September 29
A melody showed up in my head right in the middle of the lunch rush, so I hummed it into my phone in the walk-in freezer between orders. The cooks think I’m losing it. They’re not wrong, they’re just early.
My Journal
The original pages.
Where it all started. The first entries from my notebook, September 2026.
September 28
After my shift I sat in the empty diner with cold coffee and watched the parking lot do nothing. That hour is the only one that belongs to me. The sky was clear. I didn’t trust it, obviously. But I sat there anyway, and the coffee was terrible, and it was fine.
September 27
The bus is the only place I’ve ever been able to think out loud. It’s loud and it smells like vinyl seats and somebody’s fries, and somehow that’s safer than quiet. I wrote half a verse on the ride home today. Nobody asked what I was writing. That’s the whole review: nobody asked, and I kept writing.
September 25
Sat in my car for twelve minutes after I got home because going inside meant pretending I was okay. Streetlight. Radio. My breath fogging the window. That’s the whole song, probably. Twelve minutes of not pretending.
September 24
Spent twenty minutes writing a text tonight. Read it back four times. Deleted it. The cursor just blinked at me like, well? Anyway, there’s a song in there somewhere. Maybe tomorrow I’ll hit send. Maybe I won’t. Either way I wrote it down, which is more than I usually do.
How I write a song.
People keep asking, so here it is. The whole system. Do not expect much.
1. Steal a line from real life. Something I almost said. Something somebody else said without thinking. The true stuff is always hiding in the throwaway lines.
2. Hum it into my phone somewhere weird. Walk-in freezer. Parked car. Under a blanket at 2 a.m. The acoustics are terrible and I do not care.
3. Find the one true sentence. The one I’d be embarrassed to say out loud. That’s the song. Everything else is just furniture around it.
4. Leave the sad parts alone. I don’t fix them or explain them. I write them down exactly how they are and let them sit there. The song explains itself.