The Profundity of Bret Michaels

She'd searched for every version of the song she could find. The original was fine, she supposed. It deserved the top spot it'd earned over thirty years prior. But now, it felt corny. A punchline possessing the airways. It made her feel like her hair wasn't teased enough. Her pants were too loose. Leather was hardly appropriate in this economy. She wasn't a smoker and she didn't like dark liquor, so could she really give the original version the pensiveness it deserved? It deserved to be mulled over, to be quietly listened to in a dark room as a tortured artist took sips directly from a glass bottle and stared out the window, moonlight casting a harsh glow on the mistakes of the past.

That wasn't her. She was two kids and a cheap bottle of merlot away from being a full blown wine mom. She spent too much money at HomeGoods. Her overpriced, overly sweet coffee drinks were singlehandedly keeping her local Starbucks in business. She wore pastel colored tank tops with sayings like "Good Vibes Only" and had spent countless hours of her life working carefully to create the perfect messy bun. She thought "Live, Laugh, Love" was cheesy but was not above hanging a giant sign reading "GATHER" in the dining room.

Still, the covers of the song fell flat. They injected poppy, cheery beats where it didn't belong. The vocals were too sweet or too empty. The artists could sing it, but they didn't feel it. Not like she did.

She felt it, as they both lied silently still in the dead of night. The house was drafty and though the two complained often of the chilled air emanating from the untreated windows, they slept untouching from opposite ends of the queen sized mattress. They took turns shrugging off the other's touch. Where it started, she didn't know. Where it would end was unclear, but she silently wondered if it already had.

The song had run the rounds through her skull for a matter of days now. She knew it well enough. She could find it with ease. But she'd skirted around it. She thought she'd been simply been searching for something more palatable, but she now considered that maybe it wasn't the antiquated nature of the song she was avoiding- it was the undeniable sting of experience. Some stories, she guessed, will stick with us forever, regardless of when or where they're told.

She turned off the Real Housewives rerun playing in the background, picked up her iPhone, and tapped a few times on the screen. The strumming of an acoustic guitar filled the air surrounding her. A deep, shaky voice followed the strumming and began to tell a story with uncomfortable familiarity. She took a slow sip from her Iced Sugar Cookie Almondmilk Latte and stared out the window, the mid-day sun casting a harsh light on the implications of the future.