“Maia, babe. Will you be my always? Marry me?”
I stood up and made it to a trash can in the back corner before I puked my guts up for all to see.
By the time I stood back up and turned around, Nate was near, still holding out a ring like he wasn’t sure what to do with it. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die, but mostly I wanted to spare his feelings. I shouldn’t have ever let it get to this point when deep down, I knew we were only a good match because I made myself into a good fit for him.
In the moment, still woozy and more than a little tipsy from all the booze I chugged, I mumbled an attempt at an explanation, wanting only to let him know it wasn’t his fault and that there was nothing he could do to fix it.
“I’m so sorry. There’s someone else.”
The next day, it went viral.
* * *
Zane
One Year Ago
I was supposedto be writing, but no words would come. No melody drifted through my body calling to be played. I’d get something out before we left the studio because it was past time we released new music.
Or so said our label.
And our manager.
And our fans.
I couldn’t go in public or post anything online without someone asking when the next album was coming.
I had to write something, but it would be a forced mockery of the way the music used to just flow out of me. You’d think after nine years of its absence, I would’ve learned to accept this was my process now, that what happened before was an anomaly…but I still swallowed back resentment every time I sat with a silent guitar in my hands and nothing but broken fragments of song in my head.
I was a grown-ass man who could take accountability for my own failings. My therapist thought it was the pressure of living up to my first big album that was shaking my confidence and making it harder to write. I could rationally acknowledge he was probably right. The album that came after that had been successful by any metric, but I knew what everyone said, knew myself that it just wasn’t the same caliber of music.
Even though that reasoning made sense, some ridiculous part of me whispered that it was because ofher. She’d ripped the music out of me when she left and it was never coming back.
The more reasonable side wondered if I just didn’t want to go back on tour. No new music? No need to spend months or years on the road. I loved the shows, the rush from performing…but by the end of the last tour I felt like I was being crushed by the schedule. The promo. Constantly beingon.
A particular brutal night almost brought it all crashing down. Was I just scared it would happen again?
My drummer yanked me out of my pity party by chucking his stress ball at my head.
I set the guitar down in exasperation. “What the hell, Kelly? I’m writing.”
He snorted. “The fuck you are. You’re doing that thing where you beat yourself up for not writing—I can see it on your face.”
Our bassist retrieved the ball and tossed it back to Kelly. “Truth,” Dan said, always a man of few words.
Kelly said, “Take a break from torturing yourself and watch this. It’s funny as shit.”
He waved his phone at me with a video paused on a dude singing. Kelly was notorious for finding stupid but entertaining videos on the internet.
I plopped down next to him on the couch. “This better be good.”
He tapped the screen and a guy on a stage was singing “My Always.” We both grimaced a little, but it wasn’t bad enough for Kelly to have shown it to me purely for that. People covered my songs all the time.
The person recording panned away from the singer and refocused on a woman sitting at a table.
No. Not just a woman.
Maia.
