He woke too early—even for him. Blue hour. That sliver of time when the world hasn’t decided whether it wants to keep going.
The ceiling above him was smooth and endless and silent as a closed eyelid. He stared at it for a while, unmoving. Then he rose, not with purpose, but like something being pulled gently by a tide. Slipped out of bed. Found the couch. Folded himself onto it like a prayer someone else had started and left unfinished.
He used to do this a lot. Back then he called it kindness. Thought maybe he snored. Maybe she needed space. Maybe he was doing the decent thing.
But lying there in the blue quiet, it opened like a bloom—this memory that had nothing to do with her.
He was a boy. Summer. One of those still mornings in his father’s house. He’d come out of sleep and found the man curled on the couch, one sock off, neck bent sideways like someone had dropped him there. The smell of coffee grounds and old paint in the air, the kind of smell that doesn’t belong to anything living.
He didn’t ask why. Just filed it away. Something small and sad embedded in the cushions.
Later, when the rupture came—his own—he didn’t cry, didn’t scream. He just nodded, like someone finally getting the punchline to a joke that had been echoing for years. That memory had grown roots. Thick ones. Quiet and mean.
And somewhere along the line he’d started to believe it—this idea that his father was the real artist. The one who could. He was just the shadow of it, orbiting something bright, never daring to touch the flame.
Music was the same. He loved it. Felt it rattle in his bones like wind through a loose screen door. But he never claimed it. Never really believed it was his.
He was the one clapping too hard in the second row, always backstage, always humming someone else’s song.
People told him he looked like a Jagger, or maybe someone who used to open for one. He carried that look like a fake passport. It got him into places, but it never felt like home.
He’d built a whole cathedral out of other people’s names. Artist. Musician. Mystic. Guru.
He bowed so low he vanished.
And maybe he thought that was noble. Maybe he thought vanishing was some kind of offering. But really it was just fear in a tuxedo.
He’d spent years floating. Airborne. Untouched by fire or gravity.
But now—now he wanted the scrape of gravel under his feet. He wanted to know what it felt like to stay.
That’s why he kept going back to Shoal Creek. Not for answers. Just for the weight of things.
The tunnels. The limestone vaults. The breath of old waters rising through rusted gates.
The story of Orange, folded into the creekbed like a hymn.
The algae, the damp steps, the places where things got forgotten.
These were not perfect things. They didn’t need genius or confession. Just attention.
And so day after day, he came back. No crown. No chorus. Just a man with his hands in the dirt. A man who listened.
He wasn’t trying to be a legend anymore.
He wasn’t trying to be anything.
He just wanted to be.
And for the first time in a long time, that felt like more than enough.