Listening to Like Herod in my old bed in my old room in my old house, swimming on the waves of sound and watching my memories run through my fingers as I raise my cupped hands above where my body becomes submerged. Watching a slight yet steady stream of my past flow out of my hands, returning to this sea made of two parts song to every one part of genuine nostalgia.
It's ending now, and the feedback dies away, slowly forming a collage with the real-life sounds around me. The creaking in the floorboards and walls isn’t the secrets leaking out like I used to think, it’s simple physics as the atoms they are made of expand en masse with the changing temperatures of day becoming night becoming midnight becoming a cold December morning.
There’s a bubbling too, the sound of hot water flooding cold pipes. If someone was here, someone who wasn’t me (I am deaf to the sounds that my heart makes, though maybe before I wanted to listen, I could have heard) could they hear the blood pumping around my veins? My blood is warm, my body is cold, and so I think it would make a sound, what with it working on the same principles.
I think the only way for someone to really find out would be for them to listen really close to my heart. They’d probably have to put their head on my chest, and be really, really quiet. Maybe even silent. And I’d have to be quiet too, silent even. And we’d both have to just lie there, still and silent, so this person could listen to my heart beating for them, until this person could tell me that my blood is pumping in my veins and making a sound, or that it is, and it isn't.
Either way, I'd be alive, and there would be someone who cares enough to listen to my heart lying next to me, so I would be happy.