Page 81 of Before You Fell

My chest aches so badly that I shove the phone under my pillow, as if burying it could bury them too. Because if I answer any of them, I am back in that studio, back inside the life I walked out of.

I turn onto my side and bury my face in the pillow, but nothing helps.

Sometime after two in the morning, I get out of bed, go to the closet for a sweater, and find an old box on top of the folded blankets. The cardboard box has my name written across the lid in Mom’s handwriting.

WILLOW.

SCHOOL STUFF.

I should leave it there, but instead I pull it down and sit on the floor with it between my knees.

Old notebooks, certificates, photos with sun-faded edges, and the leather friendship bracelet Phoenix made me when we were thirteen—all black cord, cheap beads, and white letters that spell Wills across the middle. I remember him tying it around my wrist under that tree, acting cocky as hell while his ears went red, telling me it was not a big deal, even though it was the biggest thing he had ever given me.

I wore it all summer until the leather softened against my wrist.

There is also a dried leaf, pressed between two sheets of paper, brittle and brown now, from the tree where we wrote our first song. I kept it safe because thirteen-year-old me believed that saving pieces of the past would keep them alive.

God, I was such a hopeful little idiot.

Then I find the notebook. The first one. Blue cover, bent spine, corners worn soft from being carried around by two kids who thought songs could save them from becoming their parents.

Our names are written on the cover in my handwriting. Willow + Phoenix Songs.

My throat closes around something too old to still hurt this much.

I open it anyway.

The pages are full of pencil marks, crossed-out lyrics, half-finished verses, stupid arguments in the margins, and all the careful little pieces of who we were.

Phoenix’s messy scrawl cuts through mine in places.

This line is fucking awesome. Don’t get a big head.

A smile tugs at my mouth, but it doesn’t last. It collapses into a sob before I can stop it, and suddenly I am sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom with the past open in my lap and no idea how something so innocent could still know exactly where to cut.

I turn the pages until I find it near the middle of the book. The first song that ever felt authentic.

The one we wrote under the tree in my backyard, summer clinging to our skin as we pretended we were just writing lyrics, not making promises neither of us knew how to keep.

You’re the talented one, Wills. I’d be shit without you.

The memory hits so hard that I fold over the notebook.

That boy is dead. The boy under the tree no longer exists and the worst part is not that I lost him. It’s that I kept loving his ghost while the man he became learnt exactly how much of me he could take before I finally called it quits.

I cry into my hands for the girl I was back then and for the boy who looked at me as if I mattered before the world taught him to look past me. For the songs we wrote before they belonged to everyone else. For the version of us that never grew old enough to know better.

When the crying stops, I pick up a pen and turn to a blank page near the back of the book.

My hand shakes. For a moment, I just stare at all that empty space.

Then I write the only line that comes to mind.

I loved him before the fall, then bled beside him as we fell.

The line sits there, small and more honest than anything I’ve written in weeks.

Anyone else would read it as a song lyric. To me, it reads more like a confession that leaves blood on the page.