Chapter Text
Addict With A Pen (Tyler)
As a kid, I had never been particularly good with talking. I tended to hide behind Josh, who was eager to talk enough for the both of us. (“Anything to make you happy,” he would tease, though I never knew how much he meant it until much later.)
One thing I had gotten good at because of this, however, was writing. I wrote everything, because that was the only way for me to get things out. Other people would talk it out, or paint, or even just scream, but I wrote. After a while, I turned to writing songs, which, given the fact that I play the piano and ukulele, was not a surprising transition.
However, after a while, I set down my songbook. When asked why, I claimed that Ryan and Brendon and Pete and Gerard and Frank could write a million times better than I could, so why should I even bother? Josh tried to talk me out of it, but my mind was made up. It seemed that my writing career was over at the tender age of thirteen.
Until I moved out, that is.
It was a few days before I would leave for college. (Or, well, move across town for college, anyway.) Josh and I had found an apartment that we could rent for cheap, in the same building as Frank, Ray, Mikey, and Gerard, and I was packing up my room so I would be ready to move in the next morning.
“What’s this?” I asked out loud when I found a notebook under my bed. I must have looked ridiculous, with my butt in the air, and my entire torso squeezed into the small space that I hadn’t fit in for years. Luckily, Josh hadn’t said anything about it, other than a comment about how good my ass looked that made me blush.
“What’s what?” Josh asked, sounding amused. I began a slow sort of wiggle backwards until I finally emerged from the abyss under my bed, clutching a small black journal. I peered at it with a frown as Josh walked over to me, sitting beside me on the floor. “Isn’t that your old songbook?”
I cracked open the cover and raised my eyebrows. Josh was right – my sloppy seventh grade handwriting covered the pages, with markings to denote choruses and verses and bridges. Under a lot of the lyrics were notes or chords, clearly a much younger me’s attempt to seem like I knew what I was doing. I remembered this time, though, and I know I had no clue how to really write music.
“Some of this isn’t too bad,” Josh said after we flipped through the pages for a while. “A little immature, but you were like twelve so,” he grinned at me, “I guess it can be forgiven.”
I grimaced at him. “It’s really bad,” I said, snapping the book shut. “I can see why I stopped.”
But something about that book interested me, and after Josh left I found myself peeking through the pages again. By the time the sun had risen, I had dug a notebook out of one of my boxes and placed it on my desk with a pen. I knew how to write songs now – I had taken AP Music Theory to fill up my schedule as a senior, and that had been one of our assignments. I was better at both piano and ukulele, and I had a pretty good understanding of a lot of other instruments from hanging around the musical bunch I called my friends. I could write again. I just needed inspiration.
I didn’t have to wait long.
The next morning, Brendon and Josh came by to help me load my things into a small moving van – because there was no way my desk and bookcase, along with Josh’s, would fit into any of our tiny cars, and the three of us set out to go grocery shopping for the first time with our parents’ money.
It seemed like only a matter of seconds before a gaggle of teenagers and young adults appeared on our doorstep with smiles on their faces and bags in their hands to help us settle in. The next day, Josh and I were heading to Ikea with our parents to buy furniture – part of the deal had been that we would pay rent by ourselves if they helped pay for furnishings. However, for now we had two desks and two small bookcases to set up, clothes and food to unpack.
It didn’t take too long with everyone helping, and soon we were all settled on the floor in front of Josh’s television, curled up in sleeping bags and blankets. I looked around at all of my friends, noting the way Mikey held his arms against his chest protectively, Patrick hung back from the crowd beside Pete, and Brendon and Spencer still left a space between them out of habit.
I dug my notebook and pen out of my backpack beside me, flipping to the first page and smoothing my hands over the clean lines. I had found my inspiration.