How hard can it be?
Sleep doesn’t come.
I try everything—the meditation app my therapist recommended, the breathing exercises, counting backwards from a thousand. Nothing works. Every time I close my eyes, I’m somewhere else. Somewhere years ago.
We’re sitting on the hood of my truck at the edge of town, seventeen and nineteen and too young to know what we’re promising. She’s got her bare feet on the bumper, a jar of sweet tea balanced on her knee, and she’s naming constellations she’s making up.That one’s the Runaway Bride. That one’s the Boy Who Sings Too Loud. And that one—see the three in a row?—that’s the Pier Where Everything Started.
I’d laughed. Told her those weren’t real constellations.
They’re real to us,she’d said. Like that settled it. Like the two of us agreeing on something was enough to make it true.
Then there’s the other memory. The one I try not to touch. Her apartment in Asheville, the second time around. We were twenty-seven and supposed to know better, but she’d opened the door and it was like no time had passed at all. She’d made dinner—burned the garlic bread, laughed about it, eaten it anyway. We’d talked until two in the morning about everything except the thing that mattered, which was that I was about to leave for a three-month tour and she was looking at me like she already knew how it ended.
I’d woken up the next morning and she was gone. Just a note on the pillow.I’m sorry. I can’t do this again.
I never understood which part she couldn’t do. The loving me, or the watching me leave.
At two in the morning, I give up on sleep and pad to the kitchen for water. The house is silver with moonlight, all those big windows turning the living room into an aquarium. I stand at the sink and stare out at the ocean, dark and restless.
My phone is on the counter where I left it. The screen shows a missed text from hours ago—my manager, sent while I was lying in bed pretending the ceiling hadanswers.
Diane:Just checking in. Label wants to know about new material. Any progress?
It’s two in the morning. I should wait until a reasonable hour. I text back anyway.
Me:Working on it.
Three dots appear almost instantly, which means either Diane never sleeps or she’s been waiting for me to surface. Probably both.
Diane:They’re getting antsy, Levi. You’ve been dark since summer. People are starting to talk.
I know what “talk” means. Washed up. One-hit wonder. Lost his edge. I’ve heard the whispers at industry events, seen the speculative articles online. “Has Levi Cole Lost His Magic?” one blog asked last month, complete with a timeline of my declining album sales and a poll where 47% of respondents said I should “take a permanent break.”
Forty-seven percent. Nearly half.
Me:Tell them I’m working on something different. Something real.
Diane:Different how?
Me:I don’t know yet. But it’s coming.
Another lie. Or maybe a hope dressed up as a promise. I’m not sure there’s a difference anymore.
I set the phone face-down and grab my jacket from the hook by the door. If I can’t sleep, I might aswell walk. The beach has always been where I think best, ever since I was a kid sneaking out of my dad’s house to sit on the sand and dream about a life bigger than Twin Waves.
Funny how that bigger life led me right back here.
The night air is cool and salty, spring still fighting with the memory of winter. I take the wooden steps down to the sand and start walking toward the pier, hands shoved in my pockets, head full of noise.
Dean’s words keep circling back.Maybe it’s that remembering hurt too much.
Is that what happened? Did she spend ten years trying to forget me the way I spent ten years writing songs about her?
The thing about songwriting is that it’s supposed to be cathartic. You take the pain, you shape it into melody, you give it away to strangers who turn it into their own stories. That’s the magic—transformation. Taking something that hurts and making it beautiful.
But I’ve been writing about Delilah for so long that the pain has calcified. It’s not raw anymore. It’s just...there. A permanent ache I’ve learned to live with, like a bad knee or a scar that never fully healed.
Maybe that’s why I can’t write anythingnew. I’ve been mining the same wound for a decade, and there’s nothing left to dig up.
