“A producer?” he asked with way too much doubt in his tone.
I nodded. He still didn’t believe me, and it made me want to smile.
But I preferred that than him knowing. Or expecting something.
“Maybe that’s why you’ve been struggling so much trying to write your own music, Stevie Ray Junior.”
Yeah, he wasn’t biting. But I had learned he got a kick out of me using certain musician’s names as nicknames. I missed having people to pick on, and he was such a good kid.
“Okay, tell me, who do you love?”
Amos sneered in this way that made me feel like I was asking him to take a nudie and send it to a girl he liked.
“Okay, your mom, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Your dads?”
“Yeah.”
“Who else?”
He leaned back on one hand and seemed to think about it. “I love my grandmas.”
“All right, who else?”
“Uncle Johnny, I guess.”
“I guess?” That made me laugh. “Anyone else?”
He shrugged.
“Well, think about that. About how they make you feel.”
His sneer was still there a little bit. “But my mom?”
“Yeah, your mom! Don’t you love her the most?”
“I don’t know. The same as my dads?”
I still hadn’t gotten any further with the “dads” thing. “I’m just throwing out ideas.”
“Did you ever write songs about your mom?” he asked.
I’d heard one of them playing at the grocery store a week ago. I’d ended up with a headache behind one eye by the time it had finished, but I didn’t tell him that. “Only almost all of them.” That was an exaggeration. I hadn’t written anything new since I’d spent the month with Yuki. There hadn’t been all that much to inspire me since, or a need. Personally, writing used to come so easily to me. Too easily according to what Yuki and Kaden used to say. All I ever had to do was sit down and words just… came to me.
My uncle said it was why I talked so much. There were always too many words bouncing around in my head and they had to come out somehow. There were worse things in life.
But I hadn’t heard the words that had come to me so randomly for most of my life in forever. I wasn’t sure what it said about me or where I was in life now that the absence didn’t scare me. Especially not when I knew for sure that at some point, it would have been terrifying.
Looking back on it, the words had tapered off over the years. I wondered now if that should have been a sign.
“I feel like my best songs were the ones I wrote when I was between your age now and twenty-one. It doesn’t come as easily to me now anymore.” I shrugged, not wanting to tell him more.
Part of it, I thought was that I had been younger and more innocent. My heart had been more… pure. My grief more rabid. I’d felt so, so much back then. And now… now I knew that the world was split about fifty-fifty, if not seventy-thirty with assholes versus good people. My grief, which had been what consumed so much of my life, had tapered with time.
I was pretty good from twenty-one to twenty-eight, when I’d been at my peak in love. When things had been great—not as great now that I thought back on all the things that had been said and done that I had brushed off. But I’d thought for sure I’d found my life partner. It hadn’t come as easily, but I’d still felt the words there, lying right under my heart, ready.
Back then, I’d still woken up in the middle of the night with strings of words on my tongue.
Except for the one album I’d written with Yuki, while I’d been grieving the loss of my relationship, with the emptiness of accepting that some things weren’t forever so fresh, I’d pulled even more words out of myself. We’d gotten that album done in a month while both of us had broken hearts.
It was some of my favorite work.
Nori had written some of it with us, but she was a machine of music who pushed hits out like she shit out rainbows; she took words and brought them to life. I was the bones, and she was the sinews and pink fingernail beds. It was amazing. A gift from God.
But I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell Amos any of this. Not yet. It didn’t matter anymore.
All I had left anyway was a box full of old notebooks.
“I was thinking about taking a class…，” he started to say, and it was hard for me not to scrunch up my nose.
I didn’t want to talk him out of doing anything he wanted to do, even if I thought it was pointless. Writing songs wasn’t math or science; there wasn’t a formula in the world for it. You either had it or you didn’t.