#ideak

She had once woken up curled up on the couch in a pub's corner. 6am. The last guest had left two hours ago. Anthea had believed herself alone, but had actually found Jimmy, the owner of their favoured venue, still cleaning up behind the bar, having known better than to wake her. A shot of Jägermeister had been supposed to do the trick then, to wake her sufficiently to finally rouse herself to go home. Instead, Anthea had lingered by the bar a while longer, slumped over in her seat to make the spirit last. Every single one of the flower pots, engine parts, photographs in Jimmy's pub had had a story, and she could have stayed here listening to him retell them forever. That was what she had used to get in return for a night of strumming her fingers sore on the electric guitar: A crisp hundred-dollar bill and the stories of the photograph from Cork harbour. Some of the people in the crowd remembering her name as well. Though if it wasn't hers, it didn't matter, because all of them were equally devoted, equally outcast, equally devoid of any chances outside a career in playing music in pubs like Jimmy's. The world outside pointless, cruel and repetitive, but it hadn't mattered, because they had had each other. Andy, Chris, Jeanna and Anthea, Acherusia against the rest of the world, living for the next time Jimmy would invite them over. There hadn't exactly been too many other venues to be played, and if they had found one, it was either about to shut down, or the room they had been assigned had fitted a maximum of forty people, but it had never really mattered, or so Anthea chose to think as she stood in front of the garage next to Andy's parents' house, the spot where they liked to practise. The street eerily quiet compared to the chaos that had engulfed New York only a few days ago. The chaos that had cost Becky her life. The chaos that as of now was reborn in whispers and rumours, and the promise of something more. Something Anthea might have wanted to shape were it not for the pain that burned its way through her chest, making her speechless. She had only managed to express it on a sheet of paper so far. But singing was different, it trascended speaking. 

A crumpled up sheet of paper in the pocket of her coat, a sheet of paper they would bring alive together. 

Stronger and stronger I'm holding my last breath

I'm stuck in this world but I'm trying to leave right now

I'm dead alive

They were waiting for her already, but instead of the animated conversation Anthea usually found when arriving too late, the garage was quiet. Anthea sat down on a cardboard box. 

"I thought of something". Andy, of course. Andy always knew. If there was one person in the world who was Acherusia, it was Andy. Andy and his noncommittant words, Andy with the haircut that always changed, 

He got up and handed Anthea a sheet of paper. 

The others watching her expectantly. Anthea unfolded the paper ceremoniously. The lines that were to change the world. Andy hadn't said it, none of them had, but these were times that called for lines that changed the world. Especially if you had so little left to lose as she had, as all of them had. 

"I've been roaming around, always looking down at all I see". 

"That's...Kings of Leon though, isn't it?", Anthea finally got out after a ridiculously long pause. 

Andy shrugged. "Yeah. I thought we could make a cover. That's just the song that came to mind for me, and Chris and Jeanna agreed." Surreptitious glances of approval. "Covers reach people, you see? You tell them Kings of Leon, bamm, you have their attention. Like magic. Maybe that's the song they listen to at home as well, when they smell smoke and hear the fire sirens. Maybe they'll play that shit at funerals, I don't know. But it's their song, it's our song. Certain of it."

For a while, all Anthea could do was stare at the piece of paper. Will herself not to crumple it up for its alienness. Andy's handwriting for sure, though that seemed pointless right now. Why not just print it out, from a website that millions of people had checked before them? Why not just copy it for all of them, chase it through a machine that would carry it into every corner of the world?

"It's not my song."

"Well, what's yours?"

She hadn't touched her guitar since Becky had died. The lyrics had hit Anthea just when she had thought she had lost all motivation to ever pick up a guitar again. Or utter another word. Her voice was shaky at first, but it gained strength through the lines she could now only faintly remember penning. Maybe she had smoked a joint before. Or two, it wasn't like it mattered now, because as the chords filled the garage, they were hers, undeniably, and Anthea knew she'd never felt this much at home in any piece of music before. She even closed her eyes at one point, even though usually, that was Jeanna's prerogative, with her long blonde hair and cherubic face and the voice that compelled people. To have Jeanna sing this. Her genderswapped Kurt Cobain.

Losing you is losing me somehow

I'm not the same woman now, am I?

I'm dead alive

Anthea didn't want to disrupt the reverberations of the last note still swinging in the air, so it was left to Andy to break the silence. 

"So...uhm...what does that have to do with us, exactly?"

"I don't know. It's what I felt was my song. What I took away from all this. Don't you...don't you guys feel the same? A little?  I don't know what's gonna happen, nobody knows. And this is it, this...emptiness. I'm not searching for anybody right now, I don't even want to. It's like...it's like the idea of me having an identity, even that is revised. It's like everything starts from scratch, the foundations of what makes us...us. There's new rules, and nobody knows their way around them. All we have is nothing. A big, giant, fucking, chocking, intoxicating, whispering nothing."

And after a pause, Anthea added: "It's what happens when you lose people."

Another prolonged silence. Jeanna finally raising her voice. When she did, you knew things mattered. "Is that what you want to tell people? That they should give up all hope?"

"That's not what I'm saying."

Andy got up. "Well, what is?"

Starting to pack her guitar back into its case was the first step to admitting defeat, but Anthea only realized that too late. 

"That that's normal. To feel nothing. To just be empty, for days on end. That it's normal to not know what to do, where to take things." All four of them standing now. "That sometimes, assholes just hate you and that's the way things fucking go."

So that's where you want to take things? Covers?"

"For the moment, yeah? Don't feel like it?"

"Fuck, no. That's not how you fill a vacuum."

"But people listen to this. That's how the world works."

A cigarette in front of the garage. You keep telling yourself that you can do on your own. Funny how you only seem to need to do so when you'd need someone else the most, no matter how encompassing the vacuum may seem.

"How about next week?"

"You'll be doing Kings of Leon again?"

"I don't know. Maybe Nirvana would work. What do you guys think...Nirvana?"

"Maybe. I have classes. I'll see."

Deeper and deeper into nothingness