Tom Waits must smile sometimes as well, I hope

It’s been one week, two days and fourteen hours since I’ve seen you and each day has passed like molasses. Cold molasses. The kind that drips by the millimeters per minute and is never quite done in its descent down until it breaks off from the source and falls.

There was nothing quite remarkable about the last time I saw you. At least it wasn’t apparent at the time. We sat in your room and listened to records. An A+ Saturday night according to me, but I’m not picky about such things. You played some Dylan, which was cliche to play, but fine since your fingers rested the album on the LP player, and then some Tom Waits which was also hipster cliche but I knew you liked for only the right reasons.

During the music we drank coffee mixed with knock-off Kahlua and finished each other sentences. You were really into Melville then, (are you still?), and I guessed that it was because Billy Budd, Sailor was much more a religious story than anyone gave it credit and when you looked up, again, slow, like molasses, we both caught each other in a smile.

But now it’s been a week, going on two, since we so much as said hello to each other and I can’t help but wonder what you think of Billy Budd now, if you still place records onto the player with the same care, and if you still have a smile left for me.