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“Your messages, my sweet Stella.”
48 CALL YOUR MOM
THEN
RIGGINS
Ashford will forever be a double-sided coin to me. I love this place; it’s where I found myself, my best friends, and my band. It’s where I grew up, where I met Stella, and where I wrote music that changed lives—my life, the band's life, and fans' lives if what they tell me is true.
But it will also always be the place where my mother died and where my father essentially killed himself. When I drive from the airport to here, through the Pine Barrens this time of the year, it’s nothing but sticks, depressing and empty.
Every time, I’m reminded of the times Stella and I lay beneath those trees, staring at the sky, promising we’d be forever. I can look at the stars from anywhere in the world, but when I do it with my feet planted in Ashford, it’s like I’m still here with Stella, and that hurts more than anything ever could.
Even more so in the house I grew up with. It was left to me when Dad passed, with no siblings or other family to take it on, and since then, it’s been my sole remaining tether to Ashford. A tether I’ve avoided like the plague to the best of my ability. It’s not that I haven’t been in this house since my dad died. I have, just not for any stretch of real-time.
I haven’t lived in this house.
I surely haven’t explored it.
This house is so still, so quiet, a time capsule of my childhood and my father's pain and the life my mother lived that ended too quickly. When I walk through the door, boots hitting on the same carpet my mother hated but my father never replaced, it’s like I’m seventeen again.
I feel a strange mix of anxiety that creeps up my chest and makes me want to turn around like I’ve done every other time I tried to clear this place out but fight it back. I didn’t learn how to control or conquer until it was too late, and I have an unending hope that I still have a huge, full life in front of me, a life where I can make dreams and hopes come true.
Hopes that would have undeniably included Stella.
I think I’ve put off cleaning and selling this place for so long because it felt like the one remaining strand of hope for her, the last of the invisible strings tying me to Stella that I haven’t severed.
But it’s time. Time to leave this behind, to finally sever this part of my life.
To finally try and move on.
Maybe if I cut this tie to Ashford, I’ll cut the part of my soul that always aches for Stella.
Wishful thinking, maybe, but I’m a desperate man.
Rubbing my hand over my forehead, I stare around the time capsule that is my childhood home and grab a hair tie to pull up my hair, only the top half making it into the small bun Reed would absolutely make fun of me for.
I start with the bathroom, seemingly the easiest spot that would hold the least memories, but when I see the cabinet above the sink holding every product my mother used, half full like the day she left it when she passed, the knife turns.
I hated my dad for the longest time.
My mother passed, and I was just a kid, a kid without a mother. Then, he took my father away from me, drowning his emotions and sorrows until he died.
But I get it. I might have been deep in the rockstar life when Stella was with me, but as soon as she left, I fell off that cliff, drowning my sadness, filling that hole she left with whatever would numb the pain.
The shoes she left when she ran are still on the top shelf of my closet, and I built an entire fucking shrine for her in Maine. I get how he couldn’t bear the idea of clearing out Mom’s things, even if it would have made his life easier, his grief less suffocating.
I get it now.
It’s an uncomfortable realization that despite my best intentions, I became the man who angered me so much as a kid. And that now, I feel a bit of guilt knowing I got so mad at him for being human and not having the tools or ability to cope.
I push it back and begin the heartbreaking and harrowing work of packing up my past.
Hours and hours later, uncovering more frozen memories of my mother and even more uncomfortable realizations about my father, I head into the living room to run out and grab lunch for myself. Before I leave, my eyes catch the black box on the side table next to the couch. The family phone we never used, but never got rid of because the answering machine had my mother’s voice.
I get it, not wanting to hear that, the way it would tear open wounds that have barely healed. God, do I get it.
Every fucking day I’m on stage where I sing and play the songs we wrote together; it’s her voice that I hear.
