When it’s done, I feel hungover. I’m guessing this is what a hangover feels like, anyway. I’ve only been seriously drunk once in my life, and then I puked so much, I don’t think there was enough of anything left in my system to give me one. But after the songs come, I feel exhausted and empty, just like I did then. Like my brain is out of my control. Like my stomach is a wrung-out sock and my mouth is carpeted with sour paste, and like I’m not sure what I was doing five seconds ago.

It’s been this way for almost two years now. As long as I’ve been writing anything decent. A song comes: Everything else in my brain fizzes out. I’ve had to stop in the middle of a math test to scribble notes and lyrics under my desk. I’ve had to pretend I was sick and bolt from the dinner table. It’s like when some big breaking news story comes on TV, and it’s on every channel, interrupting every show, and everything else has to stop. Everything but the song.

And the songs always come in one finished piece. I can hear the bass line, the drums, the guitar intro, and solos. There’s no voice, but there are always lyrics, playing in the tone where I’m supposed to sing or shout them. They fill up my skull, blasting at top volume again and again, louder and louder, until I release them all on paper.

It’s exhausting, but it’s exhilarating. It’s a lot like the shows. I guess there’s a reason people want to get drunk again and again.

It’s gone on long enough, and I’ve gotten enough good songs out of it, that I guess this is just the way my songwriting works. Other composers have described feeling the same way. Beethoven even said, “Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.” Not that I’m Beethoven or anything. Just that what happens to me when a song comes isn’t that strange.

This is what I tell myself.

And the way that I can play, the way my hands have gotten faster and faster, and how it sometimes feels like I’m not even the one controlling them—that’s because I’ve practiced like crazy for the last nine years.

This is what I tell myself, too.

Even though I’m less and less sure I believe it.

I put Yvonne gently back on her stand. I set the notebook and pencil in their place.

Then I stretch out on the bed, on top of the sheets. Goblin’s stinky breath caresses my shin.

I don’t fall asleep, not the way I used to. But eventually something shorts out. Things go dark. And I’m finally gone.

Thea

There’s a pine tree with a trunk so wide that three people could hide behind it, about a hundred feet from the Thorsons’ house. It’s far from the road, so no one driving by will catch me in their headlights or spot my old blue bicycle buried in a patch of shrubs.