You have to leave the states, can't stay. Spending too much money, getting carded way too much despite the beard. Looking for your CD in the slots at the music stores. Stopping in Boston and New York before you go, the pace of those cities making your pulse quicken, and everyone looks so skinny and rich.
Stopping in a coffee house with the big couches and rickety spindly chairs, and you order the decadent Ethiopian coffee with the sugar encrusted around the wide rim and the whip cream and shaved bits of chocolate decorating the entire thing. Sipping it, such comfort food, the caffeine slowly buzzing and burning up through your veins.
You hear your Ashley song every day on the radio, and it doesn't even seem like something you ever wrote, were ever connected to in any way. All the gossamer threads have been cut.
Leo waited for you in Vancouver full of promotional ideas and CD signings and club tours and all the glorious rest of it, and more and more you find yourself thinking of Ashley, longing for her. But Ashley is out of reach, beyond the scope of your new life and you try to remember that. You begin to notice at clubs and CD signings that a lot of your fans are 13 year old girls, and you wonder if you can stand their passion. You can see in their eyes that they want that slick, clean shaven kid you were junior year, the picture on the CD case, not who you are now. Not some recovering drug addict, some bipolar freak, some burned beyond recognition high school drop-out with a college kid beard and long curly hair. What do they know? Some thread of personality remains the same, some secret of DNA and brain chemistry that doesn't change throughout the years. Can't that be good enough for them?
Pleasing them is beyond you, and the new songs you write all seem to focus on Ashley, and that may please them yet. The longing and love lost in those songs will pull them in, of course it will.
"Depressing shit," Leo said after hearing a few of them, rough still as you pluck out the guitar notes and try to match the words and the slipping melody, "but that's okay, people eat up that depressing shit,"
You nod at him, not having much use for him lately. He was all about this business you could care less about. He was all about pushing you to some next level that you couldn't even consider as anything real. The only thing that had been real, Ashley, was gone.
A few weeks off and you decide, on the spur of the moment, to go to Toronto and see if she's there, if she might at least talk to you. All the familiar landmarks coming into place, that other life of yours trying to reassert itself.
You don't know where else to start except the school so you go up to it, all the memories crashing back, flooding your senses. Being gone makes it so much more time warped, your past trapped in this bubble where it can't change or erode.
"Craig Manning?" You turn and see young girls, high school girls, but so young. Grade nines, obviously. You feel so much older than them, beyond their time.
"Yeah," you say cautiously, well aware that you don't know them, have never seen them.
"Oh my god," one whispers to the other and you watch them dig in their school bags and come up with your CD, your moody black leather jacket grade 11 picture trapped under their sticky fingers.
"Could you…could you sign this for us?" Three or four CD's shoved at you along with permanent black markers and you take them, sign your name. The girls thank you and look at you with love sick eyes, ask you questions just to keep you talking with them. So you talk with them for awhile, and it's nice to be in their attention, even though they are 13 or 14 at best. Children.
"Do you, do any of you know Ashley Kerwin?" you ask, and their looks darken a bit. You even know why. They want to pretend that you are in love with them. But they tell you that they have seen her, and where she is, and you wonder if you have the courage to find her.