I burned the CD to my hard drive. Then I made three copies. One for my daughter, for when she’s old enough to understand what a dream looks like before it becomes a regret. One for my ex-wife, because she once asked if I ever made anything beautiful, and I lied and said no.
Some nights I still play it. Not often. Just when I need to remember that once, before spreadsheets and silence, I was a boy who screamed into a microphone like the world owed him an answer.
I never listened to the CD again. I packed it away, told myself it was a demo, a rough draft, a thing I’d revisit when I was famous enough to laugh at my origins.
But fame never came. Instead came thirty-three years, a divorce, a mortgage, a child who thinks my guitar is “a weird decoration.” I stopped writing songs somewhere around the time I started writing performance reviews. The calluses on my fingers softened. The voice that once screamed about matches and rain now gently asks people to hold for the next available representative.
I found the dusty, unlabled CD-R at the bottom of a cardboard box marked “Evan – College,” which my mother had dropped off ten years too late. The plastic jewel case was cracked diagonally, and inside, someone had scrawled in fading Sharpie: RB Sngs 1 . Not even a date. Not even a band name.
