felicity
The Rolling Stonessaid it best.
You can't always get what you want.
I never wanted to be famous.
I never wanted any of this.
I just wanted to escape. To get out. To be free of the hellfire dimension where I spent eighteen years struggling to walk through the worst of the flames without burning up entirely.
When I arrived in Nashville with my hand-me-down guitar in its tattered case and a notebook full of scribbled song lyrics torn straight from my soul, I had high hopes and big plans. I had no idea that less than a year after I stepped off that bus, I’d end up broken-hearted and empty-handed when the whole world crashed down around my ears.
Actually, that’s not entirely true.
My hands weren’t empty when my wants turned into wishes and my hopes faded into fantasies. In my fingers, I clutched the broken pieces of my heart; in my palms, I fisted the tattered fragments of my dreams, trying desperately to keep them together. But it was too late. Dreams are spun from the most fragile glass, easily spider-webbed. A few careless words can shatter them beyond repair.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you: this story isn’t about getting what I wanted.
Because I never wanted Ryder Woods.
I needed him.
Like a melody needs a harmony, like a rhythm needs a tempo, like a chord needs a key. I was more consumed by him than I ever was by the notes swirling in my bloodstream or the lyrics swimming through my head.
Even after he took every aching piece of my heart and crushed them to dust between nicotine-stained fingertips.
I was stupid enough to think I’d never see him again. Stupid enough to think that fate was done playing with me. That, after the hell he’d already put me through, I’d earned some kind of respite from the desolation of loving him… and then losing him.
After two long years without the touch of his knuckles against my cheek or the kiss of his stubbled jaw against my skin or the rasp of his voice against the fragile shell of my ear, I was foolish enough to believe that I’d finally gotten him out of my bloodstream, banished him into remission like the most lethal of illnesses.
I should’ve known there was no cure.
Loving Ryder Woods was a life sentence.
A terminal disease.
And when he finally did come back into my life… he may’ve been the last person I ever wanted to lay eyes on again… but as I’ve told you twice already…
What I wanted has never mattered one bit.
Not when it comes to him.
T W O Y E A R S E A R L I E R
The bus kicksup a cloud of dust as it rolls away, rumbling louder than my stomach — which is really saying something, because the only thing I’ve consumed today is a stale peanut butter and jelly sandwich, half-squished from accidentally sitting on it during the jolting six hour ride.
I watch until the bus turns out of sight, leaving me alone on the empty stretch of roadway. It’s mid-afternoon, and there’s not another soul on the street. The lights of Nashville’s famed honky-tonks have dimmed — if only for a few hours — while tourists nurse hangovers and rest their livers in preparation for another spin around town. Beneath the bright midday sunshine, Music City has fallen momentarily quiet. Its resident musicians are at home rehearsing for another set, another stage, another night singing lyrics they didn’t write for people barely coherent enough to listen.
I know the quietude is temporary. As soon as the sun fades into darkness like a candle burned down to the end of its wick, this place will be bustling once more with flashing signs that gleam neon-bright on the surface of whiskey-glazed eyes. Nashville is Disney Land for adults, a conglomeration of bachelorette parties celebrating impending marriages and unhappy housewives escaping monotonous ones; hopeful singers dreaming about their big break and washed up stars reminiscing about they day they got theirs.
It is escapism set to a country song on repeat. It is a painkiller tablet swallowed down with a mimosa. A place where dreams are born, and also where they go to die; where music spills onto the streets as background noise or slips under your skin and takes up residence inside your soul.
They say you either come to Nashville for a single night, or stay here for a lifetime. Out-of-towners leave with nothing but a set of blurry memories from the bars on Lower Broad, their feet blistered from brand new cowboy boots that they’ll never find occasion to wear once they get home to their real lives. If you’re foolish enough to stay for longer than a weekend, you run the risk of doing significantly more damage… and not just to your feet or your liver.
To your soul.
Clutching the cracked handle of my guitar case a bit tighter, I heave a deep sigh and turn to face the building at my back. Off the well-trod Broadway strip, it’s a bit less obvious and ostentatious than Tootsie’s famed Orchid Lounge or the sprawling, tri-level Legends Corner where live music floats out the windows nonstop. Tucked on a side street several blocks from the tourist zone, the black brick exterior is chipping and sincerely in need of a fresh paint job. The windows are dark and streaked with grime. A hanging shingle sign protrudes in the air over my head, declaring THE NIGHTINGALE in fading gold letters.