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I refuse to fall apart.
Whatever you thought you saw, you didn’t, I tell myself sternly, and grab a sip of water to clear my head. Jude looks over anxiously, but I nod to him that I’m going to talk into the mic for a second. After that, I’ll be ready for the next one.
And I am.
I am. If I tell it to myself often enough, it will be true.
“It’s almost Christmas Eve, New York!” I yell into the microphone, and the crowd responds with screams of my name and ‘I love you’s. “How are you doing tonight? Is there a particular song you’d like us to play for you? Hmm… What could it be?”
They go out of their minds screaming for me to singHeartbreaker.
I smile, but it takes effort. I know they’re here for that song—some of them are here only for that.
I don’t open my concerts withHeartbreakeranymore, because it always used to cause a riot at the beginning of the show, when everyone wasn’t really settled in yet. We had a talk with my management and my security detail and I decided to change things around, but it’s common knowledge thatHeartbreakeris what all these thousands of fans are here for, in this freezing, sleeting New York winter night. If I don’t give it to them in the fourth or fifth song, they get antsy. And I need something to distract me from what I think I saw.
To distract me from her memories flooding my brain and dragging me under.
So,Heartbreakerit is. The song that once upon a time was the one thing that broke me worse than she did.
But in time, as it kept climbing the charts and getting picked up from radio stations and everywhere else, I started playing it over and over and over and I got used to the pain it emanates. Nowadays, my hands find their place on the guitar on their own, my lips forming the words without my brain even having to remember them. It’s all muscle memory at this point.
And right now, this song is my lifeline, my escape.
The minute the first notes start, the usual thing happens:
Everyone starts screaming until the whole arena is a throbbing, pulsating mass of sound. And then, suddenly, the voices stop. The clamoring, the noise, the insanity… It all stops. The chaos drops to nothing, and there is utter silence around me.
Everyone is collectively holding their breaths, a whole stadium stock-full of people, not breathing.
Waiting for me to sing.
It almost makes my throat hurt to think about it, how they all, massively go silent to listen to me. But I’m not here to think, I’m here to sing. So I drop my voice down an octave, enter a husky range, and begin.
Dead leaves, orange sky
Notebooks, dead flies
English lit novel under your arm
The day you came into my life
Scraped knees, dark clouds
I wiped your tears
You taught me how to smile
Cut to me alone in my room
Cut to me cut in pieces
Cut to me with my heart cut out of my chest
Cut to me breaking and breaking and breaking
Heartbreaker
Heartbreaker
