CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
With his knees into his chest and his arms wrapped around his legs, Travis curled into a ball. His forehead knocked against his knees from the sobs that shook him. He hit rock bottom. He took time apart from Derek to stabilize his inner turmoil. Instead, he fell apart. Hislife imploded. His world collapsed. Everything he had – his music, his band, his future – had been ripped away from him. He was alone. No friends. No family. No boyfriend. Nothing.
The phone beckoned for him to call Derek, his rock in times of crisis, but he was too embarrassed. He couldn’t let Derek hear the hopelessness in his voice or listen to his pathetic state of despair. Hehad a disastrous future ahead of him. With a lawsuit from the label, he’d be in financial ruin. Derek would want to take care of him, and he was too proud to let that happen. He needed to take responsibility for his own bad mistakes.
He thought about making amends with Ricky, Mark and Troy, but he couldn’t. He was happy to walk away from Reckless. He had slowly come to realize thatlife on the road and on the big stage wasn’t for him. He had been happy playing in little bars and clubs. The performance anxiety of playing for tens of thousands of people and the pressure from the label proved to be too much. Which meant he didn’t have a career in music, and he had no idea what the fuck he was going to do with his life.
His poetry proved to be the tiny light inthe distant corner of his mind. No one could take that from him. It shed a splinter of hope into the bleakness. It was his saving grace. His Pandora’s box. His face was still wet with tears, but they no longer flowed. His heart, fragmented into a million pieces like crushed glass, ached and throbbed, sending pain reverberating through his limbs. He was so fucking used to it that he knew exactly whatto do.
The notebook sat in its rightful place in the center desk drawer. Biting the cap off a pen, he let the pain consume him, and then channeled all of the bullshit onto the paper. He scribbled frantically, not bothering with punctuation or capital letters. He wrote it all down. The unfair treatment from his bandmates, the way he was so fucking fed up with it, the unjustness ofthe world. His self-pity turned to anger and he wanted vengeance. Retaliation. He’d never act on it, or course, but writing it down told a damn good story.
When the final line was done, he sat back and let out a cleansing sigh. He placed the notebook back into the drawer and went to the window. He stared into the black nothingness ahead of him and it enveloped him with darkness. Heturned his back to the wall, desperate to get away from the depression in front of him, but it wouldn’t go away. He sunk to the floor, fists against his temples, and sobbed. Hope slipped from the little Pandora’s box in his head, leaving him with absolutely nothing.
