My brother has a specific relationship with panic. He doesn't show it the way most people do no visible spiral, no catastrophizing out loud. He just gets quiet and starts moving. Like if he can stay in motion long enough the answer will meet him somewhere on the road. I've watched him do it his whole life. I used to think it meant he wasn't scared. Now I know it means he's scared and just refuses to let it park.
I got the notification on a Tuesday.
Genre bent. My genre: country.
I said "Fuck" out loud to nobody in particular, closed the laptop, and went for a drive.
* * *
I put on the most-streamed country songs and just let them run. I wasn't looking to become a fan. I was looking for the architecture what held these songs up, what they were made of underneath the twang and the trucks and the small-town nostalgia. And when I actually listened past all of that, I could hear it. The specificity. The way the best ones planted you somewhere real a particular exit, a particular season, a particular mother's face and made you feel the weight of it without explaining it. That was the thing. Country at its best was just storytelling with geography.
I could work with that. I just didn't know from where yet.
I ended up at Savannah's.
I don't always know I'm going somewhere until I'm pulling up. My brain routes me to where I need to be and fills me in after. Seven was at her grandma's. Savannah came to the door in an oversized shirt and reading glasses she took off when she saw it was me, tucking them into her shirt pocket like she'd been caught doing something. She probably had a book going. She always had a book going.
She looked at my face and stepped aside without asking.
That was the thing about Savannah that you couldn't explain to somebody who hadn't been around her. She didn't make a production of caring. She just did it moved out of the way, made room, waited. She'd learned how to read a person's face the same way she'd learned to read Seven's face when Seven was too little to have words for what was wrong. You watch long enough, you stop needing the words.
I sat on the couch. She sat next to me, close, and waited.
I told her about the prompt.
She said, "Ooooh." Slow, letting it land. Not laughing at me. Just acknowledging the full size of the problem the way a person does when they understand exactly how hard something is and they're not going to minimize it to make you feel better.
I put my head on her shoulder.
She brought her hand up and tapped my face twice with her palm gentle, grounding,. It worked on me the same way it probably worked on Seven. I didn't know how to feel about that and I also didn't care.
I looked at her.
She looked back.
I kissed her.
She kissed me back and I felt her exhale, slow, like she'd been carrying something all day and had finally found somewhere to set it down. I dropped to my knees in front of her and lifted her legs and took my time with her, thorough, unhurried, paying attention to every sound she made until she wrapped her legs around my head and said, "Jordan, baby, fuck," and then came loud, the way she only let herself be loud when Seven wasn't home like she'd been saving it, like she'd earned it. Then she looked at me she wasn't finished, and I smiled and turned her around and arched her back.
We cleaned up. She washed her hands at the kitchen sink and then started moving around the kitchen like she'd already decided what was happening next, pulling things from the cabinet without consulting me, checking what she had. That was the mom thing. The specific mom thing that I'd noticed the first time I came over and couldn't stop noticing She asked if I was hungry, which is really just a courtesy.
I said yeah.
She put me to work cutting something while she handled the stove, which I also noticed she didn't treat the kitchen like her territory, she treated it like a shared project. We moved around each other without bumping. It was comfortable in a way that caught me off guard sometimes, how comfortable it was.
At some point she brought up Maddy.
This was a thing she did occasionally gave me advice on pulling girls my own age, completely unprompted, in this calm and practical tone like she was a guidance counselor and not the woman I'd just been with on the couch. I never totally understood it. I think she genuinely wanted me to have something she couldn't be for me. I think it also turned her on a little, though she would never say that. I didn't bring it up.
We ate. She sat across from me at her small table and asked what I was going to do about the prompt.
"Only thing I can do," I said. "Try."
She nodded once, the way she nodded when an answer was correct not because it was smart but because it was honest. Then she said, "You can sleep here. Seven's not back until tomorrow night."
I stayed.
* * *
I woke up in the morning with it already there.
Our grandma lived in Vermont. She was the country music person in our family not the new stuff, the real old stuff, the kind where somebody was standing somewhere specific feeling something specific and had the decency to just say so. We used to go up summers when we were kids and she'd have it playing in every room at the same volume, just underneath everything else, like a second temperature in the house. I hadn't thought about her place in a while. I didn't know why I was thinking about it now except that I'd been looking for a door into the genre all day and apparently my brain had found one while I was asleep.
I kissed Savannah on the temple before I left. She made a small sound and didn't open her eyes. I drove home with the windows down.
I went to my room, pulled the guitar out of the corner, and wrote.
Two days before the final round. It was enough.
* * *
Day of the round, Kat's place again. Rue and Gia were already deep in a conversation about it when I got the notification to join Rue explaining something about the history of country music to Gia who was listening with the patient expression she wore when she was humoring Rue but also actually interested. Rue does that when she's nervous. Finds the subject adjacent to the thing and talks about that instead so she doesn't have to sit in the feeling directly.
I was in the first pair. My opponent's choice they put me on first. Somebody pressed play.
The song opened on just guitar.
* * *
As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined
You must have had yourself a change of heart like halfway through the drive
My opponent had been fidgeting with her headphones since we opened the call. She went completely still.
'Cause your voice trailed off exactly as you passed my exit sign
You kept on drivin' straight and left our future to the right
One judge set her pen down. The other leaned back in her chair slowly, like she needed more room to take it in.
Now I am stuck between my anger and the blame that I can't face
And memories are somethin' even smokin' weed does not replace
And I am terrified of weather 'cause I see you when it rains
Doc told me to travel, but there's Covid on the planes
At Kat's, Gia grabbed Rue's arm. Rue didn't shake her off.
And I love Vermont, but it's the season of the sticks
And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed
And it's half my fault, but I just like to play the victim
I'll drink alcohol 'til my friends come home for Christmas
And I'll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you're tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I'm split in half, but that'll have to do
The host had gone completely still. Arms crossed, chin down, the posture of someone who has stopped preparing what to say next and is just listening.
So I thought that if I piled somethin' good on all my bad
That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad
No, I am no longer funny, 'cause I miss the way you laugh
You once called me forever, now you still can't call me back
And I love Vermont, but it's the season of the sticks
And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed
And it's half my fault, but I just like to play the victim
I'll drink alcohol 'til my friends come home for Christmas
And I'll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you're tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I'm split in half, but that'll have to do
Oh, that'll have to do
My other half was you
I hope this pain's just passin' through
But I doubt it
And I love Vermont, but it's the season of the sticks
And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed
And it's half my fault, but I just like to play the victim
I'll drink alcohol 'til my friends come home for Christmas
And I'll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you're tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I'm split in half, but that'll have to do
Have to do
Silence.
Long enough that I thought something had frozen on their end.
Then one of the judges unmuted. "You wrote that." Not a question.
"Yes, ma'am."
"In two days."
"Yes, ma'am."
She exhaled through her nose and went back on mute and shook her head at whoever was beside her off-screen.
My opponent looked at her camera for a long moment. Then at mine. "I genuinely don't know how to follow that."
"Your song was good," I said.
"Mine was fine," she said. "That was something else."
They called the vote. I won.
* * *
Everyone said they were surprised how good it was; I was too.
I picked up the guitar and played through the song one more time, just for myself, no track underneath it. Just the words and the chords in the room. It sounded smaller that way. More like what it actually was something I'd pulled from a memory of an old woman with country music playing low in every room of a house in Vermont, summer after summer, and me never once thinking to ask her why it was always on.
I put the guitar back in the corner.
One round left.
There's a line in that song about piling good on bad and hoping it cancels out. About inheriting darkness from your dad. He sang it like it was just a fact, like he'd already made his peace with it, and I sat at Kat's with Gia's hand on my arm and I thought: he hasn't made peace with it. He's just gotten very good at making it look like he has.
That's not the same thing. I know it isn't. I just don't know what to do with the difference.