Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1078 So Whatcha Want?

So Whatcha Want?

Picture me and Ziggy sitting on a very rectangular couch, notebooks on the coffee table in front of us, a guitar in my lap and my hair all over the fucking place because I've been tearing it out.

Still no song.

"You know what?" I said, after the umpteenth abortive false start. "It's really really hard to write a song for someone else."

"You've done it for Jonathan and for Sarah, though, haven't you?" He inverted himself so his legs were over the back of the couch and his head was hanging off the cushions. His shirt rode up and gave me a peek of his flat stomach.

"Yes and no. I wrote a song about Jonathan, technically, not something I was trying to write because I thought he'd like it. And I suppose technically it wasn't about him so much as about how I felt after spending the weekend with him." Which reminded me of a song I'd written about how I felt after spending time with Ziggy–well, I mean, there were lots of those–but it reminded me of a specific one that I had liked but that I'd never finished. "And I wrote a song with Sarah, technically, because we worked on it together... And here's the thing, it was the same song."

Ziggy shrugged, which looked ridiculous because he was upside down. "Never mind, then. How are your fingers?"

"Tender." I set the guitar aside. "I don't think I'm ready to write a song about how I feel about Claire dying. And even if I was, I don't think it'd make a good impression at her funeral."

He nodded, his hair swinging. "Think about this, then. How do you want the people sitting in the audience to feel? Or, how do you think Claire wants them to feel?"

Just trying to think about it sent my brain into a kind of stutter. Imagine the sound of an engine trying to start with a dead battery. I pressed my palms to my forehead. "This is... that's... so far from where songs usually come from. It's... too many leaps."

"Hm." He righted himself and made a note in his notebook. "Have you tried taking a shower? You know you always get ideas in the shower."

"I used to," I said, looking at my scarred palm as if my hand were the problem. The problem was definitely in my head, not my hand. "I've taken hundreds of showers since the last time I got an idea for a song."

He looked sad more than frustrated. "Am I being any help at all?"

I slid over to him so I could put an arm around him and catch the scent of his skin by nuzzling him on the neck. "You are. Me sitting here alone trying to do this would be horrible. I'd probably have set fire to the place and run screaming into the night by now."

"Ha."

"Yeah, I know, joking about going crazy was funnier before I had my break with reality." Brazil felt like a long time ago. And, well, it had been nine months. I guess on the scale of entertainment business time that was a long time ago. I had a sudden pang of guilty panic–that meant Ziggy's Japanese record company had been waiting for him to announce tour dates for over a year. Had they even released the record there yet? If they had, it was old news now and probably dead in the water, and if they hadn't, well, shit, they were holding up release because of... because of me.

"Daron?"

I had gone very still. Catatonic, I guess. I was breathing, blinking, but that was all I could do.

I could feel his cheek brush mine as he pulled back to look at me, to put his face in my line of sight. "Dear one? Are you all right?"

I... just stared.

"Let me ask you something else. Can I get you a glass of water?"

I shook my head and I spoke. "No. I'm... just having a moment."