'Same'

"Did you know that she still likes you a lot?" she asked from her side of the vehicle. Her voice was devoid of emotion. It was dark save for a few streaks of ocher intruding in from the streetlight we were parked under.

She took in her cigarette again and breathed out coils of smoke that slowly dissipated into the air.

I didn't answer her. I tried to peer through the darkened interiors of the car for her features. She was beautiful, more physically beautiful than her sister and I wondered what I was doing out there with her so late.

Wondered what I was doing when I was chasing after her in the dark a few years before and a filling from one of my molars had came loose in my mouth. And in that different darkness I had tried to see what it was that I had spat into my hand while she ran ahead, away from me, a drunken stupor of confusion and heartbreak streaming through her being.

She went on to tell me things about her sister: how she had missed me, how she was looking in all the wrong places for something that was essentially me, and failed.

"Don't tell anyone what I just told you," she said.

I nodded, without feeling anything substantial, perhaps I was really over us after all.

But then days after when I replayed the imagery of what she had fed to me in my mind, slivers of guilt and pain found a place within me and I felt sorry for everything her sister had to go through as though it was all my fault.

"Can I play a song or two for you?" I said to her, breaking the silence, looking at my acoustic guitar in the back and then back at her.

"A serenade!" she giggled.

I played her a song I had actually written for her sister, and after it was over she commented that it was beautiful but sad. I told her it was about me when my relationship with her sister was almost over and that her sister will never get to hear it--it was intended to be that way.

And then I played another one, the newest song I had at the time, and after that she asked, "Why are your songs so sad?"

I merely shrugged.

I didn't want to say "I don't know" as true as it may have been then, but the order of those words have stayed with me since, like a profanity or a scar, over a heart that no longer beats for anyone but myself.