It’s midnight at the karaoke bar. But I’m thinking it always is. Here, we have to pay with secrets. I’ve told you everything already so you put in two for me. I try not to think of the secrets nestled in the fishbowl, overlapping each other with their rips and folds.
We look in every room. Sometimes it’s Selena singing in the rooms. Sometimes it’s me. Sometimes it’s Selena and me, sewed together and fighting over the microphones. Sometimes it’s You singing with somebody else. I hate that one.
We enter a room together. You are not singing. I must sing for you. There are fifty thousand songs to choose from and I type in the one I know the best. You get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the song. I’m offended but I keep going. I know I have to keep singing in order to get myself out of here. I know I have to be okay with wherever it is You go. I know I have to be okay with who You want to be. So, I sing. I sing and I sing. I can only hear the music. I have to trust that I know it. That I can hit all of the notes. There is no applause. There is no one else singing along. The Selenas do not come in, impressed with my range. The Evil Me doesn’t ridicule me. There really is no reason to be here. What does it matter if no one is watching me? If no one is cheering me on? I close my eyes. I am crying, which is humiliating, but it’s not like anyone can see. There are no windows. There are no mirrors. I have no idea what I look like. I have no idea how I sound.
When Selena sang
“como me duele,” she meant
us; how it hurts us.
But before that comes the cry.
The ay-ay-ay.
That wail that can only come from
sad drunk men standing outside
of houses, their wives at the window
with their arms folded or women holding
photographs of the sons
who never came back from the war
and children now, being ripped from embraces,
watching their mothers get farther and farther away
from them. Selena cried for us, but first she waited.
There was that pause.
And that space between her and us.
That all-knowing delay?
That space between the stage and the floor?
The buzzing in the air?
The desire, the beckoning?
That is where we want to live.