But then I broke everything.
And now?All I have is the music we never played and her voice curling through my bloodstream like a goddamn drug.I press pause.But the silence isn’t any safer.
Kit’s still in it.
And I’m still the idiot who can’t stop playing her.
She meant everything she said or composed—every fucking word.
Kit Dempsey never said things just to fill space—when she spoke, it was a pulse.A truth.A challenge.And I took it like gospel.I learned how to hold a note without ever touching the strings, how to let silence speak louder than sound.She taught me how to ache in quiet—how to carry pain in my chest without letting it bleed out.
She was young.But she taught me not only how to feel the music, but also how to draw it out from the depths of my soul.Maybe that’s what I need—more likewhoI need.Kit dragging me back from the inferno while I fight my demons.
I find “Fast Car” and play it.It fucking undoes me.
Not in a crash-and-burn, all-at-once way.It’s slower and more brutal.I’m unraveling from the inside out, like memory dragging its nails along my spine, making sure I feel every inch.
The guitar begins, soft and precise, and I swear my pulse syncs to it.My throat tightens.My grip goes numb.The air becomes too still.Tracy’s voice wraps around me with that fucking ache that’s always sounded too much like surrender.
It reminds me of that song ...one Kit asked me to create but she never sang.She never claimed it; I just took it along with many others.
That’s probably why I can’t play.Every time I touch an instrument, I think about her.I might’ve known how to duplicate the notes as I heard them, but I never learned to create my own without her—or alcohol in the absence of her.
Suddenly, I can’t breathe right.
Now I’m sitting in this dim room with a playlist I can’t turn off and a memory that feels like it’s got its hands wrapped around my neck, not hard enough to stop me—but just enough to make me feel it.
There’s no fixing this.No lyric that can rewrite what I broke.
Just the realization that I fucking break everything hits me hard.I fucking take and disregard.This is what the therapist mentioned when we discussed my upbringing.My parents made me believe I was entitled to the world and never realized I had to work for anything.Free is never free.Everything comes at a price.
More than ever it feels as if I need absolution—or a playlist for that.Something scraped together in minor chords and gospel undertones, something that can hold the ache without trying to heal it.
Maybe I should talk to Kit, apologize, beg ...but I’m not ready to find her yet.Not until I can find the version of myself who won’t flinch at the memory of when she looked at me like I was her fucking everything.The version where I took and never gave anything—not even a thank you.
The version who believed he could be that for her.Who didn’t ruin it all.
I reach for the guitar.
My fingers brush across the strings, cautious, as if they might recoil if I press too hard.The neck feels wrong in my hands.Off.Like I borrowed it from someone who still knows how to hold things without breaking them.Someone more whole.
Still, I pull it into my lap.
I don’t tune it.Don’t even check if it’s in key.
I just try to play.
I just need a single note that makes sense.The notes come, but they’re uneven.It’s just air, nerves, and the sound of someone trying not to come apart.
The sound is fractured, scraped hollow.It stumbles out of me like grief set to melody—tentative and trembling.It’s not a song.It might be just noise and broken feelings.
But it seems that it’s all I’ve got.And right now, that has to be enough.
It sounds like something trying to remember how to exist.
I close my eyes, and there she is.Kit standing there, breaking from the inside.I saw it.I fucking caused it.The way she crumbled, like she hated me for being the asshole who couldn’t give her what she wanted.I wasn’t any different.
I strum once.Then again.Let the sound settle around me like a confession.Then I speak into the stillness, not even sure who I’m talking to.
