“For Rent?” I asked. “Why is there a ‘For Rent’ sign?”
He rolled down the window and peered out at me.
“What?” he asked.
I pointed at the sign. “What’s this for?”
“The other unit is for rent again,” he said.
“What do you mean it’s for rent? Where’s Leah?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t leave a forwarding address. Just paid the rent for next month and told me she was leaving. Hopefully I’ll find someone to move in before that runs out.”
Without another word, he rolled up the window, waved, and drove away. I turned to the sign and stared at it, trying to find some sort of explanation in it, but I couldn’t. There was no explanation, no answers. All I knew was Leah was gone. I was completely blindsided. In an instant, I went from worrying something might have happened to her or at the very least that she was working herself into oblivion to regain ground after the failed retreat, to facing the reality that she was simply gone.
Realizing I’d left my phone inside, I went in and called her. I didn’t expect her to actually answer. But I did expect her voicemail. At least then I could have left her a message. Instead, I got a monotonous voice telling me the number I’d dialed was disconnected. It wasn’t just that Leah was no longer physically present, that she wasn’t in her house anymore. She was no longer a part of my life at all.
I loved her. I knew that with every bit of me. And I believed she loved me too. I’d convinced myself I was as important to her as she was to me, and that we had something special. Every day since finding out about the tour, I’d been thinking about how we were going to make it work. I’d spent hours poring over the schedule and figuring out how to get her from here to various places so we could spend even just a day together. It was supposed to be a big surprise for her, and I’d even started getting excited about what it was going to be like to travel around and experience this with her.
Now that was gone along with Leah. All my images of what our future could be and how our relationship would continue to build, and grow were snatched away from me. I loved her, but I was wrong about her loving me. The pain was instant and intense, and I knew it wouldn’t go away anytime soon. I had to throw myself into thinking about something else to stop myself from going crazy.
For the next few days, I was still somewhat in denial. It just couldn’t be real. There had to be some sort of misunderstanding. Something happened and there was a miscommunication between Leah and the landlord. I figured I would wake up or come home and she would be there. She would call me or text me, and I’d find out she lost her phone or broke it and that’s why the number was disconnected.
But by the end of the week, when the landlord came by with a couple wanting to look at the apartment, full reality hit me hard. There was no misunderstanding or miscommunication. Leah really was gone.
I tried to focus on the upcoming tour to keep me distracted and stop the pain. But my heart was broken. Even thinking about the amazing opportunity and the benefit this tour could have on my life and the future of my career didn’t help to lessen the blow. I wasn’t looking forward to it anymore. I couldn’t be happy about it. All I wanted was Leah. The only thing I could do was turn to writing songs to help deal with the pain. And soon I was surrounded by page after page of lyrics.
26
Leah – Ten Months Later
“You can always go home again.”
That’s what they always say, isn’t it?
Of course, it was one of those things that people said with the ubiquitous “they” who no one knew and they never specified. That always got to me, and now I knew exactly why. It’s because the “they” people talked about when they said those types of things didn’t know shit about what they were talking about. That’s why there were no names or qualifications. Just “they.”
And what they said about going home again gave me the inkling they never did actually go home again. Or they never left to begin with.
Not that I hated being back in Dixon. It was my home, after all. My true home. The place where I was born and raised, and where my family still lived. It was the place I always thought of when it came to things like holidays and visits and feeling sentimental. When I sang that whole thing about being home for Christmas… that was Dixon.