I call her my midnight whisperer, though I’ve never heard her voice. Once, I called her my whisperer from the past, because she had named me her Future Man. She lives inside my head and Three Doors Down. Not literally, but in the way a song lives there. That song.

It never belonged to me until the radio caught me one night, stalling me on a stretch of highway that asked nothing of me but the hum of tires and the glow of the dashboard. It is mine now, my playlist for when she isn’t there to fill the gaps inside me.

Gaps I expand. Nights stretched into morning, waiting for her light to cross into mine. Checking for her at one in the afternoon, because that is when she says good morning.

When her day fades and meets my midnight, she offers one line from Iris. I answer with the chorus Three Doors Down. Here Without You. Babe.

Sometimes I sigh. Sometimes I say hush—because the song has to fade before I can.

“How was your day?” one of us asks.

Bittersweet Symphony.

“Ah. That bad?”

“Not bad. Just…endless violins.”

I’m hers when meetings dissolve into meaningless mumble, stretches of words that can’t entice me, can’t drag me back into a conversation of I care or I don’t.

I start tugging at the worn tab on that file I’ve tucked away in the corner of my mind. It had her name once, but now it’s scribbled out and stamped Nothing to see here. The song starts on its own.

A soft acoustic guitar. The line about a hundred days, and growing older. The cello. The aching voice. Hoping no one notices my sigh.

Every gap inside me belongs to her.

The cello gets me every time. The bow takes me to an image. Her bridge, then mine. Perfect symmetry, arched like twins, a bow stretched across a body of water.

No bridge can span the body of water between us.

And then she purrs.

I wake, startled, in a room of faces, all of them waiting for my opinion. The hum of the projector, the smell of burnt coffee.

“It’s a bad idea,” I say, and then explain why.

We both know it’s a bad idea, but we live with it. Because living without it feels like not living at all.

“I feel guilty for wanting,” we’ll admit. None of us is in a position to judge.

Her heart, like mine, belongs to someone else. We admire the equal beauty in that — the way two anchored things can still drift toward one another.

I’m not missing anything in my life. There is no void to fill. But you enhance my life.

I answer: You are wonderful tonight.

And I’ll ask her how she expects me to sleep. Or even want to.

She never answers. Just returns the question.

Or purrs.

Her purrs swell into cellos and violins.

Here Without You. Babe.

We didn’t mean to.

We just answered the chorus of Iris.

Of course, they wouldn’t understand.

And sometimes you’re made to be broken.

So she’ll know who I am.