Undelivered Compliments (Way Past Due)

A man stands in front of the microphone and raps about Jesus Christ, his right hand rigidly enunciating each syllable. "He's the one that wants to get your soul out tha blenda." That red face is going to burst with concentration. The flypapers hanging from the wall are full of black spindly creatures.

I'm self conscious of these words as I write them down. I cover them with my hands so that the honest looking boy next to me doesn't judge me the way I am judging the man rapping into the microphone.
"SEE YA LATA, HATAS."

The honest one turns out to be Bjorklund from Iceland, and as he plays his guitar and sings about coming home to an empty house, I decide I am his. By the time he returns to his seat, we have already spent years together, had our fights, made the choice of failed fate. I've decided I hate his haircut. We are through before I lean over to tell him his words were lovely.
"Serendipity is the theory that you can choose your own fate."

In another life, my love and I gripped each other and moved about as a single entity in the coldest room of the tallest building in North America. Boulevards stretched out for hundreds of miles in front of us like glittering veins that summer night. I felt like I could reach from Chicago and touch someone in Joliet. Everything my eyes could see was for me to have. In the middle, I thought I'd found my soulmate. In the end, these lovers needed lawyers. He tried to reach for me, but I rolled out of bed, gathered the secrets and memories I had flung about, and tiptoed out. I don't believe in soulmates anymore. I smiled at someone I scorned long ago. I held hands with another and walked the same haunted path, pretending to be a stranger. These glorified others never lasted. High school lovers don't know how to adjust to these altered landscapes.

I will smile at these men who sing their autobiographical lyrics like I know them.