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When Bill and Ted were fifteen, in the quiet darkness of Bill’s bedroom, they had made a plan. Once Wyld Stallyn’s were world famous, and they graduated high school, they would get a place together. In Manhattan, or maybe Hollywood Hills. Somewhere fitting for rock stars where they could play all night, and nobody could tell them to quiet down.
That night they both fell asleep in Bill’s bed, and Ted could not wait to be able to do it every night.
It was many months after graduation that they managed to save enough from their jobs at the mall to afford a deposit. Far from being rock stars, they had not had a single gig, nor written any songs.
The apartment wasn’t quite a Manhattan penthouse either: a tiny one bedroom in a kind of shady part of town, with leaky faucets and kitchen appliances from a decade neither of them remembered. But it was cheap, and it was theirs.
The day they moved in, it rained like the whole sky was coming down. To Ted, it felt like the rhythm on the windows was setting him a pace; pack, pack, pack; go, go, go. Each wave of rattle on the roof building up his exited anxiety.
The same rhythm kept him going when he and Bill sprinted between the front door and Bill’s van to avoid the cardboard boxes getting soaked in the rain. Ted was first to get to the car, Bill blaming it on his unnaturally long legs. On the next run, Bill tried to balance the score by tackling his friend, but it merely ended with them both soaked to the skin, holding piles of melted cardboard. Ted felt his face might well split in half from smiling.
It was early afternoon when they were finally packed up and ready to go. They stared at Ted’s empty room, stripped from posters and cleaner than it had been for as long as either of them remembered. The slight melancholy was overweighted by a thick blanket of anticipation.
From the front door, Ted gave a shout to his brother, and got a distant grunt in response. Leaving his key on the hallway table and closing the door behind him, Ted was glad to leave before his dad got home from work.
Sitting in the passenger seat of the van, car full of both his and Bill’s stuff, the boys were quiet for a while, sitting in the weight of the momentous moment. The rain drummed the window, and Ted felt ready.
The apartment immediately felt like home; first thing, they filled the walls with posters, the fridge with soda, and set up a sofa-area for jamming and composing. Still, Ted felt it wasn’t any of those things that gave the feeling of home as he looked at his friend, his hair slowly drying from the rain with a content smile on his face.
As the day managed to get darker even as the sun had been behind dark clouds all day, they both felt the heaviness of sleep in their heads. Moving to the bedroom to settle in for the night, both boys paused looking at the two single beds, in opposite ends of the room.
Unfamiliarity tickled in the back of Ted’s mind. This felt odd to him, as they had slept in the same room more times than he could count and for longer than he could remember. There was nothing unfamiliar about falling asleep to the sound of Bills steady breathing, seeing his silhouette in the dark, the feel of his warm breath those times they were too tired to set up a guest bed. Falling asleep surrounded by the smell of his friend’s shampoo.
But climbing to bed on the other side of their own shared bedroom, in their own shared apartment, with the rain rattling against the widow hard enough to cover the sound of Bills breaths, Ted felt an odd discomfort. In this new home, that was also Bill’s home, the distance between their beds felt like a canyon. Ted wasn’t sure what that meant.
The weird feeling eased with time, a bit. Especially on clearer nights, when the air was quiet and still and Ted could hear Bill’s breathing, and when streetlights got in through the gaps in the drapes and he could see the shape of curly hair and slightly open lips peaking from under the covers.
The days were weird too. Ted soon realised he had thought that living together would somehow mean spending even more time with Bill. But realities of shifts at work and such soon revealed themselves, often leaving Ted alone in their apartment. In the beginning, it felt awkward, like being let into Bill’s room by his dad while he wasn’t home, surrounded by the disembodied scent of his friend.
It did give him time to finally learn how to play his guitar. He now remembered a handful of chords and could switch between them fairly fluently and could even play through some of the simpler songs from bands he liked. He hadn’t gotten a hang of composing yet, though, even as that might well be the most important skill for him to learn. They could not unite the whole universe with cover songs, could they? But going from repeating songs to making songs was more difficult than he expected.
“To make art, you need an inspiration, dude”, Bill told him one uncharacteristically cold morning as they were walking to work, a rare simultaneous shift. “Music is about feeling, not putting chords and notes in order or whatever.”
Ted nodded slowly, looking at the way Bill’s speech released clouds of fog into the chilly air on each exhale.
Ted still remembered the sound of the rain on the day he and Bill first moved in together. The melodic knocking of the rain on the windows, and the dull waves of heavy rain on the roof. Plucking his guitar, he closed his eyes and let his fingers run over the strings in a first attempt to capture the sound, the feeling of that day, with an instrument.
A week later, the rough draft of a melody hadn’t found the right rhythm. It was on his mind on many a slow quiet moment, at work, in the shower, lying in bed at night. But the pieces wouldn’t quite find their form. First, he thought the heavy drumming of rain would need a fast pace, with hard drums and loud rhythmic riffs, but it didn’t seem to go with the feeling he attached to the melody.
One night he lay awake, the song playing through his head, trying to hear different variations of the drums, the bass, supporting guitar over his melody. It was one of those nights where nobody seemed to be out and about, no humming of cars passing by and no knocking from neighbouring apartments. Only his, and Bill’s, breath.
Beginning to feel the heaviness of sleep, laying in the dark, he begun to match the melody to the slow, steady rhythm of Bill’s breathing. Tension building with faster notes on the inhale, releasing on the exhale. The slow pace transformed his notes; no longer a hard and fast sound of go, go, go, but calming and cosy, like falling asleep on the sofa after a long day out and a cup of cocoa. The new sound felt right like nothing else had.
Ted begun to pay attention to Bill’s breathing with new intrigue. He listened closely to the beats and pauses of a voiceless laugh when Bill had laughed long enough that no sound would no longer come. He paid attention to the new tones in Bill’s voice when he had a stuffy nose and was home with a flu. One hot afternoon when they did a grocery haul and climbed up the stairs to their apartment with bags full of frozen meals and soda, Ted was mesmerized by the sound of Bill’s heavy pants from the climb, the heaving of his chest, the speckles of sweat on his neck. Every night he was lulled to sleep by the quiet and distant inhale and exhale. They all got turned into melodies, basslines, and rhythms.
Soon, Ted found himself staring; at Bill’s lips parting to let out heavy sighs, nostrils flaring with an inhale, the steady rise and fall of his chest and belly. Listening to Bill’s exited stories of frustrated rants, he became lulled by the melodies of his voice and the movements of his lips. Electrified by the gush of air from long sighs hitting the hairs on his arms.
Sometimes, Ted took a moment to notice Bill had stopped talking and was just staring at him with question in his eyes. Ted wasn’t sure what the question was though, let alone the answer. Those times he’d just look away and change the topic or turn on the TV.
One afternoon Ted got home from work and heard the steady drumming of water hitting the plastic walls of the shower. The sound wasn’t steady pulses or gentle knocking like rain, but cacophonous pattering with the water hitting different surfaces with different pressure, as Bill moved around under the stream. Having stilled to listen to the curious rhythm, Ted could make out quiet gasps and sighs in the midst of the drumming water. Feeling his ears burn, he willed himself to stop listening and occupy himself with cooking dinner.
The sounds stuck in his head, though. Eventually he tried to write it down, turning soft gasps into strummed minor chords and surrounding them with erratically plucked bass notes. But the process didn’t stop the original sounds from playing in his head. He tried not to think about why.
Eventually Ted had written down enough small segments to have a couple of complete songs. Slowly, he figured out how to connect the disparate segments into songs; match the tapping of the dripping sink with the loud hum of the fridge, that then leads to the chorus with the melody of Bill’s laugh; the heavy sigh and tickle of skin amplified by the rhythm of Bill’s step around the apartment. And his first song, rain on the roof and windows in the tempo of Bill’s steady breathing while he sleeps, turning to the bridge and chorus of shower drumming on the walls with chords strummed faster and faster ending with a beat of silence.
All they were missing were lyrics. As Ted was never that good with his words, he finally presented his work to his friend. He played through what he could on a single guitar, explaining his vision for the other instruments and how he imagined the complete pieces to sound. He left out where the inspirations had come from, though, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.
Bill seemed genuinely impressed, his smile fond and eyes glittering with excitement. Something about Bill’s expression made Ted think that his friend understood what the songs were saying, even if Ted himself wasn’t quite sure.
But it turned out Bill had an equally tough time translating how the songs into lyrics. One late night when they were both lying awake in their dark bedroom, Ted heard Bill roll on his side on the other side of the room, and after a deep inhale, quietly ask what Ted wrote the songs about. So that it would be easier to match lyrics to them, you know.
The question made Ted’s heart pound in his chest and thinking about how he could possibly answer made his mouth run dry. The silence stretched, interrupted by a heavy truck rattling by, its lights throwing shadows in the room.
“I don’t know, dude. I just like…” Ted took a deep, shaky breath and let whatever words were coming come out. “Thought about how non-heinous it is to live with you and like, have you be around all the time.”
There was a beat of silence as the pieces fit together in Ted’s mind.
“I guess they’re about feeling at home. With you.”
Ted turned his head to look towards his friend as he heard Bill’s sheets shuffling. Bill had stood up and walked to stand next to Ted’s bed. The yellow street light from the crack of the curtain lit his curls with warm gold.
After a deep breath, chest rising and falling, slowly Bill sat on the edge of the bed and moved to lie down.
“Is this okay?”
Ted could feel the whisper on his neck, even in the dark make out the uncertainty in Bill’s eyes looking into his. Ted reached over to wrap his arms around Bill and pull him close, breathing in the smell of his shampoo.
“Yeah.”