The real curse was remembering it alone.

They had all taken the drug. All of them.

“We never took anything,” they said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You must have imagined it.”

They looked at him with the polite pity people reserve for the unhinged.

But he remembered.
He remembered too much.

The poison was in him. He felt it every night. The others didn’t. They went on with their lives, as though they had never swallowed something that fractured reality and rewound memory like old tape.

He stopped trying to tell them.
He started writing instead.

The song came all at once. The story, the feeling of being the only witness to a catastrophe everyone else insisted never happened. He put it all in there. The hallucinations. The lost hours. The silence.

He gave the song a title that sounded metaphorical, like something a songwriter would invent because it sounded deep rather than because it was literally true: “Only One Remembers.”

At the next show, he played it.

The room went quiet as he sang.
They thought it was a metaphor about heartbreak or betrayal or unrequited love.

He watched their faces, the knowing nods when a lyric resonated with some small private sorrow of their own. They had no idea the song wasn’t about sorrow. It was a confession. A truth he had encoded in melody because no one would take it straight. A warning.

You hide the truth in plain sight and people applaud you for your imagination.

After the show, some came up to him.

“That song,” they said, “God, that hit me.”
“It’s so universal.”
“You really captured what it means to feel alone.”

He wanted to laugh.
Or cry.
Or shake them and tell them that it wasn’t symbolic, it was reportage. It was literal.

But what would be the point?

The poison was his alone now.
So was the memory.
So was the song.

He smiled, said thank you, and packed up his guitar. As he walked home under the streetlights, he hummed the melody to himself.

It was the closest he would ever come to telling the truth.