Swallow Your Sleep

Let’s try to remember, those days back in December...

The apartment is dark, the only light stemming from the wide, curtain-less windows. They cast ghostly shadows down the sides of the outer walls, growing in thickness as they stretched to the small, two-seater table tucked into the middle of the kitchen.

A pale face glows, cadaverous body occupying the chair furthest from the searching hands of moonlight. His fingers played out across the table, tapping a lyric of something he can’t quite remember. It goes something like, like –

Like.

His hand falls from its arched pose, placing itself on the grainy surface of the table top. His head falls with months old defeat, shaggy hair falling over his shadowed face. Those songs – that music. It’s gone now – all gone. That isn’t him. He’s a nobody, an ex musician, a forgotten face.

Except he can’t quite... can’t quite grasp that.

He was made for music and writing and being cramped in a small bus for months on end. He was made for the feel of the stage and the familiar rush of – I’ve done something. He was built for small spaces and loud music and all the fucking noise and living that came along with a record deal. But his dad, he was right. He’s always been right.

Useless waste of life, you’re going no-where, kid. Ya’ mother knew that and look where she is – off with a kid worth ‘er time. Left me ‘ere with a pathetic mess, I-

Ryan squeezes his eyes shut, hands now contorting into his fists. He can’t... It took him years to maybe accept that his father had been wrong, that he could do something with his life. Be successful, be someone – be worth the love of another. It took nights of crying and soft touches, of smiles and arguments. It had taken pure, unadulterated support of three people that, back then, he couldn’t have imagined living without.

Or rather, didn’t want to.

It was all lost, now.

It’s just, then, Ryan couldn’t be Ryan without Spencer to hold his hand. Ryan couldn’t be Ryan without Brendon to outsmart and cuddle. Ryan couldn’t be Ryan without his anchor, Jon.

And now that they weren’t there, Ryan wasn’t Ryan. Ryan was Ryan without SpencerBrendonJon. He was incomplete. Every flaw he’d ever had them to correct and tend to was coming to the front. And fuck, there were a lot of them.

Three weeks earlier, he’d come out of his writer coma. It’s just that – that he’d been like that for weeks (months?). He’d been in his room, writing and sleeping and moving every now and then to get a drink from the bathroom. Brendon would usually ease Ryan into a shower once or twice, and Spencer would bring him food and bitch at him till he ate it and Jon, Jon would just sit down and smile till Ryan got past that frustrating multi-syllabled line.

But they didn’t. He didn’t eat, he didn’t shower, and he couldn’t get past that fucking multi-sylabelled line. He was on his own for those weeks – writing and tearing at his skin because the words just wouldn’t come. Ryan was scared he may never had come out of that coma if the owner of the building hadn’t come in to retrieve the rent Ryan owed him and spotted him passed out in the divide between bedroom and bathroom.

Waking up alone in the hospital was the most terrifying thing Ryan had ever been through.

Ryan had been alone for thirteen months.

So very alone, and Ryan. Ryan couldn’t do that anymore.