The song took shape in the dark, verse by agonizing verse, chorus by heart-wrenching chorus. It wasn't being written; it was being remembered, as if it had existed long before this night, waiting in the ether for a pain immense enough to pull it down to earth. Alex was just the conduit, the first one to sing it.
He played it all the way through, a single, messy, continuous take for an audience of one. His voice, raw from disuse and fractured by grief, was an unsteady guide through the landscape of his regret. It cracked on the high notes of the chorus, not from a lack of control, but from a surplus of emotion. In the middle of the bridge, a sob he didn't see coming caught in his throat, choking off the melody for a half-second before he forced the words out.
Tears he didn't know he still had began to well in his eyes, then stream silently down his face, hot against his cold skin. He didn't notice them until he felt a drop fall from his chin and land on the worn wood of the guitar with a tiny, soundless splash.
The performance was entirely unselfconscious. There was no thought of production, no consideration of melody or marketability, no awareness of a potential listener. The ghost was gone. The producer was gone. There was only the boy, singing a desperate, broken prayer into the darkness. He sang directly to Leo, to the empty space in the room where his friend should have been, a space now so vast and so real it felt like a physical presence.
The lyrics were a catalogue of his failures, a litany of his what-ifs, each line a new, desperate attempt to turn back time.
"When you'd hurt, I'd hurt too…" he sang, the memory of Leo's hollow eyes in the cafeteria a fresh, open wound. He had seen the hurt. He had registered it. And he had turned away.
The chorus was the raw, bleeding heart of it all, the question that would haunt him for the rest of his life, now set to a simple, unforgettable melody.
"So, before you go," his voice strained, reaching for the notes, "was there something I could have said to make your heart beat better? If only I'd have known you had a storm to weather…"
He finished the final line, his voice trailing off into a near-inaudible whisper, the last of his breath and his strength spent. He held the final, ringing chord, letting the sound decay slowly, naturally, until it was completely absorbed by the room's thick silence.
His hands were trembling, a fine, uncontrollable tremor. He was utterly, completely drained, as if the song had taken not just his voice, but everything else—his energy, his anger, his chaotic, spiraling grief—and woven it into its very fabric.
With deliberate, careful movements, he leaned forward and rested the guitar against the wall. The act was a separation. He was letting it go. The act of creating the song, of taking the formless, endless agony inside him and giving it a beginning, a middle, and an end, had not healed him. The wound was still there, gaping and raw.
But it had changed something fundamental.
The grief was no longer a chaotic internal storm threatening to tear him apart from the inside. It was now a tangible thing. It had a name. It had a melody. It existed outside of him now, contained within the structure of the song. He could hold it. He could look at it. He could survive it.
The exorcism had left him hollowed out, scoured clean. But in the vast, echoing emptiness, there was a tiny, flickering pinpoint of something that wasn't there before. It wasn't hope. It wasn't peace. It was something much smaller, much more fragile. It was the barest sense of strength. The strength, not to move on, not to be okay, but simply to take the next breath. And then the next.
He sat on the floor in the now-quiet room, his back against the bed, his knees pulled up to his chest. The violent storm inside him had passed, leaving devastation in its wake, but the immediate, desperate threat was over. He was still broken. He was still lost. But he was no longer drowning in the silence. He had found a way to float.