You whistle in your sleep. It is often quite loud but I do not mind. You attain many hours of sleep every night and it is enough to sustain you. It is enough to bring you back with regularity so that you may play with your small light machine that makes noise and makes you laugh and vibrates faintly while your nose is whistling.
You begin to have another woman over on occasion and you share your bed with her and you laugh together at the noises from your small machines and sometimes you make your own noises. Your voice is melodic when you are with her and you are both happy and excited by one another.
The woman visits more often and I hear you in another room with loud noises both pleasant and angry. She howls and I hear pounding and thrumming and muffled talk between these noises. Sometimes other people are there and you are loud with them as well and the noise is greater and less pleasant. They are not welcome in this room like she is. This room is for you and her and the small machine and the noises you bring with you.
Months pass and you and the other woman are here less often. You laugh and play and love and make noise when you are here but everything is much quieter. On days you are home you and the woman talk of making noise in Ann Arbor or Grand Rapids or someday Detroit. You share long evenings with notepads making one another gasp at what the other has written. You are getting far less sleep that usual.
One day the woman asks if I work and you do not answer this but say that I am vintage and a gift from someone not here any longer. It is someone you loved but whom you cannot speak to now. The woman says I am slow but you ignore this and you are asleep and she listens to your whistling and then sleeps too.
There is one night where you are home very late with the woman and you are very clumsy and very happy. You laugh and undress each other and make love and then sleep for a very long time. Her small machine vibrates many times that night but you both ignore it. In the afternoon you are very excited by something on yours. You and the woman are hugging each other and the noises you have both been making are now coming out of the small machine.
Months pass and you and the woman are gone for long periods of time and I do not know where. When you are home you are awake very late and sleep very late too. One day you and the woman are making noise in the other room and then you are not. The muffled talk is much louder until it is as unpleasant as her howling. Your voices are unmelodic and hurting the other. Then there is the close of a door and it is silent until you begin to sob. You do not come into my room that night but I know you are home because there is noise from the small machine. But there is no laughter.
That following night you are pacing in my room and saying angry things into your small machine but I do not know why. Your face is red and wet and you throw the small machine onto your bed and it does not make you laugh tonight. You do not close your eyes this night and you do not whistle and the woman is not in your bed. The small machine vibrates softly and you ignore it as if you were asleep.
It is morning and you are filled with emotions and move very little. You hold the small machine but the noise from it does not make you laugh and so you put it back down. Your face is wet again and you stare at a sunless wall. It is a long time before you look at me as if you are remembering something or someone.
You sniff and sit up and you reach for me and then I hear my static and my noise. I emit noise like your small machine but mine is also somewhere inside you and you are smiling and listening to the voices and melodies with recognition and excitement. You laugh and now you are holding me in your hands and watching my needle shift closer to a place you remember from long before I was here. At this place is a hard and unpleasant noise but it is pleasant to you. There is a woman yelling and many unsavory chords and angry pounding similar to the pounding and yelling you made with the woman. The needle moves back to the more pleasant noise and you whisper that dad always liked this song but you hated it. This is a lie because you are very happy thinking of this person and their noise.
This is everything to you in this moment. I am everything to you in this moment. You are smiling and then you are crying. A new noise begins and you are bobbing your head and howling terribly along with it. You put me back down and are silent and staring forward. You look at the small machine that has been vibrating for many hours and then you lay down and stare at the ceiling but it is not with despair. You begin to hum and throw your arms in the air as if you are hitting something. Your arms are long and lean as his was and you are punching the air and then the bed and then you are up on your feet and in the other room and there is much fiercer pounding. It is confident. Noisier. Like his.
Your noise fills the house and the small machine continues to vibrate until its battery is fully depleted.
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