GretaVanLace

Let Me Call You Sweetheart  *

1 | 2

You Feel Like Home *

Little Spoon *

Across the Miles *

Soft and Wet *

Stage Presence *

Hold My Heart, Keep Me Warm *

Missing Buttons *

Missing Buttons ll *

Warm Reunion *

Let Me Love You *

Golden Afternoons *

Plain White T-shirt *

Divinity *

Starry, Starry Night *

Light My Love *

Golden Nights *

Garnet *

Purple Haze *

Christmas Mouse *

Watching Over *

Choker *

Little Comets *

Valtava *

Stars Collide *

Sun & Moon (Josh/Jake blurbs) *

Blank *

Hush *

Softer, Softest *

Poppins (Josh & Jake) *

Tease | Josh & Jake *

1 | 2

Sugar | Josh & Jake *

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

17| 18 | 19

Sugar II *

Beg For It *

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Lessons  *

Whispers In the Dark *

Cabin In the Woods *

Cabin in the Woods ll *

Transcendence *

Guitar Fingers *

Guitar Fingers ll *

Firsts *

Champagne Smiles *

Truth, Lies, & Consequences *

Silver Secrets *

Adoration *

Baby Doll *

Sweet Little Toy | Jake & Danny *

Sweet Little Toy ll *

What You Need *

Alabama Song *

Call and Response *

Decorum and Refinement *

Silent Night *

Crybaby *

Dirty Filthy Things 2 *

The Emperor’s New Clothes *

Blurred Lines *

Welcome To Hell *

Debauchery Defined *

Anathema *

Animosity *

Beloved *

Crime and Punishment *

Through the Looking Glass *

Feels Like Gold *

Breña *

Sleeping Beauty *

Angel, Straight From Hell *

Princess *

Pink *

Little Bird *

Dripping Drumsticks *

Incubi *

Josh

I knew it. The moment she’d gone, I mean.

It felt more concrete than when he’d taken his leave three weeks prior, though she — and likely the rest of the world — might have called me a liar.

No, I knew she’d gone because my soul felt his own breathe a sigh of relief. The feral, ancient content that radiated from his being, wherever it was, reached me loud and clear.

His great gig in the sky had fallen into place.

I, with my grief, and he, with his girl.

You see, Jacob passed on a night as still as glass. The universe was hushed. Did it understand?

Mother Earth quieted her creatures and calmed tempestuous skies for Jacob Thomas. Bowed in honor of the music man.

He, who created so much joyful noise, had earned a solemn silence.

I was there to watch Jake draw his last ragged breath, as I was witness to his first.

I told him, that still and cloudless day, that it was time to relax his fist. That he should let go of that rage for the dying of the light. “Learn to leave a room, brother. I’m sick of you.”

“Fuck you, Joshua.” Had been his response. That biting, perfect sentiment is tattooed upon my waning heart.

As the blues record spinning like a whisper in the corner skipped as though it somehow knew, she had fallen to the floor. Crumpled down against the scuffed wood like waterlogged tissue paper when the light in his eyes had gone out.

She’d been so strong for him.

When his memory failed, she was his unwavering hippocampus. She filled in the blanks happily, readily. She kept his mind whole by lending bits and pieces of her own.

Songs. She’d learned those too. Meticulized over the chords and frets of his favorites. When arthritis marched in to cruelly snatch the melodies from his hands, she’d done her best to make sure that the walls of their home always knew music from the hand of someone who knew how it craved him.

Yes, their home craved him.

Jacob’s gait had echoed the halls for decades. His voice, his laughter, tunes coaxed from strings. Sneezes muffled into the crease of his arm. Earnest timbres when he felt passionately about a subject. Murmured timbres secreted when he felt passionately about her in the night.

That house, the one he’d promised her, the one he’d built her, mourned for him like a living being. His absence hurt us all, even those inanimate. He became our collective lost limb.

But his sugar……

Every star in the sky might as well have been snuffed out. She no longer saw them. She simply closed her eyes and forgot anything beautiful that wasn’t her Jakey.

She held fast for her girls, two of them…and even faster for their third, a wild-child son who they both claimed was nearly my clone. I still think I might be the only one who sees it, how much like my twin my favorite nephew really is. He makes me feel less adrift, and there are many days when my grief is thankful for his anchor.

But yes, she had been strong for them.

They had lost their father, those babies of theirs who were so grown it was difficult to believe they were ever small to begin with….

However, as hours turned to days and they began to rediscover their rhythm, she turned desperately inward.

I tried to hold on to her. I struggled to keep her face upturned..fought to warm her cheeks with light rather than let her skin ache with the salt of tears. Tried to carry her through the way he would have.

In those moments, I know our hearts remembered the love. That seemingly endless well of devotion..the fire that once licked at the walls of anything that threatened to touch it insidiously.

She and I….

Once, it was she and I…

And how we burned.

But we loved him. We both loved him. So, so, much more. She and I never stood a chance, and maybe I knew that the moment I watched his eyes track her in that crowded bar so long ago I can’t remember when.

I miss him.

‘Miss’ feels like such a lie. A blatantly deceitful word. I don’t miss him…I lament and throb in my sorrow. I would swallow this entire world, gnash it to pieces and callously spit it out if it meant one more moment with him.

She was not alone in her grief. And she was never alone in her devotion to Jake.

I knew it wouldn’t be long. Knew she had yearned to stumble along behind him the moment he’d breathed his last.

He belongs to the ages now, I’d wanted to hush. He’d always thought those words, murmured after Lincoln had succumbed to his assassin, were reverent, and a touch pretentious in a way that he’d liked.

If anyone on this earth deserved reverent and pretentious, it was my other half.

But he didn’t belong to the ages then, and he doesn’t now…

He belonged— belongs, to her.

So yes, the night she left this world, I know he was there, watching in the shadows of the room they’d shared for so many years. He would have burned this entire universe to ashes to ensure she crossed over peacefully.

Jake’s sugar would come home to him, but she would make her way without so much as an unsure breath. Her hand was nestled within his before she could worry for a blink, I know this as well as I know the sun will rise tomorrow.

He would have died a thousand deaths in her stead if it meant she would know a gentle peace, always.

I dreamt of her the night after she’d gone to join him.

She was young again, and so was I…

The waters lapping at the shore were a strange, crystalline pink…shimmering and shifting like a cut glass held up to the light.

I reached out, tucked a salt-kissed lock of hair behind her ear, “He’s waiting for you,”

“Yes,” turning to the glittering, shifting haze where the sand disappeared, she’d sighed in the softest content, “…he is. It’s forever now, isn’t it?”

My hands cupped her face and held on gently for a breath “It is.”

I could feel her energy shifting, and I could feel his becoming, what I can only describe as tenderly impatient. So, with a brush of a kiss upon the apple of her cheek I asked one last favor of her,

“Will you tell him how much I love him?”