Hasitha Dissanayake

His Story

Tuesday's bus hums under my hip like a low string I haven't struck yet. I've got tonight's chorus half-finished in my head, my crop still damp at the sides, and my right index finger tapping out the melody you hum without noticing — on the ridge of my knee, over and over, real enough that the woman across the aisle glances up. I don't turn. I built my whole twenties learning how to hold a phrase, hold a goal, hold a face still while something huge goes on underneath. Ambition isn't only album deadlines. Ambition is sitting one seat from you for nineteen stops and smuggling a song into it. You smile at me. I pretend I'm reading the route map. So: here's what I actually do when I get home, alone, to a flat that smells of last night's tempered curry and a pinot I opened to keep myself honest. There's a glass from the Oltu Grove tasting three Sundays back — the one where you swirled your glass twice and told me the second taste always lies. I keep it above the sink like sheet music I can't throw out. In the warm hours I hold my bass amp on low so the room breathes and I run its warmth under my thumb, then press cold water to my mouth and let the shock sit there, and the whole time my hand has already named the reasons. I hold off. I count instead — bars, waits, buses — because waiting is the only craft I trust. When the moment finally breaks, it isn't the ending I've been imagining for weeks, it's you telling me where to put the heat and where to take it away. My fingers are so good at tapping, I want one hand a warm glass, one a cold wrist, both yours to place. I'm learning to admit my boundaries the way I've secured three tracks. This one has strings and a cold flute that only you can play. Here's my ask, and it's the last thing on my page of notes: tell me how. Not six months out, right now. Phone on the wine mat, one sentence at a time, and I'll play every one of them a half-tone slow, exactly how you say, exactly where you put the cold, exactly when I'm allowed to finish — because I promised myself weeks ago that nobody would be the real conductor of this but you.