Lauren twists her lips, ‘I enjoyed that so much I think you should sing me one more. I did provide the beer,’ she says.
‘You drive a hard bargain but, true, there’s beer,’ I say.
I take a swig from my bottle and rack my brain. I don’t exactly have a big repertoire of songs I like to play and can play well. I find my eyes drifting around the room for inspiration. On the desk, one of the pictures is of a young girl standing next to a horse. She has her arms around his neck, and her lips pressed against his coat. I start to strum a G softly and follow it with A-Minor. I do my best croaky voice as I attempt to play ‘Wild Horses’ by the Rolling Stones.
As I play, Lauren lifts her phone and takes a picture of me smiling up at her. She joins in on the last few lines, and I stop singing as I want to hear her sing as I play it out. Her voice is beautiful to listen to.
‘Perfect choice. I loved the Gram Parsons version of that song growing up,’ she says. ‘My dad would play that all the time. We’d sing the chorus loudly in the truck together. That or Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash.’
‘Didn’t mean to dig up old memories,’ I say.
Lauren shakes her head. ‘Those memories are the good ones.’ She tells me about the horse and her dad, and it’s another piece of that big sky journey she began telling me about earlier. It’s the part about the things that get left behind that are not forgotten.
‘We had horses as a kid. I had this brown and white paint horse called Dakota, because it’s where my mom came from, and it reminds me of other times I suppose. I loved that horse,’ Lauren says, and she smiles sadly, and we are quiet, and we sip at our beer. It’s not uncomfortable, however, and I reach out and take her hand, and we sit there happily like that for a little while longer.
‘It must be your turn,’ I say.
‘That must be why I’m already feeling nervous.’
‘Well, we’ve had the warm-up guy. Besides, I know you have that notebook with more than one or two songs of your own. I’d love to hear one of those,’ I say.
‘So what else are you guessing?’
‘That you wrote one of Josie’s songs.’
‘It was the first one, the one about Louise sleeping in the afternoon. Josie always liked it, and we’ve played it together. I said she could have it. Writing is one thing the road is good for. You have to keep the melancholy in check and not let it get ahead of you. You can turn your solo road trip into a lyrical journey.’
‘I thought I’d committed all the song writing crimes I was ever going to, but maybe I’m not done. Enough of me, I want to hear you,’ I say.
Lauren rests her head on my shoulder for a second before lifting it. I hand her the guitar and shuffle over to give her more space on the bed. She pauses for a moment as she turns her head to look at me. She bites her lip and smiles.
‘This one is called “Fleeting Memories” and, well, yeah,’ Lauren says.
I get the impression Lauren was about to say something else only she changed her mind. I’m pretty sure I have a good idea of what it was. I feel it too, as if we’re both afraid of pushing our luck and of somehow ruining the moment. It’s as if the title of her song, these Fleeting Memories, is a question as much as anything else. We’re both wondering about this evening, and about this night. We are wondering about the part of it that is behind us, and the part of it that lies ahead, as the meter on this time we’re spending together runs down.
It is as if the evening already has a title, and a soundtrack. Or maybe it’s something else, not yet written or played. That is to say, something that might take us from here to somewhere else and, at this point, we stand in Frost territory, somewhere on the road not yet travelled. All this seems to hang in the balance as Lauren starts to play. It’s no ballad this time. The song has urgency and speed as the minutes race away.
Funny how I remember, the conversations in the flowers,
The pauses that were filled, by the stream
I admit I think of you now, someone I knew for just a few hours,
Your fleeting memory, somehow persistent.
Lauren sings with a warm, lilting voice that draws you in, and she doesn’t miss a note as her fingers float over the guitar strings.
‘Not sure I know what to say. You have a great voice and play so well. I’m insanely jealous, of course,’ I say.
‘You can say that,’ Lauren says as she steps up from the bed and rests the guitar in its case and sits back down beside me.
‘So, fleeting memories,’ I say.
‘Not quite yet,’ Lauren says, shaking her head.
I smile, as that’s my cue. I turn to her, and our lips softly touch. We start to kiss, and we fall back on the bed. The whole time, everything is unhurried, as if we’re both hanging on to our time together, cherishing each touch as we start to explore each other, stretching the night out for as long as we possibly can. We begin to undress and pull each other’s clothes off as we twist and turn and become slick with sweat and are naked, holding each other under the sheets, which twine around our bodies. I am inside her as the dark of the night starts to give way to the slow ache of dawn. It rises from the east and winds its way towards us as we lie together, almost as far west as it’s possible to be, as if our position is itself, by
