My brows knitted as I sank deeper into the couch cushion. “Sometimes, I think he would’ve been better off as a solo artist, instead of feeling as if he needed to carry me alongside him.”
Abigail did that therapist thing where she stared at me as if she was examining every inch of my being. Then she reached into her oversize purse and pulled out her laptop. “I need you to watch something for me.”
She pulled up a video and set the laptop on the table in front of me. Then she hit play.
It was a video of Alex being interviewed by some person. Whenever Alex did solo interviews, it was normally because I couldn’t manage to bring myself to join him because my anxiety was fucking up the situation. Still, he went and performed by being the charming person he’d always been.
“What was the question again?” Alex asked as he puffed on a cigarette, sitting relaxed in a director’s chair.
“Do you think your brother’s social flaws have damaged your success as a duo?”
“First, thank you for the question. Second, that’s a fucked-up question,” Alex remarked, making me smile a little. “Oliver is the true talent of this duo. Yeah, maybe he’s quieter, and he stays a bit behind the curtain of success and fame, but that’s because that shit doesn’t matter to him. To him, the main importance is always the music. So, yeah. People see me as more lively, more engaging, more quote unquote ‘normal,’ but they are missing out on the truth.”
“And what’s that truth?”
“I’d be nothing without my brother. Oliver has more depth in the tip of his pinky than most people have in their whole body. He cares about others more than he cares about himself. He pours everything he has into our music, into the lyrics, into the songs that everyone loves. Maybe I do better in certain situations than he does, but it goes both ways. He has more heart than me. He feels deeper than me, he understands people more than I do, even though he’d never admit it. I might be the hype man of Alex & Oliver, but Oliver is truly the mastermind. He is the magic behind us. The true wizard behind the curtain, and it pisses me off that you people don’t see it. The truth of the matter is, without Ollie, there is no music. He’s my better half, and I’d give my life for that guy without a moment’s hesitation, because I know he’d do the same for me. He’s the light to my shadows. He’s my best friend, end of story.” Alex flicked off the ashes from his burning cigarette and sat back in his chair. He gave the interviewer an award-winning smile and said, “Next question.”
The clip ended, and Abigail shut the computer down. Alex’s words kept moving through my head as she continued the conversation. “There are dozens and dozens of interviews like that online. Have you watched any of those ones since he passed away?”
“No.”
“But you’ve watched and read the negative commentary?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve done the same with the commentary surrounding the situation with Cam, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Why is that? Why do you turn to the negative opinions of others rather than the positive ones?”
I shrugged and clasped my hands together. “I don’t know.”
“You do,” she disagreed. “You just don’t want to admit it. You turn to the negative because that’s what you’ve spent so much of your life believing. So these individuals, these naysayers, are somewhat enforcing a flawed thought process that’s been on repeat probably since you were a child. Probably leading back to the first time you felt that you didn’t fit in. That led you to navigate through life dealing with people and situations that then pushed that anchor of self-doubt deeper into the ground of your soul. You were just following the narrative that your brain was creating. But you know the cool thing about this narrative? It’s never too late to change it. If you hear a song on the radio that you hate, do you just continue to let it play? No. You change the station. So, go ahead, Oliver. Change the station.”
“How?”
“By shutting off the outside noise for a while—the good and the bad—and creating your own original song for your mixtape. You get to decide the good and the bad, and you get to now start surrounding yourself with things that make you feel good about yourself rather than bad. Luckily, I believe you’ve already begun to do this.”
“With Emery?”
Abigail smiled. “That’s for you to decide. It’s not about the songs you’ve played in the past to yourself. It’s about the songs you want to play from this point out. So, what song are you going to play?”
“I missed your morning song this morning,” Emery said as she chopped some vegetables two days after my therapy appointment. I’d been working through so much of the homework Abigail had assigned me, which meant trying to change the narrative of my normally negative mindset, and that shit was hard to do.