The real curse was remembering it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They had all taken the drug. All of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe never took anything,\u201d they said.
\u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d
\u201cYou must have imagined it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They looked at him with the polite pity people reserve for the unhinged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But he remembered.
He remembered too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The poison was in him. He felt it every night. The others didn\u2019t. They went on with their lives, as though they had never swallowed something that fractured reality and rewound memory like old tape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stopped trying to tell them.
He started writing instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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: \u201c<\/strong>Only One Remembers.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At the next show, he played it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The room went quiet as he sang. 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\u2019t about sorrow. It was a confession. A truth he had encoded in melody because no one would take it straight. A warning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You hide the truth in plain sight and people applaud you for your imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the show, some came up to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat song,\u201d they said, \u201cGod, that hit me.\u201d He wanted to laugh. But what would be the point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The poison was his alone now. He smiled, said thank you, and packed up his guitar. As he walked home under the streetlights, he hummed the melody to himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the closest he would ever come to telling the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The real curse was remembering it alone. They had all taken the drug. All of them. \u201cWe never took anything,\u201d they said.\u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d\u201cYou must have imagined it.\u201d […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-tales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
They thought it was a metaphor about heartbreak or betrayal or unrequited love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so universal.\u201d
\u201cYou really captured what it means to feel alone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or cry.
Or shake them and tell them that it wasn\u2019t symbolic, it was reportage. It was literal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So was the memory.
So was the song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n