by Justin Davis

Your case was dusty, I hadn't touched you for months, it wasn't neglect on my part to you, I still cared for you very much, it was neglect to myself. I refused to answer to my inner musician. The musician had been calling out, like a woman, your girlfriend, the girl you want to settle down with, hanging by her nails from the edge of a skyscraper and you just standing there thinking how maybe you could find a new girl friend. How you could fall in love with anyone just like you fell in love with her? How someone would eventually replace her? How you would enjoy doing the same things with a new girl as you did with your dearly beloved, hanging by a finger now, on the edge of this skyscraper. She's cryin out but you don't listen.

And you, dearly beloved, were hanging there with my inner musician two weeks ago. I needed you in a way I haven't needed you before. Your role transmogrified into a credit bearing one from one of pure passion. Rent was due and I knew your worth to the world, an implorable monetary worth, empty compared with your worth to me. Our relationship, Oh it was neglect on my part. I'm a bastard to you. Our relationship had diminished to this, me letting you drop away.

I take you out to clean you for the pawnshop and you hum your strings as I bump you against my knee. I pause while your hum transports me to the past. Midnight thunderstorms out west with sex come to mind with our touch. It takes gentle patient rubbing but I polish out your spots of use and admire the deep rose color of your finish.

To think about you alone and with someone else pains me deeply. I want to cry but my societal role as a man has suppressed my ability to cry so that I may only do so at death and extreme beauty, so I furrow my eyebrows and hold my head and shudder and grind my teeth and think of strumming you for the first and last time in months. Your clear warm soothing voice rang out and reverberated around my room in a manner not dissimilar to a dream when you first awaken, so real, so tangible. I cried when I heard it, for it was beautiful like my mothers voice. When the vibration of your strings on the heavy air vibrated my chest and my soul, I cried for we were one. When I began to play I cried for the beauty we could create and the beauty that would end when I closed the case. I played like it was a last request for a life-time, and it might be.

And so now you are in the pawnshop, hocked away for less than your true value and more than I can probably afford to pay for too long. Forgive me for dropping you off of the skyscraper of the present. Donot worry, I have saved my inner and he is recovering nicely. I am sorry I abused you during our last months together and that I used you as money when you are asfar away from the greed, fear, and hatred it instills as I am (or try to be). And now the only thing that keeps me at peace about the whole charade is remembering our last moment together, our best moment together, we played "Wish You Were Here",and I do, I really do.