the 1 | chaennie

12. Mine

And I remember that fight, 2:30 AM
As everything was slipping right out of our hands
I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street
Braced myself for the goodbye
'Cause that's all I've ever known
Then, you took me by surprise
You said, "I'll never leave you alone."

You said, "I remember how we felt, sitting by the water
And every time I look at you, it's like the first time
I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter
She is the best thing that's ever been mine"

-

With her fitful sleep, Rosie found her temper short and her eyes gritty with tiredness as she slinked about her apartment, trying to avoid bumping into Clare, who she could hear moving about the place from behind her closed bedroom doors. Instead, Rosie sat on the floor, back against the foot of her bed, one of her guitars cradled in her lap and a melody running through her head as her fingers picked it out and applied it to the lyrics scrawled in the journal laying open in front of her. She'd been up since the crack of dawn and had spent all morning writing it, crossing out words with so much frustration that she'd torn the paper with the nib of her pen, her fingertips stained with blue ink and the threat of tears just below the surface.

She wrote for five days. Her phone rang off and on, all texts and messages unanswered, she barely ate a thing, and the only time she left her room was for coffee and to shower. In that time, a song about her parent's separation formed beneath her fingers, about all those times they'd ignored each other right in front of her, in a room crowded with people, avoiding each other right under her very nose. She was angry that she hadn't realised it. Rosie had been so involved in her own career, soaking up the limelight and the success, mingling with other artists and singers and models, that she hadn't even realised her family was falling apart around her.

Shortly after midnight in the early hours of the morning on the sixth day, she was brimming with so much frustration that she couldn't stop herself from pounding away at the drums. Jennie had called her that first day and hadn't messaged her since, hadn't come over too, and her mum was still living at her apartment trying to catch her in one of her quick dashes to the percolator. Clare wanted to talk. Rosie wanted to do anything but talk. Despite her exposed openness in her songs, she'd never liked to be vulnerable in person. Her music was her outlet, to say the things that she was afraid to say in person, to be honest as much as she was willing to be, without having to face the repercussions of her words. In a song, she could make up whatever story she wanted to to hide the real truth, but there was always the raw emotion in the lyrics, whatever it meant.

So she avoided her mum, and Jennie avoided her, and she vented in the only way she knew how. A room in her apartment had been sound proofed for that purpose, a baby grand piano tucked away in one corner, three different guitars, a banjo and a ganjo on stands or in heavy leather cases along one wall. And a drum kit. The room was like her own personal studio, without all the equipment and perfect acoustics that a studio had, but it was always her starting place. It was littered with amps, recording devices, spare drumsticks and trailing wires snaking across the floor.

It was in that room that she holed herself up in in the early hours of that morning, no windows and a single light keeping the darkness at bay, and she sat down in front of the Tama drum kit, mahogany wood polished to a rich shine, thin shells resonating quietly as she gently bumped the snare drum as she took a seat on the low stool. The guitar was her forte, and the piano, having spent hours pouring her blood, sweat and tears into perfecting her techniques with those instruments, but over the years, with lessons from the drummer in her band, from curious questions asked in the quiet moments in the recording studio, she'd picked up some knowledge about drums. The rest she made up herself.