Beca remembers the most insignificant details about people. It takes a while for her to realise that maybe those details are actually significant and that's why she remembers them, like she's immortalising them on the space behind her eyelids or something like that.
Sometimes she can feel those details, like a smell that makes her stomach clench, or moments of déjà vu that make her heart beat faster. Sometimes it's seeing a particular shade of red that isn't quite right. (Autumnal red, but in winter sunlight). There's nothing out there that quite reminds her of eyes so blue they made her cold heart melt, at least nowhere other than the photograph that sits upon whatever surface she can find, a flash of red and blue and sunlight and easy smiles and entangled limbs beaming out from that frozen moment in time. It's very old school of her – paper evidence - when the rest of her life is suitcases and wires. The rest of the pictures are on her phone and computer, a slideshow that she runs through her mind when she can't sleep, but for some reason she can't ever picture the exact shade of blue that she stared into hopelessly for more than a year. It's on the edge of her mind like a half forgotten dream. Perhaps, she allows herself to think, her brain is rejecting it. Perhaps if she remembers too clearly then it will hurt more than it already does.
The insides of airports blur together, an amalgamation of shiny surfaces, phosphorescent lighting and silently ticking clocks: she hears the mechanical voice announcing arrivals and departures in her sleep. Roadside diners, tarmac, scraps of information echoing from the radio, revealing that somehow, somewhere a world outside of moving vehicles and solitary confinement exists, which is increasingly hard to believe amidst a backdrop of cracked leather seats and stale air freshener. Vast expanses of brown marked with occasional dots of green define the outskirts of cities she never remembers the names of, and countless state borders fade into the past. There are no such things as meaningful conversations, just the buzz of phatic exchange. The sky changes colour, and it was once so beautiful, but the density of the clouds spell out the wrong words. Meanwhile, cigarette smoke clings to her like a second skin, but it is the hotel rooms that smell like regret. Checking in, checking out becomes the best part of her day - bland smiles, the passing and returning of room keys, the automatic lie - have a nice stay - and the automatic lie - I did, thank you.
She watches from booths as people she doesn't know dance to mixes of songs that she created, robotically pushing sliders and buttons, twisting knobs, unfocused, eyes glazing, always gazing out into the cataclysmic dark with an intensity that means nothing. Lights stream, bouncing from surfaces, hitting the faces of those caught in the hellfire, making them burn, burn, burn for meaning underneath the speakers, but they never find what they're looking for in the empty mouths of strangers. They can't tear into one another's skin, no matter how hard they try. She takes mental snapshots of those moments as her muses take snapshots of each another; they are blinded by flashes of delusion, pose after pose and pose, raising drink after drink after drink. She imagines them pouring over the pictures during the sober morning hours and finds herself wondering whether they're proud or ashamed to document the emptiest moments of their lives.
Soon she starts to cringe after every shower. The stench of desperation becomes impossible to wash out of her skin, because she can't save those people. Those people don't want to be saved. The digital world is her last connection to the real world, and emails constantly flood in from people she doesn't know. It doesn't escape her that the emails that matter most end up in the spam folder. (The only person who calls her is the agent she doesn't want, relentlessly steering her around the country. It's like she's following the white rabbit without ever ending up in Wonderland.)
It's hard to imagine that she wanted this for herself at some point in her life. For most of her life, actually. That she once dreamed of it, dropped out of college for it, wanted nothing but music and distraction, twentyfour-seven. Beyond that, she always had nothing. She had wanted to make it, whatever that meant. Now she had made it – people knew her, requested her, bought her mixes. Her name appeared on flyers, and she performed sets at festivals. People she didn't know congratulated her success. She always said very little, shrugging awkwardly at questions, turning down person after person because they weren't -
She hasn't been with anyone else. Consider her old fashioned, but she fell in love and that was final. Unfortunately she couldn't fuck her music, but she chose it anyway. It might have filled the empty spaces once, and it might have saved her (once). But that was high school. Before high school, it was her parent's divorce. At one point it was everything, so it came as a shock to find that it meant less than nothing without Chloe's approval.
But she chose to leave. She had to make it, whatever that meant. All of that heartbreak, that self-exile, that suffering had to mean something. All of the great artists suffered and look what they created: Van Gogh, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Plath, Mozart, countless others, all sacrificing themselves for the arts. There had to be a reason that she was alone.
There had to be a point. Without a point, there were hotel rooms and airports and bars and calls from her agent and music with no meaning.
Another hotel room, another city, another starless night sky. Propped up in bed, an open suitcase beside her, she picked up the last evidence of her sanity, pressing a finger against the cheek of ghost-Chloe, begging her to haunt the shadows of her mind, to steal the last of her love and leave her completely and irrevocably numb.
"I miss you," she whispered, pressing it into the photograph. "I miss you, I miss you."
It was a ritual, but the phone ringing interrupted her insomnia.
"Beca." Her agent, Karen, had a way of saying her name that made her skin crawl. "Beca," she repeated, building the suspense in a way Beca hated. "I have something to tell you," she insisted, and Beca despised the way she stated the obvious. "I have got you the gig of a lifetime."
I don't care, she said. I don't want it. I can't do it. There is no one to do it for. I am alone. There was someone, once, but I thought I was supposed to be alone. I thought that love was a concept and not a feeling, that music was a feeling, that it was love: it was supposed to be dependable and secure and all that I needed, but I can't fuck music and I can't tear into its skin, or burrow in its warmth; I can't dedicate mixes to music, and it can't haunt me like I need to be haunted, nor can I feel the last embrace it bestowed upon me at the airport, or feel its tears against my shoulder, saying nothing but whispering everything. I can't feel it clinging to my skin, begging me without words to stay, to fight for something real, something tangible. It isn't the feeling of Titanium in the marrow of my bones, and it isn't the music notes tattooed onto my wrist, or the piles of unsent emails and texts and scribbled sentences upon hotel notepads or letters wiped into bathroom mirrors; it isn't in graffiti-ridden toilets of bars and clubs and roadside diners, and it isn't engraved into the neon lights of darkened rooms, or etched into phosphorescent airport lights. It isn't in the ticking clocks or snippets of radio-news and it isn't lurking in cities I don't remember being in.
No, Karen. It's in the red tresses that cascade around her shoulders in endless waves, glinting like autumn in the winter sun. It's in the countless hours spent rehearsing for ridiculous a capella competitions, and late night excursions for tacos and pixie sticks, both of which I now can't eat. It's in the coffee drunk and the songs sang and the assignments panicked over and the all-nighters spent writing them. It was in our road trips, our playlists, our first times. It was in the friction of our kisses and the effortless entwinement of our hands, our limbs, our thoughts; it was hiding in the stolen articles of clothing. It was in our heartbeats, reminding us that it was happening, that we were alive in those moments, feeling those feelings. It was in the stupid clichés and the stupid jokes and those wonderful moments of shared silence. It was in her beautiful, charming, disarming smile. It was in her smirk, and the way she mouthed along to old rap songs. Chloe was music. I threw music away, Karen. There is no gig of a lifetime. Chloe was the gig of a lifetime.
She took a deep breath, feeling tears prick her eyes for the first time in six months. For the first time in six months she let the wound pulsate in her chest, wrapping an arm around herself to keep it beating, the picture clutched to her heart.
"Well?" Karen demanded. "Did you listen to a word I've just said? It's in England, darling. You know how those English love their festivals and club nights, etcetera. It's a real opportunity. You're hot shit right now and the people love you. That's huge for a DJ. Shall I book a flight? It's towards the end of the month." There was the sound of pages rustling, of Karen checking her calendar. "You'll be there two months tops, darling, I promise."
Beca hated the way Karen called her darling.
She hesitated for a moment, thinking of the past six months of her life, the photograph dangling limply from her hand, hovering somewhere between her chest and the half-packed suitcase.