This is part of our series called “Inspired by Sound,” where writers use a song as the muse for their story. This piece by Elissa Gray takes influence from “Sea of Voices” by Porter Robinson.
Three years earlier, your hands were in my hair and your lips were on my chest. Two heartbeats passed and your tongue grazed my belly button – touching me, touching you, touching us. It was everything.
You were enveloping, you were intoxicating. Impossible is a heavy word, but it fit you like a glove, like a puzzle piece you had long forgotten. Those nights, you closed me up and held me tight, as if I was an embrace you couldn’t seem to shake, a kiss you didn’t know how to escape.
Now, I’m in a sea of strangers, an empire of foreign faces, a valley of voices I’ve never heard.
The strands of your hair no longer tangle around my fingertips, your taste is gone from my cheek. All of your words stopped twirling, stopped dancing, and now I miss the sound of your tapping shoes on my hardwood floors.
Three years since, swimming in a sea full of strangers and I still search for you – your eyes, your lips, your knuckles and your toes. But I find nothing in this ocean of unfamiliarity and unawareness, in this emptiness I once called home.
I loved you, I remember. But now you are the only stranger that I know.