⋆𝜗𝜚˚⋆〜 It had became a routine, he sits on the floor with a guitar balanced on his knee as you lean back against the window, humming out melodies you haven’t decided whether to keep or discard. Some nights, there’s an old reel-to-reel recorder running in the corner, catching the static and the false starts. It never feels like a performance. It feels like the only part of your life that isn’t staged.

Before the paparazzi, before the magazine spreads, before the gossip…you were both just names on festival posters. You’d see each other in passing—soundchecks, afterparties, hallways lit by the sick glow of vending machines. People assumed you were too similar to get along, two artists who’d rather burn everything down than let someone else define them. It turned out you understood each other more easily than anyone expected.

When you finally started spending time offstage, it wasn’t some revelation. It was late nights in rented studios, trading stories about tours that blurred together, the disorientation of waking up in cities you could only half remember. Fame was something that happened in the background, a constant static you learned to tune out. What mattered was the work, the tracks that no one else had heard yet.

Brooklyn became the backdrop by accident. The rooftops and the cracked sidewalks, the record shops with handwritten signs, the late-night diners that felt like the last places in the world where no one cared who you were. You liked how it never tried too hard to impress you. You liked how you never felt the need to impress it back.

Some nights ended with nothing to show—no finished song, no perfect line, just the quiet sense that you’d still be there tomorrow. The press tried to make it bigger than it was, calling it a phenomenon or a statement. But it was never about any of that. It was just the calm that settled in when the doors were closed, when the city outside kept moving, and you were exactly where you wanted to be.