The final, ugly chord shuddered and died in the darkness, its dissonant ghost hanging in the air like the smell of smoke after a fire. Alex remained on the floor, his back pressed against the bed, the guitar a heavy, solid weight in his lap. His chest heaved with ragged, shuddering breaths. The ringing in his ears from the violent noise he had created was the only sound in the universe.
The act hadn't brought relief. It hadn't offered comfort or absolution. But it had done something. It had cracked the thick, gray ice of his numbness. Where there had been a void, a silent, static-filled emptiness, there was now just raw, sharp-edged pain. It was agonizing, but it was real. It was something he could feel.
And with the return of feeling, his mind, which had been trapped in a punishing, silent loop, finally unlocked. It broke free from the endlessly replaying scene in the cafeteria and began to spiral in a new, more frantic direction. It started asking questions.
A torrent of them, a furious, unanswerable flood that washed over him in the dark.
What if I had stayed at the table?
What if I had ignored the text?
What if I had just looked at him, really looked at him, for ten more seconds?
What if I had asked again?
The questions were relentless, each one a fresh stab of guilt, a new angle from which to view his own failure. He saw a thousand different branching timelines, a thousand alternate realities where he made a different choice, where he wasn't so distracted, so consumed by the roaring noise of his own ambition. Realities where a different, better version of himself sat down at that table and refused to leave until he got the truth. Realities where Leo was still alive.
The storm of what-ifs swirled and coalesced, the frantic energy collapsing inward until it formed one, central, haunting thought. A question that eclipsed all the others, a question that had been lurking beneath the surface of his guilt all along, the one he was most terrified to ask.
Was there something I could have said to make your heart beat better?
The question wasn't just a thought. It had a rhythm. A cadence. It pulsed with a quiet, melancholic meter. It felt… like a lyric.
Without conscious thought, his fingers, which moments before had been mashing down on the strings in a blind rage, now shifted on the fretboard. The ghost, or some deeper musical instinct, took over. His hand, clumsy and stiff, found a shape. A simple, melancholic chord. A minor key. It was sad, but it was structured. It was a container.
He whispered the question aloud to the empty room, his voice a raw, broken rasp. The words, his own words, fit the chord perfectly, settling into the sound as if they had been written for it. It was the first moment of coherence in the chaos, the first signal in the noise.
His fingers moved again, finding a second chord, then a third, building a simple, mournful progression. And the song began to pour out of him.
It wasn't a process of writing. It wasn't crafting or composing. It was an act of involuntary transcription. He was just a vessel, giving voice and melody to the furious, heartbroken conversation that was already raging in his head. The lyrics came out fully formed, each one a new question aimed at the ghost of his friend, at the empty space he had left behind.
His voice was fragile, unsteady, cracking under the weight of the words.
"If I'd have known you had a storm to weather…" he sang, the melody finding its path in the dark. The question was a fresh wound. He had seen the clouds gathering in Leo's eyes and had called it a long weekend.
His thumb strummed the simple progression, the notes clean now, no longer the ugly clang of pure pain, but the structured sorrow of a song. The questions kept coming, a relentless, lyrical interrogation of his own failure.
"I'd have been right there, back in September…"
He thought of all the times in the last few months he had been too busy, too distracted, his mind on conference calls and marketing plans while Leo was right beside him.
The music was building, the intensity growing as his guilt found its voice. He remembered the call from his publicist, the blinding flash of the magazine cover, the moment he had chosen ambition over his friend. The memory was so sharp it felt like a betrayal he was committing all over again.
"Would I have ruined my life to be with you that night?"
The question was a desperate, selfish, and honest plea. Yes, his heart screamed, a thousand times, yes. He would trade the magazine cover, the record deal, all of it, for five more minutes in that cafeteria. For one more chance to get it right.
He was no longer on the floor of his dark bedroom. He was somewhere else, in that raw, spiritual space where profound pain is involuntarily channeled into structured art. His grief, a formless, chaotic monster, was being given a shape, a melody, a narrative. He was building a vessel, note by painful note, chord by agonizing chord, to hold the unbearable weight of what he had lost, and what he had done. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't polished. It was the raw, bleeding sound of a heart breaking in a key that only he could hear. And it was the only thing he had left.