One Hell Of A Life

chapter forty one: other subjects.

Em POV:

The days that followed the breakup consisted of me, basically, feeling sorry for myself. I needed constant care - my anxiety levels were on an all time high, and so I blamed the head-spinning spells on this. I tried my best to drink enough water, relax using multiple different methods. But nothing was working.

In a onesie, I answered the door to Sarah Close one morning.
"Hey, Emmy." She gave me me a tight hug.
"Hi, Saz." I returned, not as enthusiastically as her greeting was.
"How are we feeling?" She followed me through to my living room after our embrace.
"Okay, I suppose." I sighed.
"Hit you hard, huh?" Sarah smiled sympathetically.
"Very." I forced a laugh.

"Oh - since when did you get a piano in here?" She gawped.
"I've been meaning to tell you," A genuine smile appeared at my lips for the first time in a week, "but I never got round to it. It got tuned a couple of days ago."
"It's a proper Yamaha one, too!" She gently tilted up the fall-board to reveal the pristine keys. "How much?"
"Ten grand."
"For ten grand it should be fucking playing itself!" She remarked with a grin.

"It's the Silent Acoustic one. Has headphone jacks and stuff - I'd have got a proper one but because of the flat that I live in... These walls are pretty thin, to say the least."
"What does the silent bit mean? No sound?" Sarah asked.
"When you activate it, the hammers don't hit the strings and use a sensor thing to make the sounds instead. You can record stuff on a USB..."

I elaborated more on how swanky the piano was; how I could connect it to my iPad and it would keep a diary of all the music I'd made, and even how it had nineteen voices.

I made a mental note to get Sarah one someday.

"Have a go." I told her. She'd been reluctant to touch the keys, so far.
"I daren't, Em!" Sarah chuckled. "Have you played anything, yet?"
"Literally all of yesterday." I grabbed a chair and pulled it up to near the piano's stool. "Go on. Give us a little bit of London."

And so Saz tapped on the keys, creating the sounds that resembled her latest song, marvelling at how smoothly it played.

"I swear; I'll go home after this and be disappointed." She smiled widely - and I laughed at her enthusiasm.

But rather abruptly she stopped playing, and quizzed me on my music experience.
"Have you always loved music, Em?" Sarah asked me.
"Always, man. Ever since I can remember." I replied.
"Have you ever written a song?"
"Countless."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I only found them when I moved - I haven't written music for bare long, Saz."
"Show me." She commanded excitedly.
"Two secs - I'll go and get them." I pattered towards my bedroom, rummaging under my bed for the box of papers that held so many lyrics.

With two hands, I carried the box back through to Sarah, who I passed it to.
"It's quite unorganised." I disclaimed.
"Doesn't matter." She passed me the lid and picked up a piece of paper.

"Anxiety." She read aloud.
"Oh - of course you'd pick up the deepest one first." I chuckled, exchanging a smile with Sarah. Then, she went on to mutter the lyrics:

"All my friends, they don't know what it's like,
They don't understand why I can't sleep through the night,
And I've been told that I could take something to fix it, damn I wish it...

"Emmy; this is stunning! Why have you never mentioned this before?" She yelped.
"Because I thought it was shit..." I rubbed my arm.
"Are you crazy? You have the voice for it, too!" Sarah slapped her thigh, letting out a laugh, almost in disbelief.
"I genuinely just don't have the confidence for it." I looked down at my hands in my lap.

"I think you'll do it someday." Sarah put the piece paper behind the pieces she had in her hand, and began reading the next one.
"What?"
"Put out a song."
"You're joking!" I shook my head.

"Who's Confetti about?" She quizzed me.
"Just a boy." I told her. "God... Yeah. Wrote that when I was, maybe, seventeen?" I frowned in thought. "Madly in love; long term relationship. And then he started to act weirdly - I kept having doubts about the relationship we were in and eventually ended it. One week later I find out he'd been shagging my best friend for months." I gritted my teeth.
"It's always the cute ones." Saz stuck her bottom lip out sympathetically, "Was he cute?"
"Very." I sighed in remembrance. "Absolutely gorgeous. That's what I thought at the time, anyway."
"I know how you feel. All too well." She sighed with me.

"Oi - Creep Fast is long!" She flicked through the four pages of lyrics.
"It's a rap. Used to be my fucking pride and joy." I smirked, "Absolute banger, if I say so myself."
"Give us some!" Sarah insisted.
"Pass the lyrics - I can't remember them by heart anymore." I took the paper from her.

"Watch as I hit it through the middle of the city in a Chevy,
And I'm ready with the woofers that'll flip your block,
And I got the tick and a machete for the bitches actin' petty,
Get to talkin' and Imma heat up your block."

"Shit - that's fast!" She laughed.
"The first verse is finished in, like, ten seconds. There's a reason why there's so many lyrics!" I grinned.

"Do you think you'll ever go back to it?" Sarah questioned.
"What; songwriting?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know... Maybe." I replied, "I used to just have a knack for it - there's a song in there that I wrote in about twenty minutes."
"You never loose it, you know," She told me, "It never goes away. You'll always have the talent; it's just how you put it to use that matters."

a/n:

hello - we're on over 8k reads, which is unbelievable! thank you so much, everyone.

songs mentioned in this chapter:

• Anxiety (feat Selena Gomez) - Julia Michaels
• Confetti - Sia
• Creep Fast - Twista & T-Pain

thanks for reading,

lee x