𝐍𝐎𝐍-𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆𝐒

Sing me to sleep

If you read this whole ridiculous melodrama from start to finish: I. Love. You. This is the end.

LONDON, UK
6 Months later, today
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

I keep dreaming about him and falling out of bed twice at night.

I can't deny, memories are fading away, and I have already forgotten too many things. Sometimes I feel a terrible anguish. Suddenly I have the doubt it was actually only a dream.

The doubt dies quickly. Our story somehow has always seemed to live in a dimension between the reality and the dreamlike. When I replay it it's so vague in my mind that I'm not sure if I'm confusing a memory of the past with my imagination. But it was real, I have to convince myself. So real that something inside me was born and could live and it's been killed instead.

I never saw Matty again. I haven't heard of him again. Despite the dreams, I feel like the power he had over me is slowly fading away. Like a disease you heal from, little by little.

He has a new puppy dog, and he's rumored to have a girlfriend. I desperately wanted to know who she was at first, then I just quitted. It's fine. He will find someone and love them. He will live and die for them. Maybe I was just too busy to try and get over him to fall for somebody new now, but eventually it will happen to me too. That's just how things go.

I get out of bed only to look for the earpods in the mess of my room. I turn the lights on. It's almost midnight but, in the part of the world where Matty is, the sun hasn't set yet. He is somewhere, half the world away, with a guitar and a piano, getting ready for a special set I'm going to follow in live streaming. He's got some new stuff to play. Probably that side project he was working at some months ago. He didn't want me to listen to it, so now I was curious.

I find my earpods and I climb into bed again. A skimpy pijama and a heart full of memories is all I'm wearing. I take my phone and open the link of the streaming, waiting for the live to start. It's a radio program, so I won't get anything more than his voice.

My friend Martina is already sleeping in the other room. Her room. Now she's living in my flat. She is okay, not completely okay but enough not to question her life every week. She decided to resume her studies and signed up for art school here in London. I though I liked to be on my own, but it's nice, after all, having someone who to say good morning to and who tells you how disgusting the shitty breakfast you've made for two is. We were both desperate when she moved, but we were also both determinated to fix ourselves. Together. Because people need people.

My mum hadn't divorced from my dad yet, and probably she never will. She never knew about the abortion. After a couple of weeks, she stopped asking me about Matty. She finally decided to come visit me in London, even tough she's afraid to fly. I don't know if my dad will come with her. She said he's in a good mood lately and may decide to accept to join her little holiday in this rainy city. I told her I don't mind. She said, deep down in his cold heart, he loves me.

Me and the boys are about to drop our sophomore album. The song I wrote for Matty – one of the many, to be fair;  the one I played for him – in the end he didn't produce it. But I'm good with what it turned out anyway. It doesn't make me cry as much as it would if he had touched it. But everything's fine cause the record is amazing and it's about time for us to go back touring and I can't wait to start again and we're headlining Glastonbury and –

And yet, even if life goes on, there's still a little damaged part of my tar black heart stuck in Matty's curls. I still can't tell if he really mean it when he said he loved me. I still wonder if he search for me in others girls' eyes. If he thinks of me when he can't sleep. I don't know where to find my answers. The only thing I'm certain of are my feelings. Feelings that are changing, after all.

Sometimes I find myself taking a look at his pictures, and it seems to me that his face isn't so gorgeous as I remembered, and some details of his personality terribly annoy me, just as some of the things he says are totally dumb and inappropriate. It's funny how I used to look at him as a God, and now he's just a simple, imperfect, human.

I guess this is me falling out of love. I breathe a sigh of relief, but at the same time it terribly frightens me that time is able to change not only your perception of things, but also your feelings towards people. Feelings that first burned with the same intensity of a thousand suns and split your heart and then your bones. And now there's just a little fading sparkle in the abyss of your forgetful soul.

I refresh the page on my phone and the radio host starts talking. Somewhere in the world, Matty is about to sing, completely unaware of how my hands are shaking at the mere thought of listening to his voice again.

The radio host asks Matty what this side project is about, and Matty speaks, he speaks and his voice is raspy and deep, but somehow it pierces my eardrums and digs up to penetrate my brain. I get chills all over my body. It takes me a moment to recalibrate my brain on his accent.

"Since The 1975 is a constantly evolving thing, with Notes on a Conditional Form I think we've come to an obvious end of an era, just like we've come to the end of the decade", he says. "What I know now, for sure, is that I'm doing a Matty record and George is doing a George record. And we're gonna produce each other's records. I've already got some new stuff, which I'm going to play now.

More than songs, these are letters. I'm talking to someone. I'm talking, but it's all about not talking of what I really want to talk about. These are basically non–love songs. There was a girl once, and she told me not to write about love.

I'm sorry, babe, if the word love came out of my mouth again. But it's hard not to sing about love"

Oh, my God. He's talking about me. He's talking to me.

"She gave me two assignments. One: don't sing to me about love. Don't. Two: remember that I existed and that I was physically close to you. See, I've been a busy man. I've been thinking about it a lot. Singing about love is forbidden, but maybe our ultimate desire in love is to share not our romantic feelings, but rather our sense of the world, our impressions of life, from the mundane to the poetic, with another person. So I'll just sing about accents. I'll sing about squares full of kids and dreams of future. I'll sing about videogames and Italian trap music. I'll sing about Barcelona and conversations inside a locked hotel room. About my hair, and how everyone liked my mohawk, everyone but one person. I'll sing about plaid skirts, the 80s, and how my garden has never been softer, longer, cleaner than that one cold night of November. I'll sing about the Altar of Heaven. About a bunch of roses given to me just to break down the patriarchy and ice creams we bought a bit too late. I'll sing about anything - anything but love, sure - so it will be impossible for me to forget that she existed, and that for a while she existed by my side.

That soud", he sighs, "I still hear it", the sound of my heart, "keeps haunting me.

And if you're listening to me, I – uh, I just hope you're doing fine."

Matty starts to play. What I hear is a distant melody, but so limpid that – within that vapor of blended voices and confused sounds, remote and incredibly near, frank and divinely enigmatic – I can hear now and then his voice singing about the mundane and turn it into something magical. I remember everything. I'll remember him till the day I die. I keep listening to that musical vibration from my empty bed, and I know that despite Matty's hopelessly absence from my bed, I will always have his art by my side.

Oh, Matty, after all you still remember that I existed, and that I physically was close to you. I hope you know you will never be alone cause you will always have art by your side. I hope you'll have a baby. And most of all, I hope you will love your baby and never ever make her or him suffer. That wife of yours, whoever she will be, I hope, will always treat you well, because that's what you deserve.

I am listening to your voice cradling me as I fall asleep and I am thinking of the ecstasy of a memory, the tenderness of a vibrating guitar string, the prophetic lyrics, the refuge of art. Only there we can love each other, in the harmony of a work of art, in that enchanted order. This is the only eternity you and I may share.

THE END