I wonder how long a love like that remains buried beneath your skin—woven into your breath, settled in your bones, refusing to let go no matter how far you run.
Does it live in your soul not as pain, but as a song that hums beneath everything you do, even when you swear you’ve moved on?
The longer I look at them, the deeper they cut, like reading a song someone else wrote about my life, except they got every lyric exactly right and every pause lined up with the beats of my regrets.
She lives in my soul, even though it hurts.Pain I never dealt with because I self-medicated with booze, drugs, and sex.
I’ve spent years building walls around this—around her—pretending the silence between us was mutual, necessary, and safer.
But those lines?They blew right through the barricade.They stripped everything away until there was nothing left but the truth I’ve been choking on for years.
Kit Dempsey wasn’t just my sky.She was my sun—blinding, scorching, too much and never enough—and my moon, always there even when I couldn’t see her, tugging at me in ways I didn’t understand until she was already gone.
She was gravity and noise and all the quiet between.
Kit was the inhale before every note and the exhale after the last chord.She embodied every rhythm I couldn’t explain, every silence that felt too loud when she entered a room.She was the pulse that shaped every song I ever wrote, even when I didn’t mean for it to happen.
Kit was the only person who ever looked at me and saw more than I was expected to be, more than the prodigy, the project, or the boy with the perfect posture and the thousand-yard stare.
She saw me, and somehow, without saying much, she made it clear that she understood everything I couldn’t find the words to say.
It was always like that with her.A closeness that defied explanation, a connection that felt like it had existed long before either of us were born.She’s younger than me, but we grew up so close that it never felt like there was space between us—not really.
Our lives orbited each other before we even understood what that meant, and by the time we figured it out, it was already too late to untangle anything.Kit was always there, just a room away, a piano bench away, a breath away.And from the beginning, she was electric.Brilliant.
She was unreachable in that beautiful, maddening way that makes you want to chase someone just to keep breathing.
Her mother, Ethel Price, was the catalyst.She embodied everything my father wanted in a teacher—classically trained, deeply respected in every circle that mattered to him, with the kind of résumé that made him believe she could mold me into something extraordinary.But more than that, she was someone he could keep close, someone he thought he could control.
What he didn’t realize was that Ethel couldn’t be controlled.She had her own rhythm, her way of moving through the world—equal parts grace and grit, with a spine built on patience and an eye that missed nothing.He trusted her in a way he rarely trusted anyone, which meant I was handed over to her like some precious instrument he expected her to fine-tune and send back ready for the spotlight.
But Ethel didn’t just train me.She took me in.She listened when I didn’t know how to speak, watched me like she memorized every version of who I might become.She was nurturing but never coddled me.She stripped me down to my nerves and rebuilt me—note by note, breath by breath—not to impress my father, but because she believed I was worth the effort.She taught with her hands and her heart.Her corrections were firm but never cruel.She saw music in me before I did.She gave me discipline, yes, but she also gave me permission—to feel, to question, to become.
And Kit?
Kit was always nearby, just close enough to brush against, always half a room away, curled around the piano bench like she’d been born into it.She’d be practicing her pieces in the next room, humming through transitions, correcting my posture with a smirk and a lifted brow like she already knew everything I didn’t.She was smaller than me, younger by a year and some change, but she never played like it.She matched me, competed with me, challenged me—beat for beat, breath for breath—without ever trying to.
We were both prodigies, two kids wound too tight by adults who needed us to be perfect.But where I was rigid and burning out, Kit moved like music was stitched into her blood—fluid, effortless, fucking radiant.Sometimes, I hated her for that ease.But I mostly worshipped her for it too.
Now I’m wondering if the only reason my father tolerated Connor Dempsey was because he needed Ethel.She was part of the plan to shape me into ...I don’t even know exactly what my father expected from me.But when she died, the plan collapsed, and my parents, who had never been particularly involved in my emotional well-being, barely noticed.
They didn’t ask where I went every day after school—or the weekends.They didn’t care that I was disappearing.Which worked out, because I didn’t want to be found.All I wanted was to be near Kit.
I started spending all my time at her house.In her room.In the quiet places where grief and companionship hung in the air, and neither of us knew how to speak about it.I’d sit beside her on the floor, my back against her dresser, listening to her breathe through her tears.I’d hold her when she couldn’t hold herself together—as if I could somehow keep all her sorrow from spilling out.
Sometimes—when it got too quiet, when the grief started to fill the walls, when it became something neither of us knew how to handle—I’d reach for my guitar and let my fingers do what my mouth couldn’t.I’d play something to remind us we were still here, still breathing, still tethered to something bigger than the ache sitting between us.
Music became our language, and silence became our home.We didn’t talk about Ethel much.We didn’t talk about anything, really.We existed inside it, breathing the same air, orbiting the same grief, trying to survive it without admitting we were drowning.
I was thirteen and loved her with an intensity I didn’t have language for yet.Not just in the innocent way kids are supposed to care for each other.No, it was deeper than that.It had roots.It curled beneath my skin and settled in my bloodstream.My love for her pulsed behind my ribs.It was overwhelming, consuming, and utterly without logic.
It was soul-deep and restless.It felt like we had been stitched together long before we were born—soulmates who hadn’t yet learned the language for what they were, who didn’t know how to carry what they felt or what it would one day become.
She became the center of my orbit without even trying.Just by existing.By breathing beside me.By letting me see her when she broke.And I never once asked her to move.I didn’t want distance.I didn’t want detachment, maturity, or whatever the hell adults think kids should want at thirteen.I wanted proximity.I wanted her laugh when it cracked through her tears.I wanted to carry her grief just so I could feel useful.I wanted to protect her.
And maybe that’s what made it so hard.No one else was there to help us with our grief and loss.It was just the two of us, bruised and grieving, trying to pretend we were strong enough to hold our own pain and each other without cracking wide open.I lost Ethel, but my parents were also in the middle of their first separation.I was beginning to learn what being left behind really meant.
Suddenly, I became acutely aware that I could lose it all.That realization—that at any moment, without warning, everything could disappear—stuck with me.Branded itself into me.
