Page 160 of Haunt Me

All I do is survive.

It’s like I’m hanging off the edge of a cliff, white-knuckling it through every performance, and then falling apart afterwards. Skye, Jude and Lou are left to pick up the pieces, and, to their credit, they always do, but I can’t go on like this.

Once the UK shows start, our schedule is brutal. Staying on top of my game requires stamina like nothing ever has before. Some of the arenas are a bit smaller than the US ones, but that makes the performance even more demanding. It’s more intimate, and the fans love it, which means it’s full-on for us, double the shows, and far more scrutiny on me as I sing.

A few nights ago, I was crying so hard duringHeartbreakeron stage, I couldn’t finish the second chorus. I smiled and just tried to hide it, while Jude sang instead of me, but everyone could tell I was crying.

Even before the show’s end, the Internet was bursting at the seams with videos and photos of me trying to smile while I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. Tonight, we are playing Cardiff. A lot of cities are behind us and a lot are yet to come. So I hit the gym and try to get my head on straight.

And not think about Eden.

Or think about how the pills would take the edge off, make the pain bearable. No. I will feel it, and I will learn to deal with it. To live with it. To work with a broken heart, even though it’s decaying inside of me.

I try to shut out all other thoughts, and focus on not dying on stage.

When I get really desperate, I text Faith, and she always replies, usually with a joke, always with news. Eden is doing better—and worse. Applying to schools, which is good. Waking up from nightmares, which is bad. Writing too much poetry, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. But poetry is her lifeline thesedays, it seems. Eden says she is writing a lot of poems—poems I will never read, because she writes under several pseudonyms.

When I get even more desperate than that, I write. The words and the music just come pouring out of me, and within the space of a few weeks, I have ten new songs. Most of them—or all of them?—are crap, but it’s such a difference from being blocked. It’s such a release of anguish, it feels like breathing.

I think a lot about the past. About what happened back then, to Eden, to me. To us. About all the things I did wrong. But I also think about the present. The songs I have already put out there. The life I am living at full speed. My fake name, Issy Woo.

It feels like it’s time to make some decisions. The more I think, the more I write. I write quickly, desperately, in a frenzy, and when I’m done, I’m so tired, I sleep for two days straight. I’m scared that when I wake up and am no longer crazy, the lyrics and the music will seem moronic.

They don’t. I play them again, by myself, not even letting Jude hear them just yet. I have never said this before, but for the first time I feel I might actually have something good here. And to think, I used to be blocked.

I finally tell Skye, and he doesn’t believe me at first. He thinks I’m messing with him, but I patiently explain to him how the words and the melodies are somehow pouring out of me with little effort, as if they have been there all along.

“I don’t feel drained at all,” I tell him. “I feel as if I have another fifteen songs inside me, ready to come out.”

“It seems like you’re tapping into your genius again,” Skye says.

I sigh. “I told you a million times, I’m not a genius, that’s my brother, he-”

“You told me a million times that a genius is like an ocean being poured into a glass,” Skye interrupts me.

“Exactly.”

“Well, this sounds like an ocean to me. Your ocean.”

I fall silent, because he’s right. Of course he’s right. I mean, I’m not a genius, I know that. But thiswasan ocean. And it came out of me in a whoosh—it would have all come out in a single day if I could stay awake long enough to write everything down. It had to come out of me or otherwise it would have drowned me.

The pain, the guilt, the shame. The love.

All of it, an ocean. And me, with my little boat made of music and lyrics, trying to keep my head above the waves. That’s all my songs are.

“We need to produce this,” Skye says.

“You haven’t even heard any of the songs yet,” I laugh. “They might be all crap.”

“I hear it in your voice,” Skye says, and he’s not laughing. “I hear something that I’ve never heard before, something that makes me think that what we have here is gold. Pure, unfiltered gold.”

“You do, do you?” I lift an eyebrow. “What is that thing that you hear in my voice?”

“Pride,” Skye says. “Sheer pride.”

I close my eyes.

“What is it?” he asks.

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