Living Like A Runaway

Confessions

For today's and tomorrow's set lists opening up for Guns N' Roses, we had enough room for ten songs. Now, we had only five of our own completely done, so it could have gone for five covers and the five original songs. This wasn't just a club show though, it was at a ballroom, which left room for much more people and much more publicity. So, we wanted to make one more song.

"By the end of the day, you really think we can squeeze in another song?" I asked with a laugh, taking another spoonful of my cereal. "Write the words, write the music, and run through it, let alone memorize it to execute it? I gotta say, that's one fuckin' big challenge, I gotta say." I glanced at all of them for a moment, holding the silence in the kitchen. "Let's do it." 

Sonic picked up her bowl of pineapple and cracked her neck. "Well, we don't have a ballad, so how about we shoot for that? Something really calm and soulful, but still a definite rock ballad." At this, Vicky's face flushed, and her eye contact went from our guitarist to the floor. "You okay, Stud?" Sonic asked, "or are ballads just not your cup of tea?"

Shrugging, Vicky shuffled her converse-clad feet, smiling sheepishly. "Actually, the opposite. I kind of started writing a song yesterday. Well, I tried- I got the chorus down." Her attention turned from Sonic now to all of us in general. "I was kind of thinking about how Stella and Sonic would have to be away from the guys they love, and it reminded me of this girl I used to have a crush on before she moved all the fuckin' way to Australia." She smiled as she said this, but there was a sadness behind it. 

We all sat up more and smiled encouragingly at our drummer. "Show us what you have so far," I told her, and she got up for a moment, only to return with a small scrap of paper with some words scrawled on it. Tapping to the beat she had imagined, she sang in her own shaky, scratchy voice. She was no vocalist, but she didn't need to be, because her words sounded great with the idea she had concocted: "You seem so far and away, another life, another time and place, oh, oh, if only I could find you; So far and away, there's something lost and never will replace, it seems so far away..."  

"I wanted to give it some variation, though, so in the second chorus, instead of 'there's something lost and never will replace', I put 'I'm waiting on a miracle today' and then in the last rendition of the chorus, I put 'oh, oh, I hope these words will find you' instead of 'oh, oh, if only I could find you' and then 'it's something lost that never will replace, no, I'm begging for a miracle today, hey, hey, hey' instead of 'I'm waiting on a miracle today'. I figured the order could go verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-ending lines."

Sonic grinned, running out to grab her guitar and Trixie's bass. They both had Vicky hum over what she had thought of, and easily made musical parts to go with it. "How about we get ready now and get our shit set, and then we switch, so we can be all ready with the song. The last thing we'll do before we leave is run through it once or twice, we can pick out a set list when we get there." We were in a time crunch, so nobody questioned the guitarist; we just went.

Quickly, Vicky and I made a system; she was just gonna talk about how she felt, and I was going to lyricize off of it.  It may have seemed a little careless, but it was certainly convenient for the time being. The first verse came pretty quickly: "Across the long last great divide, the distant longing never dies; And all the pain of a dream that was never known, never fades, no; that's alright, someday I'll find you, I tell myself most every night..."

To me, it felt like her heart was bleeding. Both of their families being homophobic, it was hard for Vicky to accept her feelings, let alone tell her. I learned that she never did, and she never quite brought herself to get over her regret for not saying something. Honestly, I felt bad for her, and I hoped that maybe writing all of this out in a song would help give her closure. She felt stupid for not having moved on, but when you love someone, that isn't so simple, and I gave her a lot of credit for holding herself over so well.