Track 24 Delilah
Delilah
Wherever there are people, there’s art, and wherever there’s art, there’s queer art. Our stories, our voices, our love.
But just as meaningful, just as worthy of preservation, are those smaller, more personal works of art: in the photo booth strips kept folded and tucked into wallets until the luster cracks and fades, in messages scrawled on bathroom walls, in the drawings a kindergartener makes of her family, two moms and a cat and a baby and herself.
Your story is art. You are art. And you are worth keeping.
—Always Here with Iris Gold, season 3, episode 2: “Galleries”
In Santa Fe, they park Roscoe on Canyon Road and spend the late afternoon and early evening meandering through art galleries.
Visual art was always Sam’s thing more than Delilah’s. She had an eye for emerging artists, and more than once snapped up an early piece from a painter or photographer whose later works sold for millions. She’d grown up in houses that were practically art galleries themselves.
Delilah, on the other hand, grew up in an apartment where her mother framed Delilah’s kindergarten finger paintings, couldn’t resist stopping at every single yard sale (“just in case”), and treated visiting flea markets and kitschy local art festivals like a religious practice.
The apartment Delilah furnished for herself when she first moved to LA had been done in what she lovingly called “Howl’s Moving Castle Chic”—if people coming over didn’t wonder if she was an eclectic magician with a sense of humor and love of throw pillows, then she’d done something wrong.
This stretch of road has over eighty galleries within half a mile. Sam had been convinced that she’d find at least one artist who would finally convince Delilah that there was a difference between art and art.
When Delilah had been remapping the trip, she’d been tempted to cross Santa Fe off the itinerary.
The prospect of looking at all that art while knowing she was probably only a few days away from having to deal with the reality of decorating a new apartment from scratch made her nauseous.
If they kept going, they could skip Santa Fe altogether, drive straight through to Albuquerque and then head into the last leg of the trip out to Los Angeles.
But then it would be over, and Delilah wasn’t done. Not done with the songs she needed to write, not done with the album she needed to finish—
Not done with Emmett.
So she’d casually mentioned the Santa Fe galleries, and then watched as Emmett’s eyes lit up at her description, watched them start all but bouncing in the driver’s seat with excitement as they got closer, watched them almost dive out of the car when they finally parked.
“You could bring your sketchbook if you wanted,” Delilah says as she joins them, fixing her hair and stretching out her fingers from where they’ve been cramped around her pen. “In case you want to draw any of the sculptures or anything.”
Emmett’s face, already full of eager anticipation, somehow gets even brighter. “Are you sure?”
She’d thought that Emmett couldn’t look any lovelier than when they were between her legs, but seeing them like this—wide-eyed and wondering, delighted and unselfconscious—might be even sweeter. “Of course.”
They dig their backpack out of the van and sling it over their shoulder. Delilah links her arm through theirs, refusing to think too hard about the spreading stone beneath the fabric of their sleeve, and lets them take the lead.
Emmett doesn’t have Sam’s long-honed instincts for hidden gems or her encyclopedic knowledge of art movements.
But they make up for it with their usual wide-eyed wonder that makes Delilah wish—to her own surprise—that they had more time to spend here.
Emmett could probably happily spend days walking up and down this street, she thinks, watching them peer closely at a twisting sculpture made of glass and metal and glittering gemstones.
Delilah’s never been the kind of person to sit in an art museum for hours at a time, but she now wants to take Emmett on a tour of every museum in LA just to watch them enjoy them.
She tries to ignore the creeping fingers of anxiety that make their way around her neck.
Surrounded by all this strange, beautiful, incomprehensible art, her own feels insubstantial and half-formed.
She’s written more in the past few days than she has in months, but all that music feels intangible now. Impermanent.
Fake.
She stares at the sculpture in front of her, of a woman twisted into a posture of hair-clutching despair, cast in bronze and threaded through with gold, filament-thin cracks running across her body like the path of an electric shock.
The face is hidden, but Delilah wonders if it looks like she feels—held together with nothing more than spit and a prayer.
God, what is she doing? What was she thinking?
There’s no way she pulls off this album, no universe where she wrangles together anything worth listening to in this amount of time, with this amount of mess in her head, no matter whose story she steals or what feelings she forces herself not to crush into desperate, panic-stricken submission.
This is the point where she knows—she knows—that she should admit defeat.
One phone call to Alex, and she can stop.
Take a break. Focus on doing what she told Emmett she’s been doing—finding a way to get them out of this Final Destination bullshit.
She may not have ever met Jacob—probably a good thing, since she’d love very much to kick him in the kneecaps—but she’s sure that there’s something in the man’s obsessive, feverishly righteous notes that can undo even a deathbed order.
He was simply too hell-bent on control to ever do something that he couldn’t undo.
And if Jacob could undo it, well, why the fuck couldn’t Delilah?
One call. Even just one text message, so she wouldn’t have to hear the disappointment in Alex’s voice.
And yet. And yet.
A soft touch to the small of her back nearly startles her out of her skin. “Sorry,” Emmett murmurs, soothing her like she’s a spooked horse at risk of bolting. “Are you all right? You’ve been staring into nothing for the past five minutes.”
“I—” Delilah closes her eyes. She has a sudden wild, dizzying desire to wrap herself around the sculpture, tuck her face into the gold-laced shoulder, and stay there until she’s absorbed into it, turned to metal and light the way Emmett’s turning to stone. To cease to have to do, to think, to be.
“Delilah?”
“I’m fine.” She waits until the smile on her face feels real and then turns, catching Emmett’s hand as it falls from her back and squeezing it. “Zoned out. Are you ready to go on to the next place? There’s a jewelry store I want to check out—I said I’d bring my mom a souvenir.”
Emmett studies her. Delilah studies them right back. Do they look paler today, despite the hours they’ve spent in the sun? Is there sweat at their temples, or is that just a trick of the light?
Is she looking for a way to help, or trying to convince herself that they’re already too far gone so that she doesn’t have to let them down?
“Delilah,” Emmett says again. Storm-cloud eyes, deep enough to drown in, fixed on Delilah like they can see right into the core of her, the messy, twisted, despairing thing she calls a soul. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Delilah—”
“Nothing,” she snaps. “I’m just—I’m stressed, okay? I’m under a little pressure, in case you forgot.”
Emmett flinches, dropping her hand. “Of course I noticed. I—do you want to find a hotel? Or…I don’t know where you planned to stay tonight. But if you need to work, we can—we didn’t need to stay here this long.”
It’s like watching a flower wilt in real time.
One sharp sentence, and Delilah has undone the last week of slowly growing confidence, the gentle blooming of Emmett’s personality cut off so abruptly that Delilah might as well have shoved them out of Roscoe in the middle of the highway going seventy miles an hour. Fuck.
Delilah exhales hard. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Emmett smiles at her, and it looks about as real as Delilah’s feels, which is to say, not even slightly. “Come on, let’s get back to the van. Or did you want to stop at that jewelry store? We passed one that had some really lovely pendants in the window.”
They hold out a hand for hers again, like it’s nothing.
All the skill she has with words, and her tongue feels like a sad lump in her mouth.
I’m better in verse, she used to say to Sam, when she’d struggle to make her thoughts and feelings make sense to someone else.
She’d end up spiraling half the time, and those were the moments when she’d loved Sam the most, because Sam would draw her in and kiss her hair and say, It’s okay, it doesn’t have to make sense, it’s okay, and she’d say it so gently that Delilah would even believe her.
Delilah wishes she hadn’t. She wishes Sam had pushed her until she’d had to sort her thoughts out, because then she wouldn’t be standing here now, full of confessions and apologies she doesn’t know how to turn into words.
She wishes her immediate response to feeling guilty about something wasn’t to dig in her heels and double down.
She wishes she knew how to acknowledge she’s done something wrong without turning it into self-centered misery that comes out manipulative and self-serving even when she’s trying, for once, to be anything but.
Emmett wiggles their fingers, expectant. “Coming?”
I’ll write it down, Delilah thinks. I’ll put it in writing, and give it to them, and it will make sense, and maybe they’ll even forgive me.
Delilah takes Emmett’s hand and lets them lead her away.