Mandolin

She pushed her red bangs back and left the mandolin on the floor, went outside herself, outside her room, and into the forest. In her house she wrote the song about the young man who ditched her that evening. She wrote it under the sun, and now the moon was out as she stepped on wet grass. The forest was nothing; there was no real noise to speak of, other than a helicopter. The helicopter kept chopping like her thoughts, which could cut someone. The young man in the end ditched out, and she felt violated that she had written a song but she knew she didn’t really ruin her fingers, because when she touched the mandolin magic occurred, and she could smoke a cigarette now in the wake of her exercise. He could never write a song but they came to her without interruption. Why did he have any power over her? She thought his kiss was just normal. He wore flannel and could talk confidently on dark matters—o so maybe that was like songwriting. Now she was under the dark of the wet trees and the helicopter was gone, not even a cut up whisper. She mused that she was a cat, a red cat. Did they have red cats? she wondered. Of course they had red cats. Cats did simple routine stuff in a house setting: ate cans of wet food and nibbled dry food; were pristine about their litter boxes; followed a clock like the clock on her wall. But what did cats do in the wild? Like in this forest, for example. What kind of time did a cat follow? Moon and sun? What did a cat sense, pursue? And when had one better hide or wait? She wondered how crazy, how scary did life really get in the wild. But here she was, away from humanity. She stopped musing because she could not freak out. She was already freaking out about how dejected she felt; it was always this way. After so much hope and anticipation, the songs outlasted the inspiration and then came feelings of absolute failure; she stopped. She stopped, she breathed. She purred and reset herself: a stray cat at night, without the least conveniences of the household, the familiar or friendly, but alert to see and sense. A wilderness. Drops of water fell from leaves on her nose. How did love reach one here on a night like this? She didn’t have the neighborhood’s fears about rape and murder. She was completely open and she waited thinking her mandolin was safe at home, but the night around her grew way larger and way more instrumental than a mandolin. She set her back like a cat against a tree, quiet, alert, waiting to compose new music, without any object or even subject, but not devoid of truth, and from the nothingness of black forest. She lamented nothing but laughed only as wild animals laugh beneath the changes of sky and trees.