Page 176 of Requiem
She deserved the chance to become someone beyond her trauma instead of dying beneath the weight of it.
Echos’s voice rises beside mine before I can drown too deeply inside the memory. The words burst outward across the venue while Micah hits the drums harder now, emotion pouring visibly through every movement of his body.
“We’re not broken, we’re just changed
They poured fire in our veins…”
My voice cracks slightly onchanged. The crowd hears it. I know they do.
“They sell a story, sell a face
Sell the soul and call it fate
If you speak, you disappear
If you don’t, you suffocate…”
The lines hit the crowd heavier now. I see how their faces change. More tears are flowing.
“Bathroom sinks and hotel lights
Glitter tears and alibis…”
Emma lowers her head briefly while listening, and I know she’s remembering pieces of me I wish she never had to see. The overdoses. The panic attacks. The nights she held me while I shook apart from withdrawal and trauma and fucking fear. The nights she sang softly against my hair while medication dissolved under my tongue and I tried to remember why I was even doing this in the first place.
By the second pre-chorus, my fingertips have gone numb around the microphone, and I have to pull back for half a second just to get air into my lungs again. Echos takes over gently.
“But there’s a fire underneath
Something they can’t rewrite…”
I lean into the microphone, my chest too tight to contain my heartbeat.
“You can take the stage, take the name
Take the innocence and the blame
Take the silence, take the shame
But you’ll never douse the flames…”
My voice shakes, feeling too much all at once. And then the softer lines come. The ones that pierce my fucking heart.
“Some of us don’t make it out
Some get lost inside the sound…”
Micah lowers his head behind the drums before slamming back into the rhythm harder than before.
“But their echoes don’t fade easy
You can still hear them now…”
The line leaves my mouth almost broken. And somehow the crowd understands anyway. The final chorus detonates across the venue. Everyinstrument crashes back in at once beneath the summer sky, loud enough that I physically feel the sound vibrating through my chest.
“We’re falling stars, don’t look away
We turn the dark into a stage
