Page 40 of Best Friend Burden

“But, with Jackson, that early energy and excitement will usually fizzle out.”

That got a reaction out of her, and she spoke.

“What happens then?”

“Well,” I said, realizing I was digging myself into a hole that was only growing deeper, but unable to do anything about it, “he loses interest, and he moves on.”

I was talking about Jackson here, but I wondered if Melody was in the same boat. She was an excitable person with so much enthusiasm, but back in high school, she had a tendency to lose interest in hobbies. She had me over for a guitar lesson a few times and then just sort of forgot about it.

Was I going to end up in the corner collecting dust like that old guitar of hers?

“How long have you two been seeing each other?” I asked Natasha, trying to do the math in my head.

“Six weeks,” she said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“What?”

“I don't know that he's ever been in a relationship that's lasted this long. Usually, by the end of the first month, he's lost interest.”

At this point, I was mostly thinking out loud and perhaps I should have done a better job of keeping my mouth shut, but that had never been my strong point. Especially when I was distracted thinking about Melody. I knew my brother’s habits, but not hers. How long was her attention span going to last? At the moment, she saw no signs of slowing down, but that was perhaps even scarier. Maybe, with her — as with my brother — it would be full speed ahead until she hit a brick wall, and all that affection and excitement just fizzled out.

Or maybe not. Maybe I was inventing problems where none existed.

“I guess what I'm saying is that this seems like the start of a great mutual relationship,” I told her. That seemed to be good enough for her, and I realized that overthinking things was not helping my situation either, so I changed the subject.

“Let me ask you something,” I told her. “How do you stay out of your head?”

She gave me a quizzical look. “What do you mean? I feel like I'm constantly in my head, second guessing Jackson's actions and wondering what he must be thinking. If he's telling me the truth or just what I want to hear or—”

“I mean in the studio,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I was. I was stuck in my head concerning Melody, but it also extended to the studio, where I was consciously aware of every movement of my hands. It made it so difficult to loosen up. “It was a few weeks ago you came in here and played alongside Peterson Floyd in front of professionals on an instrument that wasn't even yours, and you knocked it out of the park.”

She blushed at that. “I wouldn't go that far,” she said. “I did okay.”

“You're selling yourself short,” I said. “I would have been shitting my pants and too stiff to play anything if I was in your shoes."

“You played fine,” she said. “It was just...”

“Stiff,” I said. “Stilted. Forced. Not musical.”

“None of that,” she said. “Just you weren't having a conversation with him. With your instrument, I mean. Like this right here, we're talking back and forth. Listening and responding. You were doing your own thing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Because I couldn't keep up with him.”

She shook her head. “I've heard your recordings. You have the skill.”

“You've heard the old recordings. Lately, I feel like I've lost the magic.” Magic, in this case, was a euphemism for pills, but I wasn't about to admit that to her. It seemed like I could no longer function without them. It was obvious in the studio, but it was also apparent to me at home. I’d never given relationships this much thought. I just assumed they’d move forward so long as nobody was rocking the boat too much.

And, on top of that, I knew sober life wasn’t the one for Melody. She drank from time to time and smoked weed, but was able to do so responsibly. I couldn’t keep her away from that stuff forever and, with me, it was like giving a mouse a cookie. One crumb, and I could fall right back off the wagon.

Judging by my playing lately, maybe it wasn’t the worst thing. I needed them to really play. But however necessary they may have been for me, Natasha seemed sober all the time. She’d managed to get out of her head without altering her mind to do so. What was her secret?

“It's still in there,” she said. “My parents signed me up for tennis when I was in junior high. I was never great, but I learned a trick that would allow me to win every game. I'd go up to my opponent when they were a little bit ahead and comment on their return — ask them how they were doing that. It would get them to focus on their individual movements and do the exact kind of thing you're talking about and then play badly. I psyched them out.”

She was telling me this like she was letting me in on a dirty little secret, as if she'd cheated. Maybe she'd felt like she had.

“How do you avoid getting psyched out, then?”

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