Southern-bound trickery: That guitar

Never was there a more dedicated dreamer. My old guitar case was torn and threadbare, held together by the remnants of hinges and old bits of casing. Covered in stickers, it stood out among my belongings as the most telling bit of the my delayed adolescent years. The guitar and case were a gift from my mother. She once played and crooned and softly strummed, schooled by old folk books and "teach yourself guitar" manuals. But this she gave up with the fading voice of my father as she succumbed to the maternal lifestyle. As I sat outside my snug apartment and thought on her dilemma, her face came to me as distinct as the cracked brown paint on the steel pole to my right. The face didn't speak, it just smiled that satisfied smile of motherly love, which was joyous enough to melt my heart like a pat of butter on a stack of pancakes, maple syrup and all. Tasting that sweetness, I was invigorated.

Then I started playing. I quickly wearied of it and decided it'd be best if I stopped, but I couldn't. I was in that mood where you don't want to do exactly what you're doing, but it's much easier to just continue on doing it anyway. I wasn't very good. My poor fingers could only extract so much talent from such small reservoirs. It was actually quite cacophonous to tell the truth. The smiling image of my mother disappeared instantly, replaced by the glare of the nighttime lights above the laundry room just past our door. And believe me, those lights had no smile, no love or comfort.

It was still fairly warm out. In the distance I could hear the shrill sounds of the excitement that existed everywhere except the very place that I sat. I was ready to lay my sticky forehead on the hard wooden body and try to relax, but at that moment the night caught together and swirled as a black typhoon, draining deep down into the soundhole of my guitar. It churned about for a minute, and then spat itself back out into thousands of tiny twinkling pieces of fluorescent glass, anchored into their framework and eternally winking down at me. I tried winking back for a bit, but became frustrated with my right eye, which winks far better than my left, and at that I decided I should fall asleep. Anyway, what did it matter? I was home alone. The mattress was cold and inviting and the fan was on.