The parking lot breathed beneath the neon flicker of a golden sign synonymous with burgers that were the same every time and fries that always needed salt. Bathed softly in amber light we sat suspended in time. Cocooned within the glass and steel of your car, the low purr of the engine as we idled, windows parted to let the evening slip inside, the scent of spring rain heavy in the air and the gentle sigh of cars drifting past.
Your voice was velvet and honey, a decadent melody poured slowly into the silence. It felt lavishly familiar yet thrillingly new. Every word was rich with promise, each phrase tantalizingly fleeting, before fading into the next.
We spoke without boundaries, an unraveling of topics woven together with exuberance and intensity, a tapestry whose threads were as much felt as heard. There was no plan, only spontaneous elegance, intricate and unrepeatable. We held the moment, savoring the sensation of first discovery.
You were a song, the kind you only get to hear once. Not because someone takes it from you, but because to repeat it would be to rewrite it, to misremember it, to reduce it.
The magic was in the newness. The chaos. The way we talked in tangled harmonies and echoed each other’s laughter without even trying. I can’t go back and expect to find the same melody. It only sounded like that once, in that moment, in that parking lot, under the flickering sign of predictable food and unpredictable feeling.
And so, I won’t press play again.
Because I’d rather carry the memory of the song as it was unrepeated, unsullied, than listen so long that I forget why I loved it.
Some songs, like some nights, are perfect only in their singularity.
And you were one of them.