After pouring over the blank pages for a couple of hours, scratching through lines, and adding new ones, I began hearing melodies in my mind. Of course, when I’d come back to Nashville, I hadn’t thought to bring my guitar. Music had been the last thing on my mind. So, I took Emilia for a quick field trip to pick up a coffee and a pup cup before heading to Guitar Center.
“If you tell anyone about this, I will deny it,” I said to Emilia as she licked the whipped cream from the tiny cup I held for her in my lap. Not that the geriatric dog could hear me anyway. “Who even am I?”
When we got to the store, I tucked Emilia under one arm and went inside. There were a few other customers, some being helped by employees wearing black button-downs with the Guitar Center logo.
“Hey, man, can I help you?” a tall young-looking guy asked as he approached. His eyes widened as he leaned a little closer. “Holy shit, dude. You’re Luca Sterling. Big fan.”
“I need a guitar,” I said by way of a greeting.
“I can definitely help you with that,” he said eagerly, clasping his hands together. “Follow me. I’m Quentin, by the way.”
I nodded, too focused on the mission at hand for pleasantries, and trailed behind him.
“Cute dog,” he said over his shoulder.
“Thanks.”
Quentin came to a stop in front of a wall filled with electric guitars and started rambling about the different models they had available.
“You can’t go wrong with a Fender Strat,” he said, tapping his fingers along a seafoam green version propped against a stand. “But I’m a Schecter guy myself. The necks are slimmer, and they’re just a bit more versatile depending on what your needs are. I play in a Metallica cover band, and my C-1 FR shreds like a fucking dream.”
That wasnotwhat I needed. I wasn’t envisioning soaring guitar solos or anything like that. I wanted something a bit…softer.
“Actually, I think I’d like to check out your acoustics,” I said, gesturing down the wall with my thumb.
Once again, Quentin launched into more specifics about each of the various brands that I didn’t really care about. I had enough talent in my left fuck-you finger to make any guitar sound good. What I really needed was something that felt right.
I was drawn to the Gibson Hummingbird hanging in front of me.
“Here,” I said, pressing Emilia into Quentin’s chest. “Hold her.”
“Oh, uh, sure.” He hesitantly scratched the pup’s ear. “I never had a dog growing up. I did have a ferret once named Nikki Sixx. I used to take him to school in the pocket of my hoodie. One day he chewed a hole through it and stuck his head out of my stomach like in that movieAlien.”
“Believe I would’ve kept that one in the vault, Quentin,” I said, sitting on a nearby stool with the Hummingbird propped on my leg. The neck fit in my hand like it was made for me. I started strumming the melody that had been in my head all day as Quentin yammered on about his old ferret, and Emilia let out an annoyed huff.
“…and one day he got out of his cage, and the little fucker got into a hole in the drywall,” Quentin said with a heavy sigh. “Never saw him again after that.”
I stopped playing and stood, snatching Emilia from Quentin’s grasp, and handed him the guitar. “I’ll take this one.”
Emilia and I returned home with the brand-new guitar, and she snacked in the kitchen while I went back to the bedroom. I opened the notebook and began to play, the gravel in my voice filling the silence.
“The only way I can win is to fix the game so everybody loses
Pay to play, drop your guard
Won’t know what hit you, but you’ll feel the ache of my bruises
Because when you get high, I go low
Pull back, don’t get too close
Or I’ll go
So it goes”
I dropped my pick to the pen-scrawled page with a smile and nodded. It was far from perfect, but it was a start. But more importantly, it felt fucking good.
It was as thoughI’d taken a sledgehammer to the wall I’d built between me and my emotions. Once I gave voice to one feeling, another would raise its hand and demand to be heard. By the time I heard Dallas and Katie’s car pull in the driveway that evening, I’d filled half the notebook with lines upon lines of my thoughts and incomplete songs.
