Chapter Text
Will hadn’t written a song in years. It wasn’t something he had stopped doing on purpose; it was just a habit he’d left behind as he’d grown out of his high school self who was swimming in teenage hormones and didn’t know how to regulate emotions without a guitar. He still listened to his old recordings sometimes, and every so often a new lyric or string of chords would play through his mind, but he was always so busy with college, and med school, and now his residency — not to mention trying to have friends and a dating life on the side — and music just wasn’t something he’d made time for.
But now here he was, holding flowers and an umbrella and standing frozen at the base of the stairs in this gaudy apartment complex, dry from the rain outside but not from his own tears as he stared up at the door to the apartment that he’d just watched Drew disappear into with her arms around some man Will had never seen before.
The apartment where Drew’s mom had told him he could drop off her stuff.
(He hadn’t brought her stuff. He’d brought flowers.)
And suddenly he was driving home, flowers strewn about his passenger seat like they’d been thrown there and windshield wipers moving so quickly they rattled, and he was writing a song.
He was pulling out a marker and writing "to sell" on one of the cardboard boxes scattered throughout his apartment and filling it with things that weren’t his, and he was writing a song.
He was moving, alone, into the house that he’d put a down payment on a month ago after Drew declared it her favorite of all the houses they’d toured, and he was writing a song.
He was unpacking and dusting off his old guitar, painted bright yellow and covered in the souvenir stickers his mom had brought him from every city she’d visited on her first tour, and he was writing song after song after song.
And he was recording them, and mixing them with a program he hadn’t even realized he still had on his old laptop. And he was burning them to a CD. Nobody used CDs anymore, but that was what he did the last time he wrote a girl a song when he was in high school 12 years ago, and he wasn’t sure what else to do with this mini album he’d created, so…
He put it in a case and stuffed it into a shipping envelope. He wrote his address in the corner — no name — then stared at the blank space in the center of the package for several minutes, before breathing out a long sigh and filling in the address he’d had memorized since running into Mrs. Tanaka at the grocery store.
He put a stamp on it and placed it on a small table by the door, telling himself he would take it out to the mailbox the next time he went.
He didn’t.
Instead he walked past it, day after day, week after week, month after month. At first, he would feel something each time he saw it — spite, hopelessness, anger, desperation — and he would tell himself over and over again that he would send it tomorrow. But after a while, the envelope faded into the background, taking the emotions it had held for him with it. Will moved on. He still missed Drew sometimes, still wished he had someone to come home to, and still wondered what exactly he had done to drive her away. But he had friends, he had family close by. He hadn’t started dating anyone new — wasn’t totally sure when he’d be ready for that — but he was happy most of the time, content with his life alone in this big house.
The envelope became part of the senseless mesh of knick knacks and clutter that made up the rest of his home decor, and he forgot about it.
His mom visited, about a year after he’d moved into the house. It wasn’t the first time she’d come, but this visit was the most important, although Will didn’t know it at the time. Because this time, on her way out at the end of her visit, Naomi Solace noticed something she hadn’t noticed before. Sitting by the door and half covered by sticky note reminders and a chinese takeout menu, there was an envelope that was clearly meant to be dropped off in the mailbox and sent somewhere.
So, being the helpful mother that she was, she picked it up. She called out a last goodbye to her son and walked out to her rental car, passing the mailbox on the way and leaving it with the flag up, stuffed with a single shipping envelope.