Something Dark Like Jazz

A Flash Nonfiction Fantasy

He is the bass stripped down to a dark rhythm that hums to
the backdrop of city lights and black and white urban streets and alleys,
somewhere foreign to me that I want to get lost in. My thoughts around him read
like the first time I fell in love with banned books and Henry Miller lovingly
wrote “cunt.” I want to turn his pages. I want to read the forbidden words he
paints in red. A steady and heavy cello across absurd piano strokes crash into
everything I’ve judged myself on, every law I am governed by and I am
intoxicated by the strangeness, drunk on this existential, loveless affair,
this music. There is something cold in his quiet demeanor, something almost
cruel, a hidden beat to his body, to his sex, a muted aggression beneath a tie.
I imagine his eyes ignoring his surroundings, lost in thoughts on maybe
statistics, maybe sex, maybe the structure of all things black and white,
applying logic and reason and theory to the strange design of women. Or maybe
he is seeing only scale and the black dots of notes and wanting only an outlet
for himself, and maybe I am making this all up because I am looking for it
too—somewhere to release it, to choke out my tired morals, or at least to have
a corner where I don’t have to hide. I feel him make a little room for me, and
just the tone in his voice makes me wonder how he feels. I want to crawl into
his mind. I want to be taken without expectation. It is a want, a hunger. I
don’t want to be so alone all the time with this appetite.