“Fall is about starting over / Relationships crumbling like dead leaves / You scattered my hope to the wind / Blown away like dandelion seeds.”
Russ stares at the lyrics he’s just written, then grumbles and strikes them through with his dull #2 pencil. They’re okay, but edgy in a weird way. He prefers it when his songs sound angry, not brooding. He wants to keep the fall theme because it’s his second-favorite season, but each time he tries writing about it the lyrics come out wrong. What else is he supposed to write about, though? It’s nearly September and he can feel autumn’s encroaching chill, see hints of it in the leaves spotted with red and orange. He can’t even skip the lyrics and go straight to writing the instrumentals because he doesn’t have any instruments (the stripped-down DAW on his iPhone doesn’t cut it).
He doesn’t have anything to distract him from the seasons except for his dog Jamie and his backpack, actually, because he’s in the middle of hitchhiking. Right now he’s somewhere in central Nebraska, leaning against a tree in a patch of forest that’s been cut up by highways. His sensitive ears pick up on the sound of speeding cars in the distance, and he doesn’t have headphones to block them out with. It’s droning, grating, moody-making. It dawns on him that maybe he should just accept the emo-ass lyrics his brain’s been giving him and see if he can make something good out of them anyway. After all, he’s spent over a year being angry. If letting the leaves and engines’ roars wash over him is what it takes to make him let go of that, then so be it.