You ever feel like a ghost before you’re dead?

It’s weird, but that’s the only way I can explain the past six months. Like I’ve been walking around this trailer, breathing, eating leftover pizza, watching the dust collect on the pillow you used to sleep on. Just existing in the place where love used to be.

I didn’t think it would hit me like it did. You’d think, with my reputation — the town freak, the metalhead dungeon master, the “wrong guy” — I’d be used to people walking away. Hell, people have been giving up on me since kindergarten.

But you? You were different.

I don’t even know how we happened. You weren’t supposed to look at me twice. You came from this whole other world — clean, bright, full of expectations and tightly woven futures. And me? I’m the detour nobody plans for. But still… for a while, we made it work. God, we made it work.

Your laugh was a song I’d never heard before, and I couldn’t stop playing it in my head. You liked the way I talked too fast when I got excited. You said you could listen to me ramble about band rehearsals and campaign prep for hours. I started writing songs about you without realizing it. Doodles of your name ended up in the margins of my homework — the little homework I bothered turning in.

It was real. Deep. The kind of love people think only exists in sappy movies or guitar solos that stretch longer than they should.

And then… the cracks started.

At first it was small stuff. Your ‘friends’ would shoot me these looks, like you’d brought a wolf to brunch. One of them even pulled me aside once at a bonfire and said, “You’re fun for now, but don’t drag her down with you.” I laughed it off. Acted like it didn’t matter. But it did. It always does.

They started getting into your head. Whispering things like “He’s not your future,” or “You could do better.”

And one day, you said it. “I can’t do this anymore.”

I’ll never forget the look in your eyes. You were crying, and so was I — not the kind of dramatic breakdown I’d imagined heartbreak would be, but this quiet, slow, suffocating grief. Like watching a candle go out in a locked room.

“It’s not you, Eddie… it’s them. It’s everything else. I can’t breathe anymore.”

I wanted to scream. I did scream, after you left. I smashed my favorite record, regretted it instantly, then sat in the dark with bleeding knuckles and a bottle of cheap whiskey I didn’t even like.

But I never blamed you. Not really.

You loved me. I know you did. Hell, maybe you still do. But the world doesn’t always let love be enough.

So I let you go.

—

It’s late now. Past midnight. I’m sitting on the couch, stringing together a new riff I’ll probably forget by morning. There’s a half-drunk beer sweating on the armrest, and Wayne’s snoring from the other end of the trailer.

My hair’s longer. I haven’t really looked in a mirror since Christmas. Not for more than a few seconds. But I know what I look like — tired. Like someone who’s still haunted by the sound of your voice saying goodbye.

And then the phone rings.

At first, I don’t move. Nobody calls me this late. And the sound — that shrill, old-school ring — it punches through the silence like a bat to the gut.

I grab the receiver off the hook, my voice coming out groggy. “Yeah?”

There’s a pause. Just long enough to make my stomach twist.

Then I hear you.