Exhaling You

Piano keys play a couple chords,
then a sweet voice tells me about her pain.
She misses him, she knows she was wrong
but her voice isn't corny, it's deep.
It is caring.
Her back-up singers echo her.
He was her everything.

Should I turn down the music?
The sun is going down now,
The lyrics are outlining my life:
warm breeze, soft words, lips, cheeks, his face begins to form.
But the song murmurs, the chorus ends.

Chirping echoes the blue sky,
brown leaves fall unnoticed.
My earbuds fitting into place but
the same song is on again.
Our summer comes back to sing in my ear.
Standing on the curb between my house and the bus.
My only options are to skip, repeat.

Again, the melody circles my head.
Skip, repeat, skip, repeat.
I pause.
But now, the silence is different.
The birds are everywhere.
All around me the cold clings to my sweater,
chilly but warm inside the threads.

I unplug my iPod
welcoming the new into my life,
the air into my lungs,
your song out of my ears.

A brown leaf falls into my open palm.