No Reason

I made a song.

Not a song I was asked to make. Not a song for a brief or a client or a campaign. A song I made because I had something I wanted to say and music felt like the right container for it.

I sent it to someone.

He screenshot it. Sent it to his group chat. Laughed about it. The screenshot made its way back to me the way things do — through a mutual, through the specific cruelty of the internet knowing exactly how to close a loop.

I know his name. I'm not going to say it here. What I will say is that he's someone who fancies himself a creative. Someone who talks about authenticity the way people do when they haven't actually risked anything for it yet. Someone who would, I guarantee, in the right room, at the right moment, tell you that vulnerability is important.

He just doesn't think it applies to me.

That's fine. I've been that guy's lesson before.

What I keep coming back to isn't the mockery — I've been mocked. I know what that costs. What I keep coming back to is the instinct. The screenshot. The group chat. The immediate move to make someone else's earnestness into content for your friends. The reflex that says: look at this idiot who thought feelings were worth sharing.

Because here's what that reflex requires: it requires you to believe that caring is embarrassing. That making something real is a risk that marks you as naive. That the correct move, the cool move, is to stay above it. To be the one laughing, never the one being laughed at.

I am not above it. I never have been. I am firmly, constitutionally, annoyingly in it.

I make things. I mean them. I send them to people I trust — or people I thought I trusted — and sometimes it goes sideways and I look like the idiot in the screenshot.

I've been thinking a lot about Rich lately.

Not because anything is wrong. Because something is right, and I'm not entirely sure what to do with that. He sits in it with me. The realness. He doesn't laugh at the earnest parts — he moves toward them. And I keep waiting for the other shoe, the screenshot, the group chat I'll never see.

That's not his fault. That's the scar tissue from every person who treated my openness like a punchline.

I've been pulling back. Not from him — I'm not doing that again, pulling back from someone good because someone else was careless with me. But from the broader habit of handing things to people who haven't demonstrated they know how to hold them.

The song exists. It's real. It came from somewhere real.

The fact that one person thought that was funny doesn't make it less true. It makes him less interesting.

I hope the group chat enjoyed it.

Love ~~& Art, 1991~~ That for ~~you.~~ me?