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“Here’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Willy declared. “We are going to call my old professor, Dr. Vangari. She’s a friend of mine and one of the most respected psychologists in the country. She specializes in talk therapy, and is a hard ass who isn’t afraid to make you confront your issues instead of just masking the symptoms. We’ll schedule you an appointment, and we’ll work together to safely wean you off all these medications you don’t need.”
“Will you come with me?” I asked, my voice sounded small and unsure, betraying my vulnerability.
I didn’t put up a fight because, like I said, I wasn’t stupid. I knew everything he said was the truth. I just hadn’t realized anyone cared enough about me to notice, which really wasn’t fair to my best friend. Of course he noticed. Of course he fucking cared, I was just too deep in my depression to remember that.
“What else is an emotional support whore for?” he joked, injecting some much-needed levity into the conversation.
Dr. Vangari was different, I’d give her that. She genuinely seemed to care, which was a new experience for me. And like I said, I fucking hated therapy.
Her whole approach centered around the concept of “closure.” Apparently my lack of closure was holding me back in life. My parents, Gray. Everyone had left me, and I never got the chance to have that discussion with them, to express my feelings. Instead, I bottled up that rejection until it festered into a sore of self-loathing within me.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to get the closure I desperately craved from the people themselves. My parents had probably OD’d years ago or had fried their brains to the point that they couldn’t even remember having a kid. If they did, I’m sure they would’ve come knocking by now, asking for cash.
I could easily track down Gray if I wanted to, but Ilene cautioned against it. She said that confronting someone who had hurt you rarely gave you the answers you sought. Moral of the story: people suck.
Instead, she encouraged me to write down my feelings of hurt and betrayal. The idea being that once they were on the page, I could let them stay there instead of allowing them to rot me from the inside.
I gave it a shot. Angry words on paper quickly morphed into memories and feelings of longing. Brief sentences naturally evolved into lyrics. And then, almost effortlessly, melodies and harmonies emerged. Before I knew it, I had written an entire album, the most vulnerable I’d ever been, even more so than my debut album. Although I wasn’t sure if I’d ever find the courage to release it to the public.
Recording it in the studio felt cathartic at the time, though it also unleashed a flood of emotions I thought I’d buried for good. But now, sitting in my cold and barren townhouse that I despised but never cared enough about to move out of, listening to the final notes of the last song with Willy beside me, I didn’t feel the relief I’d hoped for. Instead of closure, it seemed there were more loose ends than ever before. At least the album title fit.
Willy sat beside me, uncharacteristically silent.
“What, nothing?” I quipped, trying to break the awkward tension.
He turned to face me, a single tear spilling over his watery eyes with a streak of mascara following. He needed to clear his throat before speaking. “Holy shit, Colt. That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I don’t think I truly understood before just how much love there is between you and Gray. I thought you couldn’t move on because of what he represented in your life, but I didn’t think you were still head over heels in love with him.”
I frowned at him. “Ah, I don’t think we listened to the same thing. I wrote this as a farewell to Gray, a way to let him go of him for good.”
“Well, if that was your intention, you failed spectacularly. Because I just listened to possibly the greatest love letter ever written. Who knew you were such a goddamn romantic, boo?”
“Ahh...” I couldn’t even begin to formulate a response to that. Surely Willy was speaking complete nonsense.
Willy helped me out by punching me in the arm. “Ow! What the fuck was that for?” I grumbled.
“Dude, what are you even still doing here? Go get your man! Play him this, and I can guarantee he’ll drop his panties before you finish the first song.”
“Can you please be serious?”
“I am being serious. Why haven’t you tried to contact him? Because after hearing that,” he gestured towards my sound system, “I don’t buy that he wasn’t just as obsessed with you as you are with him. I don’t know what happened, but I know that he didn’t just wake up one day and willingly decide to walk away from a love like that. So go to him! Go tell him you love him, because a love like that deserves to be fought for.”
“It’s not that easy,” I tried to reason.
“I didn’t say it would be easy. I said it would be worth it.”
“He doesn’t want anything to do with me. If he did, he would have tried to talk to me before now.”
“Sure,” Willy said with all the sarcasm he could muster. “Huge popstar with a twenty-four-seven security detail. I bet it’s super easy to find your number in the directory and ask you out for a coffee.”
Fucking Willy, being all logical. The truth was, as stupid as it sounded, I had never actually considered that. That Gray maybe didn’t know how to reach me. But I quickly discarded the idea. I may have blocked him, but I’d purposely never changed my number in the hopes he might try to contact me one day. Which he would know, because I’d kept in touch with Kingston of all people. We had a silent agreement never to discuss Gray, but I also knew well enough that King wouldn’t be able to keep that fact a secret.
Also, we were still legally married. All he had to do to get my attention would be to serve me with divorce papers.
Still, I couldn’t shake what Willy had said. The seed had been planted and continued to grow the longer I thought about it. Seeking out Gray may be inevitable, if nothing else so I could finally close that chapter of my life. If writing a whole freaking album about him hadn’t given me closure, maybe telling him to his face how much he hurt me would do the trick.
I slowly came to accept that if I ever truly wanted to move forward, I would eventually have to make the trip back to Missouri to confront my past.
I just needed time to work up the courage to go through with it.
