My Musical Flower

Chapter 20 - Alice

April 22nd, 2023

It's been over three months since Ivan returned to our band and brought a new singer—Harmony.

I've found myself out of place. Recently, I've noticed that Harmony's been much more comfortable around Melody, Akai, and Ivan. They have inside jokes I'm not familiar with, they hang out at Harmony's apartment with her roommate, and have been acting all buddy-buddy even though I've known them longer.

It's 10 AM in the morning, and Jio drives us to the studio and parks the car while I wait for him. The studio's noisy, and I peek inside out of curiosity just to witness Ivan teaching Harmony new chords on the guitar.

The same guitar he rarely let me play.

"Akai and his distraught face after realizing Kaia wasn't home today was literal gold. Did anyone take a photo of it?" Melody says, sitting on the couch propped against the right wall.

"She has a performance soon and has been rehearsing nonstop. Like, it's gotten to the point where she asks her instructor to stay behind and play the piano for longer so she can get extra practice," Harmony reveals, sitting next to Ivan with his guitar in her hands, "And she's been covering my shifts at my flower shop since I've been extra busy with exam season and being apart of this band. Isn't she a goddess?"

"Oh, yeah! You're taking political science or something," Mel responds and looks over to her brother, "You'd never understand because you never studied."

Ivan chimes in, "If your workload gets too heavy, tell us and we'll try to take a few things off your plate."

"None of us decided to go to college because we wanted to focus on the band. Look at you doing both!"

The pit in my chest expands, threatening to consume me, and all I can think about is how my life is being stolen. It started with Ivan, my music career, and now my friends.

Before Harmony can respond, Akai says, "Melodor, stop distracting her, she's diligent and trying to learn a new instrument."

"Melodor literally isn't a nickname for Melody, it doesn't even make sense! You're trying to indirectly call me stinky and I'm catching on, you stupid bi—"

"Alice? What are you doing?" Jio creeps up behind me, and I almost jump.

"Jio! You scared me," I start, "I didn't realize you were here already."

"Why are you just watching? Let's go in."

"Right," I say, grabbing Jio's hand as he leads us inside.

"Hey guys!" Harmony greets, and Melody waves at us from her seat.

"Oh, hey. How's it going with the guitar lessons?" I ask, trying to be polite. After my failed attempt at embarrassing her at our last gig that ended up embarrassing me, I think the only way to get the band to like me again is to finally accept her. I guess. . .

"It's actually going pretty well, I've learned a few songs already!" she says.

"That's debatable," Ivan counters, but there's no animosity in his tone, "Now that everyone is here, I had something I wanted to suggest."

Here we go.

Ivan starts, "Has anyone came up with any new song ideas?"

Silence.

"Okay, what we're lacking is inspiration," Mel sighs, "And I can't lie, I'm not really inspired by anything or anyone right now."

Jio adds on, "Yeah, all the songs I've tried writing have turned out to be . . . something else."

"This is what I mean, " Ivan says. "Usually we're filled with new ideas, but now we're blanking. All of the songs we've tried writing aren't good enough to be released."

I hate to agree with Ivan, but he's right, and this is one of the reasons why the band was stuck without him. Without his leadership and inputs, we couldn't continue growing.

Ivan continues, "The problem is that we've been stuck in the same place, with the same people for way too long. There is nothing new here. Nothing interesting that pushes us to tell new stories with our music."

Although nobody says a word, I can tell we're all thinking the same thing.

"We're not inspired because there's nothing inspiring where we are," Jio repeats, thinking carefully, "What are you suggesting?"

"We need a change of scenery. Let's take a trip."