He stood silently, afraid to move. He heard those tones, the beginning of that one song, one of the most beautiful songs ever created, the musical embodiment of three years of soaring feelings of love, rejection, jealousy. Feelings of hurting, sadness, depression, suicide. His fingers killed the cigarette he had smoked, and reached immidiately for another one. After all this time, listening, just listening, was still a struggle.
He stood completely still as her voice soared with intensity, staring out at the fading light of the summernight, and realized that she was watching him, searching his face. “You wanna talk about it?…”
He shook his head, with a sigh he muttered that he'd talked enough about this subject. Far too much.

She reached out to him, pulled him to the floor where she sat cross legged in the balcony doorframe, and he sat opposite her. She lit her own cigarette. Her smoke whispered soft dreams of longing and care, and he realized that he loved this song, not because of the emotions that had become connected to it, but despite them. He had loved the song far before meeting his loves; he wouldn't let anyone or anything ruin it for him.

After a moment's silence he broke it with a calm low voice: “It's funny how you connect things, feelings, to the things you love. Nothing can ever be without meaning, without connections to your own experiences. But you can choose them for yourself, what each thing represents. I've watched people leave my entire life. People always end up leaving, people always fail you in the end. But some things can be constant. Some things you can rely on. And I can always rely on myself. The world is what you decide it to be, you shape it, it doesn't shape or control you.”

He smiled and paused, looked at the sky for a moment more before turning back to her, to those amazingly dark and mysterious, yet sparkling and joyous blue eyes of hers and continued: "I could fall into your eyes and never come out again, they could hold me forever. How can so much experience, bitter experience, so much sadness and sorrow, belong to eyes that flutter with such innocence? … My tattoo says Serendipity, it means that there is fate that hovers over us, a plan of what will happen to us all. But I have to believe that within that fate there is the chance of us shaping it, bending it so that we are what we are and become what we should become. And that we decide what we should be. When I can't believe that, sadness grips me and holds me, until someone reminds me that there is hope, and that I should believe it. What else is there?

A calm peace granted him a silent serenity as he sighed and finished his cigarette, then reached forward and kissed her.

She was another love, and with her he had another song. Perhaps that song would too, later, become riddled with sorrow and regret.
But not yet.