Every Day After
Ryden
I began seeing an addiction’s councillor a few weeks ago.
My cravings were getting better, but that life – that version of me still came to visit, still took up residency in my head – my nose – my heart – every now and again.
Addiction couldn’t be eviscerated at the drop of a hat, but it could be managed. And with time, I’d get better.
I was getting better. I believed that. I saw that.
And that’s all that mattered.
Help helps. Sounds stupid but it’s the truth.
Don’t be afraid to take back what you’re owed.
Happiness. Joy.
Hope.
Well that… and a little patience.
[Haha.]
***
Scarlett wasn’t the best singer, I admit.
I didn’t mean it literally, you know. This isn’t that kind of story. Where of course, my best friend – my soulmate, she’s some kind of hidden musician, twisting her mic around mine as we perform live in front of the world.
No, Scarlett hates crowds. That’ll never change.
How long has it been, since we worked on our new song together? No, not as manager and best friend, but as lovers and co-writers…
Fuck.
It feels so fucking good to say that.
Things unfold when they need to. I realize that now.
My mother came back for a reason. And maybe now I was starting to see punishment as change.
Maybe she pushed me so I could fly.
Maybe without her, I would’ve continued locking my feelings inside of a box, allowing them to torment me until the darkness came.
But something broken inside me that day. The old me. The scared me.
Something new took its place.
I’d caged my feelings for too long, worshipped the burn.
The world saw it. Everyone saw it.
But the Fall worked in my favour, did it not?
When everyone drops their expectations of you, you can finally fly.
And I didn’t just fucking fly. I fucking soared.
No more hiding, no more pretending.
I had nothing more to lose.
Just. One. Thing.
And my Dove, that took work. All the best things do.
We were children when we met, we grew up in volatility. What was love if not each other?
It had been there, swimming beneath the murky water all this time. A story of us; erratic, misbehaved, yet completely whole.
I couldn’t get enough of her fire.
She wrapped herself in my warmth.
I replayed the moments leading up to the photo booth, what possessed me to claim her as mine.
I was over the restrictions, the patterns we danced around for a decade and a half.
She had owned my heart since the day I laid eyes on her.
And since then, we have long past broken those boundaries.
Side by side, night after night, we’d brush our teeth together – she’d apply a sheet mask over her glossy skin and I’d watch her do it with wonder and admiration.
We won.
We found normalcy in chaos.
And I’ve been the luckiest bastard in the world to witness Scarlett Emory-Blake in all the simple ways that made up her.
Me, I have been the only person to peel the stone layers, climb the mountain and dine with her at the top.
Yeah. All my song’s have been about us, about her. She was, and always will be, my forever muse.
I did rewrite the song, by the way.
It was only fitting.
Paint the Town, Dove.
No title could ever compare.
After all, I credit those lyrics to her.
***
Scarlett
Every day felt like a tsunami of bliss and fear.
My guard had flipped on its axis, the reality of my life an illusion of what I’d always wanted.
Was I happy? Was I scared?
I felt like a piece of paper being ripped in half.
All these new emotions, these feelings. How could I control them? How could I navigate them?
He didn’t need to persist, he just needed to ask.
Do you love me? And I’d finally admitted, Since the beginning.
Do you know how hard that is? To begin again, with the one person who knew the roadmap to your scars? The highway to your heart?
It left me sleepless. Every touch, every kiss, it was impossible to teach my brain to obey the signals of affection.
Imagine growing up without a trace of it all your life.
But there was a new feeling, something kinder.
Slowly, I deepened the manner of our kisses, the lengths of our touches.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to chip away at my walls.
I remained his manager (now co-writer).
Still his best friend (and… partner).
After all these years, a dam had finally broke inside of me, and slowly, carefully, I let some of that love in.
It felt impossible… allowing the most vulnerable pieces of each other to weave in symbiosis.
It was euphoria and terror – fear and freedom. But finally… finally –
It was us.
***
Ryden
The tabloids were a frenzy after my Dove and I made it official. Gone were the days of Radio City, and thank fuck for that. I didn’t need the constant reminder of my mother’s presence.
I’d made peace with the inevitable. That her abandonment was meant for a purposeful transformation – whether I knew it then or not, the pain had always served my music. The after of her.
Scarlett Emory-Blake, Scarlett Emory-Blake.
Her name was everywhere. It filled me with a pride like no other, the swell in my heart aching with tenderness.
She did it. Scarlett really did it. Emory’s legacy lived on, soared to new heights, all because of my Dove. Her soul now resurrected.
On my back. On our arms.
In our hearts.
We dug up more of Scarlett’s old journal entries, discarded sheet music and lost pages buried within her piano bench. Her eyes scanned over old words, old memories, like she was fighting a virus inside her wounds.
She wrote like I wrote.
With heart. With pain.
With feeling.
If only she had laid her thoughts bare to me from the start. Maybe we wouldn’t have a song.
[Maybe we wouldn’t have a book]
And I would’ve suffered for it.
I would’ve suffered for her.
It was never my choice.
We were always written in the stars.
And when she wrote, I knew that to be true.
We were always destined to be rock stars.
From the very beginning.
***
Scarlett
It wasn’t a traditional duet, no. What did tradition mean to us anyway?
We were always moving, fast, fast, fast – at the speed of light, our lyrics blended together like ribbon and twine. We flew high in sync, climbing a crescendo and descending to the most beautiful ballad of words to exist.
I never thought pain could make you write like that.
I never thought pain could be the freefall into diving in love.
But the stars were right.
We’ve always been among them.
Nevertheless, the adjustment was still hard over the last few months. It pelted me with resentment. How could I have been so blind to the emotional instability, the anger, the rage I’d built up over the years?
How could I touch a person and feel safe, secure, after so much trauma and heartache little Violet had to endure?
She didn’t deserve that, Sue had said. And she is you, Scarlett.
I’d always separated me from Violet, a mere fragment of my imagination. A different girl, a different story.
It raised a dominant version, a tougher one, eradicating the warmth inside me that still fizzled beneath my skin.
Ryden met me as Violet.
Ryden loved me as Violet.
I chose to become Scarlett red, dripping with fury.
Red is more than just fire, Scarlett, Sue had said. Red is roses and rubies, vitality and passion. There is blood running through your veins, not acid. Blood means life. You do not need to be an aggressor, you can simply be.
Simply be.
But who was I without the pain? The suffering? The baggage? The loss?
Who was I with Ryden?
He loves with his whole chest, I’d explained, I don’t know if I’m capable.
She had smiled. You’re confident aren’t you, Scarlett?
Well, I’d say so.
Confidence is trying to love with your whole heart, even if you’re not confident there is much left to love with.
And so I tried.
I tried. And tried. And tried.
Until trying didn’t feel like effort, because the right person forces you to heal.
Loving him felt like flying, like breathing, as if it had already existed beneath the burning hole in my lungs.
Ryden compared that to art.
The unquenchable thirst of creation.
Music, noise, melodies.
I understood now, the feeling of being a rock star.
Not a performance on stage, or a dazzling smile on the jumbotron.
It was heart.
The essence of it – exposing yourself raw to the world, and allowing the world to look back at you without resentment or shame.
I could do that with time. I could expose myself to the world.
My world.
My Eagle.
My Ryden.
***
Ryden
And so we re-wrote Paint the Town, Dove.
A duet, a tribute to us.
I mean, I’d like to think it was already written. A prophecy told throughout the course of our lives, inescapable from the start.
In bold lettering, stamped in the fonts of our past.
The lyrics were made for collaboration.
How could I perform it without the woman who made it all possible?
When it came time to my spring opener at Madison Square Garden, I made a quick call to the camera men on stage. Within seconds, the jumbotron panned to my Scarlett, standing by the curtains.
The lens zoomed in on her beautiful face, lighting up the stadium with the woman I’ve loved for the better half of my existence.
I yelled to the abyss of fans and fireflies, “THE DOVE BEHIND THE SONG!”
And the crowd, our crowd, roared like a wild, untameable beast –
If you were going to love someone, love them loudly.
***
Scarlett
The lion and the wolf rattledrattledrattled against the caged bars of my heart, a loud thump emanating from my chest cavity.
I didn’t think…
I never thought –
People saw me. Noticed me.
It was the reason… I hated crowds.
Because no matter the flaming red hair or the gaudy attitude, the false confidence and bravado…
No one had ever loved me. Not properly, anyway.
I know that now.
I looked to Ryden, arms outstretched in front of thousands of people, eyes pinned on mine with total adoration.
I know that now, yes.
Because of him.
I painted myself in red, like a siren – a warning sign –
And every human ignored.
Every human until this spring opener –
And the stadium put a face to a song.
All because of one man.
***
Ryden
Her biggest fear was being noticed, stemming from her innate craving to be adored.
I promised myself long ago that I’d give her the world.
I made well on my promise.
“Come out on stage for me, Dove!” I called, sweat dripping off my brow, Jaw & Lion behind me, cheering her on. “Come stand by my side!”
And slowly, tentatively, she stepped out onto the stage. One foot after another, the blinding strobe lights illuminated the sparkle in her brown eyes, the fire slowly dissipating, the warmth taking its place.
I could fucking cry. I could fucking cry seeing her.
The growth. The journey. The change.
An epic moment, for an epic ending.
Or maybe, this was just the beginning.
“Everybody give it up for Scarlett Emory-Blake!” I yelled into the mic, the crowd’s screams so deafening yet so… quiet.
So quiet, when I was with her.
“I told you I would give you the world…” I whispered, letting the mic fall from my hands so I could hold her face. “We don’t need to hide it anymore. We don’t need to pretend.”
She swallowed, a solemn tear dripping down her cheek.
We were alone in front of the whole damn world.
“You were the life I was waiting for, too.” Her voice shook as she repeated the words I told her when we were kids.
I could barely hold in my own fucking sobs. “I wished on every star you could see yourself the way I’ve always seen you. Strong, fierce, mine. I knew one day, Dove. I knew one day, we’d take flight.”
Ryden! Scarlett!
Ryden! Scarlett!
Tentatively, her palm slid over mine, a crystalline tear dripping down her cheek. “I… love you,” she whispered, so softly, so small.
A woman still learning to define love. A man determined to show her how.
Scarlett! Ryden!
Scarlett! Ryden!
I kissed her softly, the memories of almost two decades flashing in my mind like a carousel – round and round they took me, until finally slowing to destiny’s halt.
“I’ve loved you through every color,” I whispered, the pieces of our past evaporating to the open sky. “Black and blue, Violet and Scarlett…”
Her tears fell onto my lips. “My Eagle.”
I kissed the last of her pain. “My Dove.”