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Gettin' Lost

There are two types of structures in New York City: those of permanence and those of impermanence. The permanent structures are unmistakable—made of wide stone or concrete—rooted deep and thick into the bedrock, shooting upwards towards the sky. The Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Apollo Theater: creations that architects must spend their entire lives dreaming about, praying that one day they’d get to contribute to the immovable Manhattan skyline. Up close, you can feel the pull of their gravity and the hairs stand up on your neck as you sense that a thousand years from now, they will still stand like the Colosseum in Rome or the Obelisk in Cairo. No amount of stock-trading, novel-publishing, or empire-building done inside them could do justice to their stature, nor could they sully them. They make you feel tiny and inconsequential, but in a humbling rather than belittling way.

Then there are the impermanent structures, those that exist only in their fixed moment in time before they're detonated or bulldozed a hundred times over to make way for something new. If the buildings mentioned above are the bone, these are the flesh. One day they’re a health insurance clinic, the next they’re a shawarma joint. When you live in the city long enough, you can feel their push and pull, rise and fall, ebb and flow.

I got the sense that the building in which I sat was one of these latter structures. Yesterday it may have been Bethel and tomorrow it may be a brothel, but today it was an Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The walls seemed flimsy, like the whole building would fall over if you applied enough pressure to the right spot, so I kept still. Sizzling tubular bulbs hung from the ceiling, making your own vision claustrophobic unless you squinted a bit. The scraps of wall that weren’t covered by shelves of colorless binders were coated with posters with pictures of families camping with platitudes like “Begin Tomorrow’s Adventure, TODAY!” This room was what I imagined purgatory looked like. Rather, what it felt like, as I had been waiting in this saltine cracker of a room for much longer than I anticipated, and I was aching to get on the move.

I watched a woman behind the counter with frizzy red hair squeeze the last drops from the spout of a coffee jug into a paper cup and hum a tune I didn’t recognize. She looked like the aunt who visits you every other Christmas and tries to kiss you on the lips, and she obviously wasn’t happy to have found me waiting outside for the joint to open. I stared as she took a sip from the cup and I winced. The taste of coffee had made me gag ever since I downed my first cup hours before being rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix.. It seemed to flip her switch though and she motioned me to approach the counter and asked for my ID. She took a quick look at it and raised her eyebrows at me.

“You need to be twenty-one.”

I came prepared for this. Without skipping a beat, I unzipped my backpack and slid out a printout from New York State’s DMV website and slapped it on the table, as if I’d rehearsed it the whole trip there. Almost anywhere else, she would’ve been right. But today, geography was on my side. It turned out that there were two states in which the legal age to rent a car was not twenty-one, but eighteen: Minnesota and New York. Coincidently, Bob Dylan’s place of creation and his place of creating. Maybe he had pulled some strings for me.

My printout proved inefficient, as the woman turned to her side and yelled “Miles!” I didn’t think anyone else was in the building with us since I had watched her unlock the doors and turn on the lights only fifteen minutes before, but out trudged a stout man whose head had seemingly passed all its hair down to his neck. Once he reached the desk, she slid the paper across to him. He pulled a pair of bulky Andy Warhol glasses out of his shirt pocket and scanned the whole page, acting as if my handy highlights were invisible. As he read, I couldn’t stop staring at his face. I ran my hand through my own facial hair, suddenly feeling the need to shave. He looked like he just found out the sixties had ended and ended ugly (though I couldn’t talk). Once he reached the end, he turned over the page to find nothing else. He scratched the hair on his neck and then nodded and walked away. He didn’t look at me once.

Next thing I knew, I was being handed the keys to a silver 2015 Mitsubishi Mirage—the last model of its design before their marketing team must have realized that people don’t like driving in cars that look like toaster ovens. But I was content enough and couldn’t afford to be picky. I spent some time adjusting the mirrors and plugged my phone into the car’s sound system, queuing up the ultimate escape-by-car song. The car’s thin speakers didn’t do the music much justice, but the words of Bruce Springsteen nevertheless rang out, more true than ever.

I’m no hero, that’s understood

All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood

And the chance to make it good somehow

I always liked Bruce. His words always seemed to tell the story of some loser trying to win for once. If you took the lyrics by themselves, you would ask yourself why the loser doesn’t just give up—it seems like things are never going to go his way. But Bruce’s voice and his guitar and the rest of the E Street Band convinces you otherwise. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe during these four minutes and forty-nine seconds, your life will change for the better.

Hey, what else can we do now

Except roll down the windows and let the wind blow back your hair

Well, the night’s busted open, these two lanes will take us anywhere

I drove across the Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn into Staten Island with that feeling. That sharp, wild mercury feeling you get where you just want something to jolt your world off its axis and send you flying off into space. But my wheels on the pavement would have to do. And I was thankful I had even that, all because of some loophole in the law that allowed a twenty year-old to rent a car in New York. That law would change the following year when a depressed insurance salesman near my age drank too much and drove himself off a wooden bridge near Albany. Maybe he should’ve listened to more Bruce.

The I-278 snuck me through Staten Island and I swerved South onto the I-95 once I crossed over into the Garden State. The tall buildings that had painted my landscape for the past couple years vanished as if they were never there to begin with and were replaced by a mélange of reds, yellows, and oranges. I was born and brought up in the flatlands that broke up beauty on the West Coast, so the Autumn palette was new to me and added a new dimension to my senses. I didn’t think there were that many trees in the state, let alone in each quarter mile that whisked by my window. My field of vision seemed to be a new entity every time I blinked, with the only continuity being the paved road that cut through its center. That was fine by me. In fact, the open road was the only constant I welcomed. The rest—I was hoping for a change.

A few months prior I’d been knocked off my feet when a girl with whom I thought I was in love bailed from my life a thousand times quicker than she had entered it. That sort of thing wasn’t uncommon for me, but this time I could feel the blood in my head pound and everything was thrown into a haze. The rest of Summer came and went like some forgotten dream and November crept up behind to kick me while I was down. Before I could dust myself off, it was Thanksgiving Break. My college roommate had left for a Rocky Mountain ski trip with his family, and the rest of my friends returned to their corners of the country. I had never gone back home for Thanksgiving before and had little interest this time around. The flights were expensive and my family wasn’t known for its gatherings anyways. I originally planned on spending some alone time in the city feeling sorry for myself, but lately the East and Hudson rivers seemed to be closing in on me. The air felt foreign in a way it hadn’t since I’d arrived there. It was as if I’d fallen into a fountain of water and passed right through into the inverted reflection of New York—up was down and down was up. Right when I thought I’d reached the top, I found I was on the bottom. What once was a radiating berth of freedom and opportunity was now just another box that I’d jammed myself into.

I’d moved to New York eighteen months earlier to learn how to write the score for musicals. For years, I had been absorbed by the “concept” album and fascinated by how songs could interlock to form something greater than their sum, from narrative concepts like in Tommy or The Wall to thematic ones like Bookends or Pet Sounds. Giving a structure to the body of work seemed to give each song more weight, and I was a sucker for heavy songs. I rolled my eyes at feathery ones that would blow away in the breeze. I sought anchors tethered to the human condition. Songs made of bedrock that could be fragments from the earth’s mantle. These surely weren’t the type of songs you often see on a Broadway stage, as they don’t make for a good kickline, but I had seen slivers in the works of Stephen Sondheim. “Epiphany,” “The Miller’s Son,” “Finishing the Hat”: these were songs that grab you by the collar and look you in the eye. A barber descends into madness; a maid conjures up imaginary husbands; a painter sacrifices love for his art. These dramas were right up my alley. You wouldn’t find them in a playlist to accompany your wine-pairing dinners and they don’t give you an even beat to line dance. They make you face them head-on and maybe you’ll come out the other side unscathed. They whispered in my ear in a way none had since Dylan, and told me the secret that musicals would be the path to get where I wanted to go.

So sure was I that I’d spent the last year sculpting myself into a theatre composer, or at least what I was told that was. However, it turned out that Sondheim was the exception rather than the rule and I was being groomed to be a cog in a machine—a craftsman partaking in a dramaturgical Mad Libs where songs are shuffled and swapped within the tried-and-true template optimized for minimum snoozes and maximum show-stoppers. I blindly allowed myself to be carried along by this conveyor belt until my recent heartbreak threw me into the woods and forced me to take stock of what I had if I was going to find my way out. One sharp look around was all it took to realize I wasn’t in the right scene and that I needed to find a new one.

An album and a half of songs later, I passed a white sign with an American flag and the words Welcome to Freehold Township: A Family Town. Under the lettering was an X made from two muskets. Freehold was the site of the Battle of Monmouth, one of the largest battles in the Revolutionary War. Loyalist forces used Freehold as a red herring for the Continental Army to attack while they secretly evacuated citizens from the more important Philadelphia. Both sides claimed victory over the town as its people were wedged in between, which seemed to be a trend for the town. I read in the early 20th century that the town was divided into two pieces—Freehold “Borough” and Freehold “Township”— after extreme disputes over how best to spend its tax dollars. Something about that reminded me of growing up in my own hometown. As I teenager I’d attended the bluest school in the reddest town in the bluest state, so everything always seemed to be heated and shaking on the verge of combustion.

All of these historical fragments stood secondary to the real reason I had arrived: Freehold, New Jersey was the birthplace of Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen. Where better to reclaim your roots than the home of the Boss? (Besides, Duluth, Minnesota was too far.) Highway 537 morphed into Main Street and I was carried along Freehold’s spine, looking outwards at what seemed to be a battle for the town’s soul between Irish-Italian taverns and Catholic churches. Perhaps it wasn’t a battle at all—in the end, they were all shrines for coping.

My map led me from Main Street to South Street and helped me track down a small wooden house located at 39 ½ Institute Street. I parked my car across the street and smelled the air outside. I’d read in Bruce’s book about the smell of moist coffee grounds that had always saturated the air from the nearby Nescafe plant, but I didn’t smell anything outside of the dust my shoes kicked up from the dirt road. A rusty gate marked the perimeter of the tiny house with several signs warding off trespassers. I wondered to myself if Bruce’s childhood home had always been this hideous hue of yellow. All the pictures I had seen of it were in black in white, so there was no way to know for sure. I began taking some pictures when a tall, pencil-thin man emerged from behind me, likely thinking I was preparing a robbery. He wore dark, thick glasses, like they were made from Coke bottles.

“What are you doing?” he snapped.

I froze. “Taking pictures,” I replied. “Bruce Spingsteen grew up in this house.”

The man raised his eyebrows and took off his glasses. “Huh. You know, I’ve lived here all my life and never knew that.”

I asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a picture of me in front of the house, and he patiently helped me recreate the cover of Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” 45. Meanwhile, we got to chatting. His name was Lonnie and he worked on Main Street as a technician for Freehold’s only fire station. Not only that, but he was a descendant of Charles Guiteau, the disgruntled lawyer who killed President Garfield. He climbed me up his family tree in excruciating detail. Nobody talks that way anymore—people these days don’t care where they come from. God knows I didn’t. However, there was a suspiciously proud glimmer in his eye that made me think he was ready to join the family business. He asked me if I wanted a drink from his house next door, but I lied and said I had a busy schedule ahead. As I drove away, I looked back at Lonnie in the rearview mirror and smiled. He was taking pictures in front of the house.

There were many other pieces of treasure buried in the surrounding streets. I stumbled across the Saint Rose of Lima school where he’d been forced to recite the lord’s prayer and the stump of the tree he had lamented the destruction of in his recent Broadway show. Every site I excavated and each picture I posed for was met with odd stares from local passersby. Weren’t they used to this sort of thing by now? They obviously weren’t, and they looked at me like I was from another planet. Maybe there were less fans making pilgrimages to Freehold than I’d imagined in my head. This shouldn’t have been much of a surprise to me, as I’d learned a long time ago not to expect my level of devotion from anyone else.

Soon, the sky had faded from its crisp blue to a smokey pink so I drifted back over to Main Street to find a bed to sleep in. It quickly became apparent that the only option was a two-story wooden box of a building with a long vertical sign attached reading “The American Hotel.” Its logo was a cursive “A” with a shadow shaped like a star and it resembled one of those old saloons you would see in a spaghetti western where robbers would hide out from the sheriff. Perfect for someone like myself who was looking to get lost.

I made mine the only car in the parking lot behind the building and entered the lobby, or what I assumed would be the lobby. The room was cluttered with cleaning supplies and an old woman stood in the center folding clothes. I decided I must have entered the laundry room by mistake and started towards the door to recalibrate when the woman shouted.

“You want a room?”

I looked at her and wondered if there was any nonwhite person in a fifty mile radius. “Do you have any?” I asked.

“Do we have any? We have ‘em all! You can have our best one.”

I told her I just needed a bed for the night and she receded into what looked like a back closet and I heard paper rustling. I looked around the odd, little laundry-lobby. The walls were covered with photos of the woman I’d spoken to locking arms with various presumably famous guests, but I didn’t recognize anyone. My eye was then drawn to a golden plaque on the wall and I inched closer to read the fine print. It read that Abraham Lincoln stayed at The American Hotel in 1861 on his way from Illinois to Washington D.C. to be sworn in as President. While the old woman continued wrestling papers in the back, I took out my phone and googled New Jersey’s electoral map in 1860. Lincoln lost the popular vote by four thousand votes but won the electoral vote 4 to 3. Abe had guts to stay the night in a state where the majority of people hated those guts. I looked at the wall around the plaque and wondered how many times it’d been painted since it was looked upon by America’s greatest martyr. They probably weren’t purple. For a moment I felt like I was in some American Via Dolorosa. Like Christ slouching through Jerusalem, Lincoln passed right through here on his way to the cross.

The woman returned with a key and leather-bound ledger that she thumped onto the desk. I scribbled my name on a couple pages and she handed me the key, adding that the handle on the toilet sticks and that it’ll flood if I’m not careful. I wondered what the other rooms must be like for this to be their best one. I made my way upstairs, passing more photos of unfamiliar celebrities and ducking under several low-hanging lamps. Lincoln was 6’4’’ so he must have struggled walking up these stairs. I held my breath as I opened the door to my room but sighed in relief—it seemed more or less intact. The air was hot and stale, so I lifted the window up a few inches to trade in for some fresher air. I dropped my backpack onto the queen bed and musty particles filled the surrounding air. Not looking to add an extra layer to my pants, I sat back in a squeaky swivel chair in the far corner of the room and gazed at my only traveling companion for the trip: a young Taylor GS Mini.

The guitar and I were looking to get reacquainted. My first purchase once I arrived in New York, it had been my only friend for months. Although, the deeper I descended into theater, the more time it spent in its case, for it was impressed upon me that theater composers were musical chameleons. To that end, I would need to throw out all my Simon & Garfunkel posters and Led Zeppelin tee shirts should I be hired by a wealthy producer to write Transformers: The Musical. Moreover, I was told that theater composers play piano. This seemed logical to me at the time. After all, every theater composer I knew was a master pianist. So, when the time came, I packed away the Taylor and began taking rigorous piano lessons with the keys player for The Lion King. For someone who’d strummed religiously since the age of thirteen, this should have been a devastating blow, but I was visionless and willing to take any direction given.

Nervous to see if the spark was still there, I slipped the guitar from its fabric case and sat on the bed, fingering the strings. I strummed some random chords and was suddenly taken back eight years earlier, sitting on my old bed back in California. Noises of a dying house party filtered in from the hallway, but I was silent and transfixed on a small book called The Beatles Chord Songbook. I’d given up on learning to be a guitarist several times, but I stubbornly decided to take another swing at it. Flipping through the pages, I scoured the book for anything I might be able to play. “A Hard Day’s Night”? No, too hard. “Blackbird”? I can’t finger-pick. “Yesterday”? What the Hell is a F#m?

Finally, I turned to an obscure George Harrison number called “I Need You” from the Help! album and zoned in on the intro riff. The chord names were foreign to me but their shapes seemed simple enough. Form an “A” shape. Strum. Lift off your ring finger. Strum. Place it now on the third fret. Strum. Then back to the A. Strum. I followed the instructions step by step at a glacial pace, and an overwhelming grin took over my face. It sounds just like the record! I played the riff again. And again. And again. It was the first time I’d even made a sound on the guitar that actually sounded like something I’d heard, like music. That was all I needed to keep from giving up.

Back in the present, I strummed through that momentous intro, and then played through the rest of the song, foreign chords and all. Only these days, they weren’t foreign. I knew exactly what they meant, how to play them, and why he wrote them. It’d been a substantial eight years. And something told me that guitar and I were just getting started.

Checking my watch, I decided the night was young enough to take a walk down Main Street. I placed the guitar on the bed thinking I’d play some more when I returned, and I walked down the stairs of The American Hotel with “I Need You” stuck in my head.

Please come on back to me

I’m lonely as can be

I need you

When I reached the ground floor, I saw the owner/hostess/housekeeper still folding clothes and I asked her if there were any restaurants nearby. She laughed and told me there were only bars open at this hour. That was fine with me, and she gave me a familiar name: Federici’s. I wondered if there was a connection to the late Danny Federici, Springsteen’s searing organist, who was also from the area. I thanked her for the recommendation and set out to see for myself.

Freehold must not have been known for its nightlife, as it was only ten o’clock but you would think it was nearing sunrise. I walked South down Main Street and surveyed each of the buildings. A post office. A drug store. A fifties-themed diner with a “Open 24 Hours” sign that was, ironically, closed. Then, a fire station. I thought back to Lonnie and his job as a technician there. Perhaps I should have taken him up on that drink. The lights seemed shut off inside, so I decided there must not be many fires in Freehold. In fact, each of the buildings looked like they’d stood for a hundred years and would stand for a hundred more. This was odd to me, as they were so different from the “permanent” structures I’d admired in New York. Back in the city, these types of buildings would have been rebuilt a dozen times over by now. However, there was something serene about the lack of urgency in the air. There was none of that out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new commotion that I’d grown used to as a child of postmodernity. Indeed, here I seemed to be transported back to time before any existentialist thought, when people were perfectly content living a stable, quiet life until they left the earth to be rewarded in heaven for their patience. Not betting on any promised land myself, I felt out of place among all the innocence that surrounded me. Or maybe it wasn’t innocence, and they knew some secret I didn’t.

Federici's was smashed beneath an empty office building and would have gone unnoticed by me if not for its bright-red, neon sign. A short staircase led me underground and through the door where I entered the emptiest bar I’d ever seen. The door I opened had rung a small bell and a face with a thick mustache shot up from under the countertop.

“Good evening!” the face yelped, as if I was his only customer of the night. “Just give me one second. I’m fixing a leak.”

I told him I was in no rush and circled the room. Above the bar hung a square, boxed TV whose Magnum PI reruns were subdued by an analog jukebox in the back blaring “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” by Glen Cambell. That song had always drawn me in, so I listened and mouthed the words while I scanned the room.

By the time I get to Phoenix, she'll be rising

She'll find the note I left hanging on her door

She'll laugh, when she reads the part that says I'm leaving

Cause I've left that girl, so many times before

Across from the bar stood several empty booths, and there was a cracked disco ball hanging from the ceiling that must not have been used since the 70s. While I scanned the walls, the bartender popped back out from behind the bar.

“There we go,” he exhaled. “Sorry about that, friend. Can I get you anything?”

“Can I just get a coke?” I asked.

“I have Pepsi. Is that alright?”

“Even better.”

He started towards the tap levers and paused. “You at least want a fancy glass?”

“Any cup’s fine.”

Like the lobby at The American Hotel, there were pictures hanging of people I didn’t recognize. I was beginning to think these were just random locals, but then I saw faces I recognized: the bartender arm-in-arm with Bruce Springsteen.

“Bruce was here?” I gasped, pointing to the framed photo.

“Oh, yeah! Many times. He was here just last week, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. He lives about thirty minutes from here.”

I wondered what I would have done if he had been here. I got halfway through a far-fetched daydream about being invited to his house to jam when the bartender set a glass of Pepsi onto the bar and motioned me over to him. I took a sip, and couldn’t resist probing further.

“This place is called Federici’s. Does that have anything to do with-”

“The keyboard player,” he completed for me. “No, I get asked that a lot. I’m Federici. Danny Federici, funny enough. But there’s no relation.”

Odd coincidence. However, this Danny Federici was bald and wore what looked like a tattered bowling shirt. He spoke with a thick Italian-American accent and sounded like he’d smoked all of his life.

“Are you a fan?” he asked.

“One of the biggest,” I said, seriously.

“I believe it,” he chuckled. “There used to be lots of fans making trips around here, but not so much these days.”

I told him that wasn’t surprising to me, as everyone seemed to look at me like I didn’t belong there.

“Eh, don’t let that bother you. We all have a weird relationship with Bruce,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“We love his music, but he also reminds us of all the things we never did.”

I thought about that for a while, and heard the Glen Campell song end and be replaced by a Buck Owens song I didn’t recognize. I sipped my Pepsi, thinking how my father would’ve been ashamed of me, when the counterfeit Danny Federici knocked me off my balance.

“I have to say, you look like you just got dumped.”

Suddenly, I was put on edge and felt defensive. More than anything, I was puzzled. He said it as if I’d walked through his doors gushing into tissues or carrying a crushed box of chocolates, which I obviously hadn’t.

“How’d you know?” I asked, genuinely.

“I’ve been here a long time. I can sense these things.” He took a long swig from a glass of some brand of dark beer. “What’d you do?” he continued.

I nearly choked on my drink. “Why so curious?” I retorted.

He let out his smoker’s laugh. “You haven’t talked to many bartenders, have you?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“What? Are you Mormon or something?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Just bad memories.”

“Ah. That’ll do it.” He ran his hand over his round beer belly and giggled. “I obviously have plenty of good memories.”

And just like that, my walls came back down and I floated him some details about my current 2019 Heartbreak Tour, but I didn’t feel like going through the whole story. I’d finally been able to get those ghosts out of my head and I wasn’t looking to welcome them back. He did his bartender-ly duty of comforting me and joked that he wasn’t exactly a womanizer either, which made me notice the wedding band on his finger.

“Must not be too bad,” I teased, gesturing to his hand. “You tricked someone into marrying you.”

His eyes shot to the ring like he’d forgotten it was there, and let out an embarrassed scoff. He told me his wife left him and that he didn’t know where she was.

“I guess I just left it on so I don’t lose it,” he chuckled.

“I’m sorry I asked,” I murmured.

“Oh, don’t be. I’m a big boy.”

“When did she leave?” I asked.

His smile faded. “Almost six years ago.” As he said that, the Buck Owens song ended and the whole bar seemed to go silent for a few seconds until he broke it up. “But you never know.” He got up and walked to the jukebox. “What do you want to listen to?” He then winked as he added, “Other than Bruce.”

“Got any Dylan?” I asked.

“A man of good taste, I see,” he smirked. “I’m sure we’ve got something here.”

He fidgeted with some buttons of the jukebox and out hummed a fairly obscure cut from Time Out of Mind. Impressed, I made a “rock on” sign with my hand and we chatted about the lyrics as they played.

Everyday your memory grows dimmer

It doesn't haunt me like it did before

I've been walking through the middle of nowhere

Trying to get to Heaven before they close the door

The more I talked to him, the more I realized how much of a romantic he was. His favorite novel was The Portrait of a Lady and he was saving up money to travel to Verona to visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. I felt the impulse to tell him that Romeo and Juliet weren’t real people and that there was no such place, but the feeling passed. The line between history and drama had become increasingly fine.

“You wanna know what the problem with life is?” he asked. “By the time you can read women like a book, your library card has expired.”

This weathered piece of wisdom saddened me, but I felt I knew a shred of what he meant. I told him about a recurring dream I’d been having the last several weeks where I was wading through a vast sea of people and chasing after a strange woman.

“Who is she?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t know. Each time, I ran faster and shoved harder so that I finally could see her face, but she always stayed a few yards ahead of me.

“That’s a doozy,” he chuckled. “I wonder what it means.”

I wasn’t sure. I had never been one to remember my dreams, let alone be stuck in one so Sisyphean. I got lost in my thoughts for a few moments, but the music playing thankfully kept me in the room.

Some trains don't pull no gamblers

No midnight ramblers like they did before

I've been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down

Now I'm trying to get to Heaven before they close the door

Before long, it reached one in the morning, so I closed out my tab of Pepsi’s and shook Danny’s hand. He scribbled his email address onto a napkin and handed it to me. The last thing he said to me rang in my ears for weeks afterward:

“Hey, maybe you don’t belong here. But that’s okay. Neither did Bruce.”

A week later, I sent an email to the address he gave me but never received any response. I told myself there must have been a typo.

I’d forgotten to close the window before I left my room so now the November chill bit into it. I took my shoes off and laid face-up on the bed beside the guitar I never put back in its case. The ceiling was spinning, or maybe I was. I couldn’t take my mind off Danny, and I wondered what sort of life he went home to. There was probably no one to greet him there. He was probably lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, fighting off feelings of regret. Not too different from me, even if I was a few miles behind. A sudden rush of panic squeezed my heart and I felt my hands shake. I’d come here to get lost, but now I felt alone at the center of the universe. I cupped my hands around my mouth and blew warm air until I regained control of them. After a minute or two, I reached over and brought the body of the guitar to my chest. The strings were cold from the air. My hand found a chord shape.

Songwriting can be dangerous. Most of the time, it’s a grind. It truly is work and like solving an intricate puzzle of compression. But every once in a while, it’s lightning that bursts out of you and all you need to do is focus it. There’s beauty in that, but therein lies the danger. Because while that emotional thunder is fleeting, a song is permanent. The emotion is crystalized and given eternal proof of existence. These can sometimes make for good songs, but they can also be painful reminders. There are many songs I’ve written that I wish I could leave behind along with the ghosts within them. They’re like anchors that keep you at arm’s length with your past selves and I wanted to shed it all.

Thankfully, the frosty air had made the strings awfully out of tune, so I strummed and my trance was broken. I threw the guitar back to the other side of the bed. Songwriting was an open wound and it needed time to scab over. However, my mind was running a thousand miles per hour and I needed a road for it to race on, so I reached towards the floor for my backpack and pulled out a fresh, blue Moleskine notebook I’d received as a birthday present a few weeks prior. I turned to the first page and wrote down a few scattered thoughts.

Folk musical

Small stories tied together to form a larger work

Mini epics put on stage

I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant, but I had a piercing feeling that they were important. The words felt big and heavy on the paper, like I needed to flip ahead a few pages to give them some room to breathe. My head geared down, and I decided I needed to close the notebook or the words I’d written would keep me awake all night. Before I did, I wrote down one more phrase that would be the keystone.

All in one town

I closed the notebook and dropped it onto the floor beside the bed. My head felt lighter and my body felt heavier, sinking deep into the mattress. I slipped under the sheets and drifted off to the hum of the dry heater kicking on. My recurring dream came back, but this time I gave up the chase and stood still. Before long, the woman turned around and was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

© 2021 by Alex Shelbourne