Don't Admire Me
Title: Don't Admire Me
Author:
lil_darcy
Rating: PG-13 for language, suicide reference
POV: First person
Summary:
Everyone knows a song that takes them to another place in time. What if you wrote that song? What if you were famous, and you heard it every day on the radio? What if the memory that song called up was the worst of your existence?
Disclaimer: Very dark, unhappy endings, etc.
Don’t admire me for my character.
This isn’t one of those celebrity-confession things. I know for a fact that on the day I was born my conscience realized what it was saddled with and crawled away to die. This is about what happened when I was nineteen. This is about the thing that makes me cry every time my number one hit comes on the radio.
Shit, they’re playing it again. My debut album went platinum because of that song. Every teenager in America is singing it.
And I’m hunched over my desk sobbing.
Walk me down to the river…
I remember the first time I sang that song. I walked her down to the boardwalk by the river. We stood side by side watching the sun set over the Mississippi. I started rapping as a joke. Then the words just started coming, faster and clearer than they ever had before.
She had long red hair and a waist I could put my hands around. The first time I held her, all I could think was how different it was from holding a guy. How insubstantial she felt.
Funny how something so insubstantial could feel all these years later like a weight around my neck.
Your heart sets the beat of mine…
Too many sleepless nights, too many times when the drinking and drugs didn’t help. I’ve got my gun on the desk in front of me. Another celebrity cliché-- the girl rapper with a gun.
I have in my hand the number that she gave me seven years ago. The number she pressed into my hand when I said goodbye at the airport, promised to call, and walked away without looking back.
Because the rumors were starting to fly. Someone saw us somewhere doing something… at the time I thought my career was more important. I sacrificed her love for my reputation.
Don’t admire me. All you kids out there, singing my songs, I--
I don’t even believe my own words anymore.
Pull me back from the water…
I’m going to dial that number before this song ends.
And if I don’t get up the nerve, or if she doesn’t love me anymore, or if for some reason the call doesn’t go through--
Well, I don’t know what I will do.
And keep me sane tonight…