out_of_phase raze you told everyone you broke your hand falling down the stone steps of the house you were renting. when it was just the two of us, you told me what really happened, your voice soft as breathing, your eyes fixed on the floor. you were seeing someone. you saw a future with her you'd never seen with anyone. it was a lie, like the one you told about your hand, but you let yourself believe it. even when the father of her child was stalking you and letting the air out of your tires, you believed it. even when she was showing up at someone else's house and screaming at a stranger, asking to see the man she never really left to be with you. you had an argument. the kind that ends things. you went home and punched your fridge. that's not a fight you win. she drove you to the hospital and held the hand that wasn't broken. you wondered if this was what real love felt like. if it was buried in some small gesture that couldn't chase away the poison but would buy you a bit of time before everything you'd already ruined ate you from the inside out. we recorded a song later that night. you couldn't fingerpick, so you strummed. you sang and played acoustic guitar, and the sounds you made hit the two microphones in front of the guitar and the microphone in front of your face at different times. a fraction of a second is all it takes to throw everything off balance. the fricatives weren't quite right. there was something hollow there. but we lived with the phase issues. the plaster cast that kept your hand from moving gave something to the tone of my old gibson that wasn't there before. your voice was the sound of your broken bones. you sang: "once i knew a girl in the hard, hard times. she made me a shirt out of fives and dimes. now she's gone, but when i wear it she crosses my mind. and if the best is for the best, then the best is unkind." one take. that was it. there were mistakes. it almost fell apart halfway through. but you pulled yourself together, and the song did the same. i overdubbed piano. i didn't know what i was doing, but it felt right. i hit a strange low chord at the end that sounded like a cough. "i don't know, man," i said. "i was kind of feeling it out." "i actually kind of like that last part," you said. "that chord that didn't really sound right but sounded awesome." we talked for a while. then you left. i added more to the song on my own. bass, drums, layers of electric guitar, shaker, harmonies. i knew how to blend my voice with yours so we sounded like the same person. everyone who heard your songs thought you were singing with yourself. they didn't hear me. my real voice was in the music. it was in the reverb-drenched artificial harmonics and the muffled heartbeat drums. no cymbals. just the sound of what lived beneath them. the sound of what wouldn't last. i sent you a rough mix the next day. you loved it until you played it for a friend and she said she didn't like my harmonies. you decided you didn't like them either. you made me get rid of most of them. everything else stayed where it was. your hand healed, but it was never the same. it came most of the way back. when you made a fist you could feel what was different. there was strength you couldn't get to anymore. that was the last thing we did that grew out of our friendship, or what was left of it, and the last song you sang that sounded like it meant something. you didn't write it, though. josh_ritter did. 211106 ... unhinged they say this like it's a bad thing waning_gibbous 211106 what's it to you? who go blather from