DAYLIGHT FADING

twenty two | to mix a gin and sink into oblivion

Taking the warning of my bleeding finger, I step back from my patch and feel a tiny flush of pride. I shouldn’t because I’ve really just tended to a few bushes.

My other patch is in the corner, full of little seedlings. I doubt we’ll remain here long enough for my roses to fully grow and they’ll probably die in my absence but the satisfaction I gain just from seeing those little sprigs of green is probably the only feeling that punches through the lazy, relaxed haze of the drugs. That and the one time I thought I saw Adam.

I’d panicked so badly that Justin actually had to take me back to my apartment where I destroyed plates and dragged all of my furniture out of their usual places just to make sure he wasn’t there.

Matt had apologised the next day, saying after he hadn’t gotten it he’d thought the rumours about extreme paranoia following smoking pot were just that – rumours.

Luckily, it seemed as though I had a very specific trigger.

“Lacey,” I freeze slightly, knowing that the husky, Scottish baritone belongs to Declan. I don’t want to end up being yelled at for Matt smoking marijuana when he’s the one who, technically, handed me my first spliff.

I turn towards the doorway, much preferring the sunlight of me and Matt’s small garden than the claustrophobia of that hallway.

A camera is hung round Declan’s neck but he makes no moves to use it. The band tends to document their time in studios and on tour with photographs and they do it mercilessly. They don’t create any facades and Declan, for all of his gruff, aloof manner, is a brilliant photographer.

Somewhere between reality and his lens, the studio turns into a place infused with seedy glamour. He always seems to get Justin’s eyes at just the right moment so they always appear half-gold and he never shies away from the clouds of smoke around me and Matt in the garden. Dylan becomes this mysterious, intense figure and he himself becomes a ghost, rarely seen in front of the lens.

I suppose he could be called similar to Chris in their seeming obsession to capture everything on camera but their talents are different. Chris shows things with simple honesty, each shot translating perfectly to reality, whereas Declan has an eye for lighting and a flair for the dramatic, twisting the scenes into something slightly untouchable. The Noise, I think, will become half a myth due to those photographs.

“You’re needed,” I think those two words are the only ones I’ve heard him say to me save my name.

I sigh as I walk away from the garden, my fingers brushing against the cold metal of the bench, before coming to rest in front of Declan. He normally strides off before I can get within five metres of him and shifts away whenever I have to walk past him in the corridor.

“Matt will fuck your life up,” in the bright sun of the garden, the grey of his eyes is almost ghostly, “he does that to people.”

I appreciate the warning but I am getting really fucking sick of everyone telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. First it was Seb with Adam, though admittedly that appears to have been a fairly good one, and now I have Declan with Matt.

“Matt doesn’t have that much rope to work with,” I can’t write and it feels like someone rearranged my heart so my blood pumps through the chambers backwards.

“You have no idea how much rope you have until you’ve hung yourself with it,” Declan’s face doesn’t tighten in the sadness of remembering something that happened to him. All I see is anger.

“Neil?” I know very little about the guitarist I replaced, deciding that it seemed to be a touchy subject and to leave it alone in fear of triggering the supernova that Dylan warns me is an inevitability.