I plucked each string lightly, listening, correcting, listening again.
Spinning pegs. Tiny metallic creaks. Soft humming vibrations against my palms. It felt like waking something up. Maybe wakingmeup.
Once the tuning felt right, I positioned my hands. Left on the neck. Right arm around the body. The guitar cupped against me like an old friend returning after a long, painful absence.
I took a breath. Strummed. It came out wrong. Thin. Unsteady. Like my hands had forgotten what my soul always knew.
“Come on,” I whispered to myself, throat thick. “You know this.”
I adjusted my grip and tried again. Second chord—better. Third—almost music. Fourth—the hint of something real, something warm, something like belonging.
By the time I ran through a simple progression, muscle memory started sliding back into place, my fingers remembering the dance even if my heart hadn’t quite caught up yet.
The sound filled the cabin in small, soft waves, and for the first time since LA, I felt something loosen deep inside my chest.
Not joy. Not yet. But possibility.
Like maybe, just maybe, the part of me that made music wasn’t gone.
Just waiting.
I started with something easy—an old Emmylou Harris song I'd learned when I was twelve. My voice cracked on the first line, rough from disuse and thick with emotion I wasn't prepared for. But I kept going, pushing through the cracks, finding the melody like following breadcrumbs home.
"In the hour of not quite rain..."
The words were whispers at first, then stronger, though tears were streaming down my face. This was who I'd been before LA, before the machine, before the stalker. Just a girl with a guitar and something to say.
My whole body felt tight at first—shoulders hunched, ribs aching under old bruises, breath catching high in my throat like it didn’t trust me to use it. My fingers trembled on the strings, not from fear exactly, but from the weight of everything inside me pushing to get out.
I didn’t hear the door open, but I felt him before I saw him—Liam’s quiet steadiness settling into the room like a warm blanket. He set a glass of water on the table, then stepped back onto the porch. Not leaving. Just… giving me space to breathe. To be. To fall apart or not. Whatever I needed.
The Emmylou song ended, the last note trembling into silence. My fingers drifted automatically, finding an old progression I’d been working on months ago—before LA, before the stalker, before everything shattered.
The chords felt different now. Heavier. Rooted. Like they’d been waiting for this exact moment to mean something new.
There’d been lyrics once—half-formed lines scribbled on hotel stationery at 3 AM. Mississippi. Hurricanes. Things that chased you even when you ran.
“Mississippi mud on my rental car…”
The words rose in my throat on their own. Soft at first. Tentative. But real.
My chest squeezed painfully, like the lyrics were pulling splinters out of old wounds. My hands steadied. My breath deepened. Heat pricked behind my eyes, that hot-warning kind that meant something inside me was loosening, cracking, breaking free.
“Looking for home in every dive bar, every neon sign, every fallen star…”
The ache in my ribs didn’t matter. The tremor in my fingers didn’t matter. The fear lodged under my sternum didn’t matter.
Because for the first time in weeks, my voice felt likemineagain—not manufactured, not perfect, not a polished product to be sold.
Raw. Cracked. Human.
“But home ain’t a place you can find on a map,
It’s the arms that catch you when you collapse,
It’s the voice that calls you back from the dark,
It’s the safe place to rest your battered heart.”
