Like it’s daring me.
The apartment hums with loneliness.Just the rain hissing soft against the windows.Seattle cries in the morning.Like the whole city is hungover and trying to hide it.
I listen too long.Footsteps above me—my neighbors are pacing again, their anxious rhythm pounding through the ceiling.A bus wheezes on the street below.Someone yells.Someone else slams a door.
This?This is what I gave up the stage for?
Empty days, countless seconds without having anything to do, and the silence of my guitar that doesn’t want to be played.I shut my eyes like maybe if I don’t see the world, it won’t see me back.
Like I’m not being stalked by my fucking mind.Hunted and haunted.Both.
There’s something inside me clawing, begging for release.It wants a drink.A line.A fucking bullet—anything that numbs.Something to rip away the pressure behind my eyes and the bile clawing its way up my throat.Something to drown the shame.
I tell myself to breathe, to move.To start the day like I’m not unraveling at the seams.
I leave the bed because lying there makes it worse.I stretch, kind of.Go through the motions of something they made us do in group—breathe, reach, hold.It’s not yoga.It’s not anything I used to do.Not even close.But it’s something.And right now, that has to be enough.
I shuffle to the kitchen in boxers and a T-shirt.The floor’s too clean.There’s no ashtray full of butts or sticky bottle caps.No crushed pizza box with Sharpie lyrics scrawled across it in a blackout haze.
No proof of the old me.
Just me.And this quiet.And the itch under my skin that tells me I’m not okay.
I open the fridge and stare at nothing.A half-empty bottle of flat club soda.A lemon that’s gone to shit.Leftover Chinese in a Styrofoam box that I don’t trust.No beer.No whiskey.Nothing.
I close the fridge and grab a protein bar off the counter—some godawful peanut butter protein bar one of the counselors shoved into my duffel on my last day at rehab.It tastes like poorly flavored cardboard, but I eat it anyway.Because that’s what I’m supposed to do.Fuel the body.Stay upright.Stay clean.
I boil water in the kettle that whistles too fucking loud, then pour it over instant coffee because I haven’t figured out how to make real coffee yet without fucking it up or burning my hand.The French percolator is a joke, or I’m too fucking useless to understand it.
I sit on a stool, setting my mug on the marble counter.While sipping the coffee, I stare at nothing and try to ignore the blinking light on the answering machine across the room.
It blinks red.Someone called, left a message hoping I’ll respond.I don’t check.I just watch it blink like a warning light I’ve learned to ignore.
There’s a pile of unopened mail on the counter.Half of it’s addressed to Jordan Smith; I’m guessing he lived here before me.I should do something with it.Maybe I’ll let my agent figure that out—if I still have an agent.
Who cares?I should look into that soon, but definitely not today.I take another bite of the protein bar.It flakes in my hand like dry mud.I try hard not to remember last night.Try not to think about the guitar in the living room gathering dust.Try not to want anything I can’t have.
By ten-thirty, I’m already pacing.I flick on the radio, but everything sounds clean.Too clean.Pop hits from Matchbox Twenty and Hanson.Fucking “MMMBop.”I can’t listen to that bubblegum shit right now.I turn the dial until I land on a station playing something dirty.Nirvana.Live.The unplugged one.
Kurt’s voice drags across the room and tears through everything that’s tried to patch me up.That raw rasp.That final stretch of sorrow before the silence took him.It makes my chest twist.Something shifts under my ribs, deep and jagged, like a song I forgot how to finish.
I miss it.
The studio.The dive bars—the stadiums.The ache in my fingertips from too many sets, too many encores.I even miss the shitty hotel mattresses and the manager yelling that I missed another photo shoot.
You don’t realize how loud your life was until it goes quiet.
Now I have whole days that don’t belong to anyone.I’m supposed to fill them with journaling, AA meetings, and the gym.Instead, I’m thinking about how many ways I’ve fucked up and if I can make it up to anyone.
I can’t remember the last time I wrote a song that didn’t come from somewhere soaked in tequila or fury.
I grab my guitar.It’s leaning against the wall like it’s waiting to be picked last.I hold it, fingers stiff.I strum a chord.It sounds like nothing.
No crowd to lie to.No amp to scream into.No tour bus rumbling down the coast.
Just me.
Sober.Bored.Angry.
