your use and intent.

The statement stuns you like a lightning storm, burying you so deep into the ground that you wonder if it’s possible for a person to grow roots.

Words are a weapon, and the heaviest three have just been dropped like bombs with your body as ground zero. The shrapnel peppers your skin like a thousand haphazard kisses; you wonder if you’ll come out of this alive.

IV

Do we ache for the people and places we’ve left, or because we realize that they’ve outgrown us? Is it the miles between us that drive us apart, or the distance between our hearts? Can we drown from our own blood, biting down too hard on our tongues? What are the odds that a plane’s engines will stall the second it reaches optimal cruising altitude? Do you ever wonder what the elephant in the room has to say about this? Can we talk?

V

There are just some things we aren’t built for.

VI

If you say a word enough times, you take away its power—it becomes ridiculous to the point of losing all meaning. So the name falls from your lips like a prayer, bleeds into the most innocuous and casual of conversations, inserts itself into harmless statements and observations; wrenches itself screaming from your throat until your lips are cracked and your lungs are burning, echoes in the split seconds between your heartbeats. You say this name, this word, until all the poison is drawn from your body, until the whole world knows how this story ends whether or not they want to, until it loses all meaning.

VII

When the first photos of them show up on your feed, it takes all of your willpower to take a step back from the edge and consider your options. Option 1: Send your fist careening through the web and straight down their throat because I existed goddammit and it fucking mattered how dare you pull a Clementine on me. Option 2: Curl into a ball under your desk and lose yourself to the tidal wave of tears (anger, anguish, what’s the difference?) that are threatening to choke you. Option 3: Suck it up and carry on. Bitterness suits no one.

VIII

Are you still breathing? Good.

What are you listening to right now? Share your soundtrip with us in the comments section!