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fmdtaeyongarchive · 4 years

Text

↬ my reality is a cruel fall without you.

date: august 2020.

location: ash’s living room / ash’s therapist’s office / ash’s apartment studio.

word count: 1,822 words, excluding lyrics.

summary: -

triggers: n/a.

notes: creative claims verification.

ash has been through this exact writing process three times prior and he’s picked up some tricks. defining the seasons in the context of love had become easier for him as he finished their respective songs one by one.

winter had been the cold of the world driving two people together.

spring had been the honeymoon phase.

summer had been the oppressive weight of a long-term relationship taking its toll.

now, it’s time for him to write fall.

ii.

it’s been a year.

ash can’t remember anything in his life ever feeling quite as heavy as that promise ring had the night he’d slipped it off the chain around his neck and passed it out of his grasp for the last time, a mere six months after he’d put it on his finger and thought he’d had everything figured out.

“i love you so much, but we both know this isn’t working.”

(i love you, but not in the way i thought i’d been looking for my whole life any more.)

if he’d looked at himself from the outside, he would have felt silly for feeling his entire core splitting in half as the silver ring clattered onto the table, his resolve too weak to thrust it directly into the other man’s hand, but there’d always been the unspoken understanding that the ring was more than a silly promise.

a public declaration of forever in a relationship as an active idol is, by most accounts, socially impossible. making that forever official in the form of government documents as a same-sex couple in south korea is, by all accounts, legally impossible.

forever had been a big thought to a barely twenty-three year-old, and it’d only grown more massive the longer it hung over ash’s head blissfully unacknowledged for the sake of his own happiness, for the sake of the idea of finally getting his own happy ending. he’d get there one day. then, it wouldn’t feel so all-encompassing, so terrifying, but months had passed and he’d felt like he was only getting farther away from that one day.

it hadn’t gone unnoticed to ash that, without fail, he’d been the one to deflect from the topic of forever when talk between them became too real. with time, it started to weigh him down. one day, he looked up and found he wasn’t on that cloud high above everything anymore.

he was in a different world and he couldn’t see a way he’d ever be able to climb back up to be on even ground.

so, it had ended at ash’s hand.

ash had once heard a person needs half the time they were in a relationship to get over it, so looking at the calendar and seeing august come around once again, that hill should officially be behind him now.

so why does he still think about it with sorrow at times like these?

how are you? how are you doing without me?

he has no intentions of writing a song about him for his fall single at first. he only wants to distract himself on the anniversary of the last ending he’d faced. the last one he’d ever face if he’d learned anything worthwhile.

but when does he ever learn?

his piano is an old friend at times like these. if the wood had any consciousness within it beyond what he projects into it in his most desperate times of need, it would surely judge him for how he goes back to it like clockwork in his times of emotional distress, but the rest of the world will judge him less for it than it will for turning to the bottles in his kitchen or the exes in his phone.

there’s a pattern to it now. sit down, straighten his back (the weight of the world on his shoulders is no excuse for poor playing posture), rest his phone on the bench next to him with an application recording every note he plays, and lay a blank notebook of music staves next to it in case he decides to be formal about anything workable that comes out of his idling.

nothing noteworthy comes to him at first, but the more he plays, the more fresh ideas begin swirling in a twister in his mind against his initial intentions of merely distracting himself. he messes around with chords, keys, arpeggios. he’s been forcing it a lot lately, and it hasn’t turned out in his favor. letting it slowly seep its way out of his pores might be the better course of action now instead.

his mind is frantic but the music is slow and inspiration piles up inside of him until he decides to sit and think through a chord progression, then a top line melody, then he fleshes it out. the first step in the process is never perfect, but he isn’t stumped with where to go with it yet, and that’s a good sign. more and more, he’s felt defeated with his songwriting after idea after idea gets rejected by the only people whose opinions really matter if he ever wants his songs to make it out in the world. he could think a song is the best piece he’s ever crafted, but if it doesn’t appease the bc entertainment gods, it will never see the light of day.

he tries not to think about that while he works on this song. that’s the roadblock he’s run into too many times before trying to pluck out something he can be proud of on the strings of a guitar or on the black and white keys of a piano.

the end product is something jazzy but moody, laden with his unspoken emotions but in a way that lends itself to simplicity, but he ponders for days the right way to put words to it.

he can feel what he wants the lyrics to say. it’s when he attempts to put them into words with a rhyme scheme and an appropriate meter that he struggles. ash has become a master at packaging his emotions into a pretty song with structure and a story, but this time, it’s evading him. the feeling is emptiness, but it’s also missing something he doesn’t really want back. it’s wanting something he can’t have now and wanting to tear himself apart for wanting it. it’s looking down the dark path to his future and seeing only less and less light as it stretches out in front of him. it’s fear of the inevitable pitch black darkness at the very end of the path and how quickly it’s approaching.

iii.

it’s after his second therapy session with his new therapist that something occurs to ash that stays with him beyond the time he’d paid for.

it’s not something he brings up during the session itself, or says out loud to anyone. ash doesn’t talk about his romantic life in detail with any therapist he’s ever had, even though he’s well-aware refusing to bring it up is ignoring a festering wound that needs attention if it’s ever going to heal. he’s heard too many horror stories about professionals that were supposed to know better discovering the money for the gossip being better than adherence to the oath of confidentiality they’d made for him to find comfort in disclosing the intricacies of his private life.

there’s a part of him he’s still holding back, but he only finds comfort in not opening up completely even to the person he’s paying to allow him to do just that without too much outward judgment.

opening himself fully or not, the lyrics to the song come easier to him after that. putting what he’s feeling into words is no easy task, but he’s made progress on it already. possibilities don’t come flooding out like a broken dam, but they do trickle down through his brain steadily enough for him not to lose hope. the slow drops only come when he pries them out, but they come nonetheless.

iv.

the mood of the song evolves in a way ash hadn’t anticipated at first. it becomes sadder in tone, more wistful. that had been a given from the moment the lyrics began to flesh out, but playing around in cubase ends with him deciding the song works its best as a simple piano composition, stripped bare like his emotions.

the piano remains prominent even as he adds more percussion and the main instrumental piano track gets jazzed up more than the initial draft recording had been. in a world where his music reflects solely his gut instinct, the song would be even more bare bones than it becomes. he imagines he would have taken a direction similar to “the unknown guest” on his last album, purposefully under-produced and made to sound like something that isn’t radio friendly, but it’s still simple enough to sound stripped-down to an untrained ear. the more he works on the song, the more he understands he does want it to be played on the radio. then, maybe, he’ll be able to tell himself the right person had heard it and convince himself of the closure he needs.

there’s a feeling in his chest as he listens to the final draft version, with layers of his vocals put down and a thoroughness that only comes with a song that has found its final form, that feels a little like he’s at the top of a mountain. he can’t put a name to it other than thinness of air. it’s not disappointment or regret, and as much as he decides he does really like how it turned out, it isn’t pride either.

the song is different than he would have thought it would be when he began it — after all, at some point visions of his ex-boyfriend had begun to mix with visions of the current flame he held — but different in a way that he hopes does service to the song instead of taking away from it.

at first, it’d been about his past relationship, a love that had been suffocated by his own choice.

now?

in a way, the song is about that relationship, but, in ways, it’s about the one that had come before that. and the one before that. and then, at the end, it becomes about the next one. the one he’s not supposed to have, but the one he’s confessed to yearning for in secret in the lyrics.

i want to fall in love.

unlike so many other songs he’s written, he’s not really begging for love to return to him or cursing himself for wanting such a thing. it’s about something else.

then it hits him: it’s not any of his relationships, long passed or current or future, that he’s holding on to. it’s a lament pried out of him by the lover he’s taken up in the time since, one entirely separate, but also entirely connected that creeps in the corner of every room he enters: loneliness.

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