Two Punks In Love

Attic

Trace

I retreat, not into the bedroom where I just blew up my life, but into the attic of this villa. It used to be staff quarters, but because of the great acoustics, it's where I had the guitars put. Unlike this three hundred year old house, they are all new, unplayed and unpackaged.

I have no intention of playing them now. Or maybe never. I lie on the floor, because I feel absolutely ill. Maybe I'll just lie here until I become one of the ghosts that are rumored to haunt this place.

Because no one in my life has any fucking chill, I know they will come to me. They will all come, eventually. One by one, or in little delegations, small strategic groups who think their combined strengths might recall me to myself. Most will come to offer a sickenly optimistic moral support. Some will come to muster me action. A couple will come trying to force me to eat or otherwise go on living.

One will come with his rock star firmly in place and the determined grip that he will place on my shoulder, to hold me together because he knows what it feels like to have your world walk away and your children taken from you because of your own flaws, your own mistakes.

One will come to pray in that way that never feels like prayer, but like comfort and hope and strength.

One will come to mourn with me, but she will wait. She will let all the others try to raise me from my self-inflicted torture. And if—when—they fail, she will come, to lie on this bed of nails I made for us both, to cry with me, and share my sorrow, because the haunting refrain of pain is the only song Ashlynn and I will ever know how to sing together.

I know who will come first. The angry one. The futile one, who doesn't understand the life, the loves his daughters have chosen.

I don't get ten minutes of stillness, before he finds me in my hiding place. My heart hasn't even really begun to break apart. The image of watching Kat walk out on me barefoot and without a backward glace is mostly what I'm thinking of.

He growls at me to get up, but I don't move. I'm trying to remember if she put any goddamn shoes in the suitcase.

He paces the attic as I lay on the floor, questioning, ranting, going mostly unsatisfied because I rarely answer his questions or engage in his anger. Finally, my stoicism pushes through his self control and he yanks me to my feet.

He's surprising strong. Maybe it's just an adrenaline rush.

"Do it," I sneer at him. "Hit me! You think I don't want you to hit me!?!?!" I yell at him. "Fucking do it!!!"

He's got his fists clenched in my T-shirt, but pity cools behind the anger and frustration in me. He releases me without even so much as a shove, then grasps his head with one hand. "Fuck, Trace. How much pain are you going to cause my daughters? When does it ever end?"

I close my eyes, fighting the sick, but I'm pretty sure it just ended, but I won't let him know that. I'll fight to protect Kat's independence from him, even if she wants her independence from me.

"Step back, Mike," Two self-disciplined men have come in tandem, probably to break up a potential fight between us. My dad isn't the one that spoke those words however. He is grim and silent beside the Lion, who is giving me an exasperated look like "Fuck, Trace...why'd you have to go an mess everything up?" But the lion's words to his father-in-law are not exasperated. They powerful and commanding, just like when he owns a stage.

"You," Mike whirls on him, stabbing a finger at Leed, then at me. "You, talk to him, because I can't get a goddamn word out of him. I don't even know why she left. Was is those fucking filthy videos or some petty argument that blew out of proportion? Did you see what she did to herself?" He gestures at his own forearm, in illunstration of Kat's which he has seen papered with bloody tissue. "We need to find her. Where would she go?"