That’s the wound we never stop carrying around.
We avoid it, we blame it, we hate it ...but ultimately, it’s always just this—“I need to understand why I wasn’t enough.”
Sometimes, we don’t get the answer.
We just get the pain attached to the unresolved issues and the absence of therapy, which we fill with music.Music keeps us from disappearing into it.
Breakups aren’t neat.They don’t end when someone walks away.They fall apart in pieces—one playlist, one photo, one rewound message at a time.
You don’t just mourn the person.You mourn the version of yourself that believed it was going to work.The version that believed love was enough—it was forever.
It’s not.
But sometimes a song is.
Sometimes, music is the only thing that keeps your rib cage up when grief makes your spine forget how.
So, yeah.
Maybe I am a gothic banshee with a wind machine, but don’t pretend you don’t hear the same storm howling in your own chest.
DeadStrings:I hope you don’t have to see him again.
Not because you can’t handle it—you could turn that kind of pain into poetry and set the room ablaze with it.But because you shouldn’t have to.
You’ve already carried more than your share.
And honestly, some ghosts don’t deserve a second haunting.
StringTheory27:You say some ghosts don’t deserve a second haunting.
But what if we’re the ghosts?
What if we’re just two barely-exorcised heartbreaks clinging to a faulty connection and nostalgia, pretending this doesn’t already mean something?
Sorry.That got dramatic.
I blame all the Kate Bush.
But ...if we are ghosts?At least we’re haunting each other with a hell of a soundtrack.
Now go ahead, make fun of me again before I admit anything real.
ChapterTwenty-Nine
Roderick
May 8th, 1997
It’s well past two in the morning, and I still haven’t fallen asleep.I’m lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, illuminated only by the artificial glow of my laptop screen, rereading our conversation—for the third time.Maybe the fourth.Definitely the fifth.I’ve lost count.
I should close the damn thing, shut the lid, let the hard drive hum into silence, and pretend I still have a handle on this.Do something that resembles self-preservation.
I just keep reading.Line after line, like a man tracing the blueprint of a dream he knows will end badly.Her words breathe with me.They settle beneath my skin, pulse inside my throat, curl around the edge of my skin.
Each sentence sinks in as if she’s in the room, daring me to feel something I’ve worked too hard to numb.
This ...this is fucking dangerous.
