GHOST LANGUAGE

FEBRUARY 2026– the ending sounds like this.

Fifteen years is a long time to hold your breath, but I swear I did.

I still am– sitting alone in a tux I borrowed from the costume department of the show I did sound design for last year, the condensation of a flat gin and tonic starting to trickle from my palm down into my sleeve. The ceremony isn’t even halfway over yet, but I’m ready to call it a night. Everything always looks so glamorous on screens, but the reality is it’s all just warm plastic; it’s never fun for long.

The seat next to mine was empty. Then it wasn’t.

I don’t look at him right away.

The stage lights soak us in indigo, and the emcee is announcing something I’m not listening to. My fingers buzz. My pulse skips.

He’s nominated for a Grammy tonight. A Grammy. In my head, the band is still a bunch of ragtag college kids, playing in sweaty basements with instruments scrounged off eBay. In my head, he’s still twenty-two, still wears the same pair of jeans three times a week, and drinks black coffee solely as a stylistic choice.

He’s married now. With two kids, and I hear he’s got a third on the way.

And who knows how he takes his coffee these days?

I’d heard the new album. It had been all but impossible to avoid, despite how good I’ve become at keeping my distance. I still found myself looking him up sometimes against my better judgement, but with time I no longer had to fight to resist listening to whatever project the band had just released.

But I’d listened to this one.

It sounded almost entirely different from anything we’d ever done together, and I was proud of him for it. Still, hearing his voice for the first time in ages, the image reared back up in my mind of his eyes meeting mine through the glass of the recording booth.

That was before. Before the night in his flat in North Side. Before the half-said apologies, the way he’d avoid my eyes during soundcheck. Before I’d told him I was done, and he didn’t argue.

Before the band made it big without me.

The new music has his fingerprints all over it, drenched in his voice– older now, a little deeper, but still distinctly him.

I look to my left. He’s already looking at me.

“Hey,” he says. Just like that. As if we didn’t have over a decade of silence between us.

I swallow. “Hey.”

“How’s the drink?” He nods towards my gin and tonic. “Haven’t had a chance to swing by the bar yet.”

“Terrible,” I answer. “Don’t bother.”

He laughs under his breath, then rubs the back of his neck. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be. My editor bailed, and I took the ticket.”

“I saw your name on the soundtrack credits for that miniseries. The one with the astronauts.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You watched that?”

“Yeah.” He shifts in his seat. “Twice.”

We watch the ceremony in silence for a while. Not tense. Not really. Or maybe that’s just me trying to convince myself.

My mind spins with all the things I could say.

The memories are barging in mercilessly– half-eaten takeout in the studio at 3 a.m., laughing into beer bottles in dorm hallways, his hand brushing mine all those times before he pulled away, even in the dark.

“You’re still writing.” I phrase it as a statement rather than a question.

He nods. “We’ve got a new album coming out in a few months.” It will be their eighth album by now. When I’d left the band, there were three.

“Do you have anything new coming up?” He asks.

“Sound design. Some indie films. Freelance. Some personal stuff.” I pause. “Nothing loud, but it’s me.”

He nods. “I always liked your quiet stuff best.”

He looks older up close. For some reason, that surprises me. Lines are starting to form by his eyes, and edges of his features are beginning to soften with age.

Again, all those things I could say.

Hey, I saw you on a poster in a record store the last time I was in Manhattan. Were you ever there before me? What vinyl did you choose?

Hey, it’s been fifteen years, and I quit smoking, did you?

Hey, just so you know, you may have gotten older, but not to me, never to me; you’re frozen in amber, with your sharp jaw and your tousled hair and your wild smile. You’re forever leaning into the mic on a cramped stage with your guitar hanging off your shoulder; eternally young.

“Hey, congrats on the nomination,” is what I end up saying. “It’s deserved.”

He blinks slowly. “Thanks.”

For a few minutes, we sit and listen to a pop star’s poorly rehearsed speech.

Eventually, I stand. “I need to get going.”

He stands too. Not closer. Not further. Just parallel.

“It was good seeing you,” he says.

“Yeah,” I reply. “Take care of yourself.” I start to walk away.

Then he calls my name– just once.

I turn.

He seems like he wants to say something else. Something final. But instead, he just gives me a look: soft, familiar. Somewhere between a question and an answer.

That’s enough.

I exhale softly, and I nod. Then I finally leave, and I don’t look back.

OCTOBER 2007

It all took off in the kind of moment that didn’t look like a beginning.

Just another Tuesday that was too hot out for October. We were in the practice room upstairs in the old music building on campus, the one with warped floors and a busted air conditioner.

He was sitting on the floor, Gibson across his lap, tuning it to some weird open configuration that probably didn’t exist. I was trying to write a bassline that didn’t sound like it belonged in a car commercial.

We’d been at it for an hour by now, no real progress, just tossing around licks and attempts at hooks. He leaned back onto his elbows, shirt slightly damp from heat and effort, strands of dark hair sticking to his forehead.

He let out a long exhale. “Can I tell you something serious? Without you doing that face you do?”

“What face?”

“The one where you pretend not to be judging me.”

I smirked. “No promises.”

He grinned– wide, boyish, dangerous- but his expression became more serious as he said, “Sometimes I only write music because I don’t know how to be honest in conversations. I don’t know how to be interesting enough or relatable enough in a way where people will like me.”

I looked at him.

He wasn’t joking.

I’d always known he was smart– sharper than he let on, precise in his quiet way. But this was the first time I saw something underneath even that. The tangle of someone who understood himself too well for his own good and didn’t know what to do with it. For some reason, I wanted to say something comforting. Or real. Or both. But the room suddenly felt too warm, too still, like any word out of my mouth would land too clumsily.

So instead, I just replied, “Well, it’s working.”

He looked at me for a second too long. Not in a weird way. Just in a noticing way.

That’s when it happened.

Not a lightning strike. Not some crashing epiphany.

Just the soft, sinking feeling of:

Oh.

I knew what it was. It was a feeling that was almost familiar but not quite. I’d come out years ago, towards the beginning of high school, that part wasn’t new. This was something different. He’d quietly become the axis around how my days turned, and I hadn’t even noticed it was happening.

I knew the situation was bad. I knew what kind of person he was– the girls, the attention, the careless wielding of that kind of charm that made people rush to fill in blanks he never said out loud. But I was already in it– already thinking about how his voice sounded when he was tired. Or how he drummed his fingers when he was thinking. Or catching myself watching him laugh with other people and feeling something twist in my stomach.

It wasn’t dramatic; it was worse: slow and quiet and inevitable.

And yeah, I knew.

I was just tying my own noose, setting myself up so he could kick the chair.

I stayed anyway.

We released our first album during our senior year of college. After graduation, we packed up our instruments into a rusted van with a perpetual check engine light, and we hit the road on our first tour.

​

JULY 2011

Around a year after graduation and another album later, that same van broke down an hour outside the city. The rest of the band had taken it as an excuse to drink, argue, or wander into the dark with spotty cell service, trying to call rideshares that didn’t reach this far out.

We stayed behind.

I was in the back of the van, sitting on an amp case, scrolling through vocal takes on my phone and trying to find something that wasn’t ruined by feedback or the drummer yelling in the background.

He climbed in and sat across from me, back against the wall, long legs bent, a cigarette between his fingers that he didn’t end up lighting. “You’re the only one who didn’t lose their mind tonight,” he said.

“I save my breakdowns for post production.”

He smiled faintly, one of those barely there expressions that always made it feel like we were sharing a joke no one else was in on.

“Is any of it usable?” he asked, nodding toward my phone.

“Some,” I said. “You’re pitchy in the second verse.”

“Naturally.”

I should’ve looked away, but didn’t. The shadows in the van shifted every time a car passed on the highway– brief flashes of gold, then darkness again. His cheekbones caught the traveling light. He had this calm, collected cool that didn’t come from ego. He just existed a little sideways from everyone else. Everyone noticed him. Especially the girls; God, there were always so many girls. I knew it was never anything but girls.

And still.

Still.

There was this unspoken thread between us– this constant leaning in. We wrote the best songs at 2 a.m. when our knees brushed under the table, and no one else was awake. He’d send me half-formed lyrics that were usually barely even coherent, but I’d still know what he meant.

“Why don’t you ever ask me the meaning of the things I write?” He asked suddenly.

I blinked. “Because I already know.”

I wasn’t sure how to describe the way he looked at me. The stretched-out silence was a rubber band threatening to snap at any moment, or ricochet off the walls.

He set the unlit cigarette on the amp case between us, leaned forward slightly, and whispered, “Do you?”

Time vortexed. I did the bravest, scariest, most stupid thing I’d ever done in my life. I moved closer, too close, I tilted my head and his breath was warm against mine. I leaned closer still, and his lower lip brushed my mouth. For a heartbeat, he didn’t move.

Then, as if some kind of alarm had sounded, he pulled back.

He looked down at his lap, like he’d already decided to regret it. Neither of us said anything.

The tow truck showed up. When our other bandmates had finally gathered back together; laughing and reeking of bad beer, he was already outside, talking to the driver.

He didn’t look at me again that night.

Something shifted in the days after. He wasn’t cold. Just careful.

At soundchecks, he spoke to the mic instead of to my face. In the green room, he sat on the other side of the couch. We never mentioned that moment in the van. The space between us expanded like fog.

He started seeing someone– a girl with sleeve tattoos and silver-blond hair. He talked about her at rehearsal and brought her to the studio a few times.

I kept showing up, doing the work, pretending none of it had happened.

For a while, I started spending more time behind the board than in the room. We still worked on music together, but I spent more time mixing alone than writing with him. Even as things started shifting back to normal, where he’d start sending me random ideas again and showing up unannounced at my house with a guitar, I knew there was something irreversibly different.

The songs changed too– got louder, faster. Less nuance. Less us.

​

SEPTEMBER 2012

We were hours deep into working on a demo track, sprawled all over the living room floor in his apartment. He was leaning back against the couch, unusually quiet.

“Something on your mind?” I did my best to sound casual.

He shrugged but didn’t meet my eyes. “Just tired, I guess. Everything is… moving fast.”

“Yeah.” I swallowed back the lump in my throat. “Feels like we’re on the edge of something.”

“We never would’ve made it here without you.”

I waved him off. “It’s a team effort.”

“No, I mean it. You’re… you’re really something else, you know that?”

My mouth went bone dry. Could he hear the thumping of my pulse? Or the blood crashing through my arteries?

“I think you’re the only person who’s ever really understood me.” He might’ve sounded trite had there not been such profound sincerity there. His cheeks were slightly flushed– probably from all the Jameson we’d had tonight.

“It’s easy to understand you. It’s easy to be around you.” It was more confession than compliment.

He laughed softly, but there was an uneasiness there. He looked up at me– really looked. Like he was weighing that invisible thing between us.

“You’re my best friend.” He told me, eyebrows drawn together, face guarded, but something borderline pleading in his eyes. “You know that, right?”

I thought of all the shows we’ve played. I thought of all the writing sessions and the nights at bars staying past last call. I thought of when he’d gotten so drunk at a party that he’d passed out and I had to carry him to the car, or when he sat with me all night in the hospital after I cut my palm open washing dishes. I thought of the rehearsals, the road trips, the way his hands shook a little when we signed onto our label. The cigarettes backstage and the bad diner food and the way his voice would hypnotize the crowd as they screamed for him, but he’d glance back over his shoulder at me.

I could tell he was thinking about all those things, too.

Slowly, hesitantly, he took my face in his hands, trembling slightly.

“You’re my best friend.” There was this hum in my chest; an orange symbol on the dashboard that you try to ignore as you speed with windows down across the highway.

Whatever decision he made, he was going to let me down either way.

The kiss was slow, deliberate, careful. It was so much gentler than I’d thought it would be. It was so real I almost didn’t believe it at all.

His mouth opened against mine and I knew even as it was happening, we were crossing a line. Then we were stumbling towards his bedroom like two strangers and old lovers all at once; both unsure, both wanting something we couldn’t quite name.

There was fiery urgency beneath the hesitance. Skin pressed to skin, clothes falling. No promises, no plans. Just this fragile, fleeing thing.

Afterwards, as we lay side by side, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, I could practically see the images of what we’d just done replaying over and over in his mind.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he finally said, barely a whisper.

Neither did I.

“Let’s not worry about it right now,” I told him selfishly, and he sighed softly and rolled into me, pressing his face into the side of my neck. He was asleep a few minutes later, the gentle rhythm of his breathing threatening to lull me into sleep with him, but I fought against it, forcing myself to stay awake, to experience every last second of the warmth of his body on mine.

For one night, I got everything I wanted.

My chest steadily tightened more and more as the gravity started sinking in: this situation was no longer hypothetical, and neither were the consequences. The second the sun came up, it was going to bring the crush of reality with it. While he’d never been anything but accepting of me the entire time we’d known each other, I knew he only ever imagined himself ending up with a woman. Even if by some lucky draw I was some kind of exception, he’d never take it further.

The second it’s public knowledge, he’s viewed differently, his art is viewed differently, and there’s an irreversible change in how he’s perceived that he won’t be able to take back. Everything he creates or says will be filtered through some kind of altered lens. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, but it’s how it is. He’s a star about to take off. This… Whatever this is, can’t exist in the same orbit.

Sometime in early morning, right as the sky is starting to turn gray, I get dressed as he’s still asleep and slip out the door.

Four days later, I told the band I was done. I told them it was due to creative differences.

I didn’t tell him anything at all, and he didn’t ask.

JUNE 2013

I wasn’t looking for it.

I was just scrolling mindlessly– half asleep in bed, laptop overheating against my stomach, some obscure synth review playing in another tab I’d already stopped paying attention to.

Then there it was– a notification from a music blog I used to follow religiously:

“New album from indie rock darlings House of Leaves drops in two weeks. Here’s an exclusive preview!”

House of Leaves.

They’d kept the name.

I guess I never actually thought they’d change it. It wasn’t mine to keep. But still– seeing it like that, in that bold official font, felt like seeing someone else wearing your jacket.

My self-control collapsed. I clicked the link.

The page opened to a full press photo; the kind with professional lighting and art direction. They were standing on a rooftop somewhere, dusk sky behind them. He was in the center because of course he was.

He looked… confident. Sure of himself. I hovered over the image far longer than I meant to.

The accompanying write-up was short: “House of Leaves brings thoughtful indie rock with witty lyricism and razor edges. A record full of emotional restraint, whispered grief, and melodic catharsis.”

Yeah, well, that all did sound like him.

The album was called Ghost Language.

I closed the tab. Then opened it again.

Ghost Language.

I’d been there when he’d written that phrase: late night on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper during one of our last real nights working together. He’d scribbled it in the margins like a throwaway thought. I remember it clearly because I’d underlined it and circled it twice.

“That’s something,” I insisted.

He’d shrugged like it didn’t matter. Now it was an album title.

I closed the screen again. Shut the laptop for good measure. Then sat there in the dark. I wasn’t angry. Not exactly. Just… hollow.

The shape of me was still there in the band, but I wasn’t.

They had the right to use whatever contributions I’d made while I’d still worked with them, and I was okay with that. That wasn’t it. I just hadn’t expected it to feel so intimate. I was watching pieces of myself dressed up and sent out to the world, stripped of context but not their meaning.

I knew the songs would be good. Of course they would be. He knew how to build something beautiful from silence. He knew how to make people believe.

I knew better than anyone.

When the album came out, I hit the play button even though I knew better. The first track started with a field recording. Summer insects. Cicadas. A faint hum of traffic under all of it. I recognized it instantly. That was my field recorder. The one I’d taken out to the park two summers ago because he wanted “something that sounds like waiting.” The guitars came in next. His voice, a moment later– that clear, airy, glowing signature voice of his, the same one that had sung versions of these same lines to me in my kitchen; the table heaped with recording equipment and his sweatshirt thrown over a chair.

I didn’t need to read any of the lyrics. I knew it all already: little fragments of old conversations, reshaped. My phrases, the weird metaphors I’d used when we were working, were tucked into choruses. Things I’d thought no one had ever noticed, now hidden in plain sight. He’d taken part of me and instilled it into this album. I haunted every single one of these tracks, but interlaced with him, overridden with him.

It didn’t sound like our band anymore. It sounded like his.

And it was good. God, it was good.

That hurt the most.

I sat there, song after song, until the last one faded out. The final note was a single guitar chord, clean and ringing, left to decay into silence. I didn’t hit repeat. Didn’t save it.

I got out of bed, I plugged my laptop in to charge, and took a long, hot shower and I didn’t cry even though I wanted to.

MAY 2016

The venue was sweaty and claustrophobic, buzzing with the energy only sold-out shows have. I stood near the back, holding an overpriced beer more as a prop than anything else. It had felt like fate, in a sense. I’d moved cities after quitting the band, and now House of Leaves was playing the venue fifteen blocks from my place. I’d told myself I wasn’t going to go, and then I did anyway.

Watching him come out onto the stage was surreal. I hadn’t seen him in person since I’d left the band around four years ago. His hair was different. He had a tattoo swirling around his right wrist now.

And at the same time, he was still exactly the same.

At first, I didn’t recognize any of the songs. The new stuff was polished, layered, richly cinematic. They’d grown into something bigger, something I wasn’t a part of anymore; something that had played Madison Square three times and had hosted SNL. The songs were cryptic and clever and beautiful, but they didn’t pull at anything inside me. They belonged to someone else.

Then the lights dimmed for a pause, and he stepped out, guitar hanging by his waist, mic in hand.

“This one’s a little older,” he said, with that quietly magnetic calm he always had. “From when this all started. For those of you who’ve been here with us since the beginning.” He smiled and stepped back as the crowd erupted for him, and the first notes rang out.

That song.

That was our song, the first one we’d made for the band's first album. We’d written it in a freezing dorm room on winter break, where he’d initially recorded the vocals by singing into an iPod voice memo app. The rhythm threaded through my ribs, blazing through years I’d tried to bury. His voice was more controlled now, more experienced, but if I closed my eyes, I could still hear it coming from the version of him that I used to know.

The last note faded. The audience screamed and clapped and cheered, but I slipped out the back, disappearing before the next song started.

When I got back home, I meant to go straight to bed. Instead, I found myself pulling my guitar down off the wall, opening Logic Pro on my computer, and sitting at my desk, hesitating.

I hadn’t created anything real in so long, and I was only just realizing it now.

I’d worked on other people’s music— brought their ideas to life for their TV specials or albums, or commissions. I hadn’t made anything just for the sake of it.

Why was that?

I strummed a few chords. Frowned. Re-tuned. Strummed again.

Maybe it was because I was worried he would still be there, inside the steel strings, inside me. Or maybe it was because I wanted him to be.

We always come back to the things that haunt us.

You live the experience, and it keeps breathing through songs and cigarette smoke, and you either fight it, or you open the old composition you wrote, and play it again and again, because some of you will always be there.

Maybe the answer to a decade's worth of questions was right here in my hands.

Everything that had happened was painful and inevitabile and I would do it all again because all those years were a beautiful album. That was one hell of a show.

The clock above the TV ticked. A car horn went off outside the window.

I took a deep breath, and I started again.

​

SEPTEMBER 2006– the beginning sounds like this.

​I wasn’t even supposed to be there.

My roommate had dragged me to this dodgy basement show on the edge of campus, talking about how I would have “such a great time.” While I doubted it, turning down the first event you’re invited to in your freshman year of college seemed like a lost opportunity.

I regretted that mentality almost immediately once we were there.

The basement was already packed shoulder-to-shoulder, dim and sticky with September sweat and cheap beer. Christmas lights zigzagged lazily across the ceiling, flickering in a way that I wasn’t sure was intentional ambience or just because their batteries were on their last leg.

I instinctively searched for an exit as my roommate thrust a plastic cup into my hand, mystery liquid sloshing over the rim.

“Thanks.” There was no way in hell I was going to drink whatever that was.

“Do you want to get closer? They’re about to start.” Before I could respond, he already had me by the arm and was pulling me through the tangle of bodies towards the front of the room. Several lamps were all tilted as makeshift spotlights. There wasn’t anyone at the dilapidated drum kit or keyboard that was shoved against the back wall. There wasn’t anyone, period, except for one guy tuning a guitar, seemingly oblivious to the swarm around him.

Tall. Wiry frame. Collared shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, as if it had just occurred to him to look casual. Worn-in black jeans. Hair doing that obviously deliberate mess.

I caught his eye briefly—just a flicker, the slightest glance—and he gave me a small, closed-mouth smile. Then he looked away, back down at the guitar, as if it hadn’t happened. I pretended it hadn’t either.

When he started playing, I stopped looking for the nearest exit.

It was indie rock; nothing experimental, nothing particularly noteworthy about his cover choices. What caught my attention was his voice– it was unexpectedly airy and luminescent, entirely lacking the typical alternative mumble and instead floated like mist rolling out over water. Most amateur singers in the genre tried too hard to add grittiness to their voice. You could hear them pushing their words, butchering their annunciation. He avoided it altogether. His technique wasn’t perfect; he was rough around the edges at moments, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he sounded unusual, unique. He stood out.

Suddenly, I felt an urge to drink, mystery liquid be damned.

Afterward, people swarmed him, asking about gigs and MySpace pages. I hovered near the drink table, trying not to seem like I was waiting. I told myself I’d leave.

And then—of course—he found me.

“You didn’t react much during the set,” he slipped next to me like it wasn’t intentional. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Good,” I said. “You’re kind of annoyingly good.”

He laughed— really laughed. Up close, he smelled like laundry detergent and something woodsy. His eyes were the same deep brown as his guitar.

“Thanks, I think.”

“That’s a beautiful ES.” I nodded towards where his guitar was propped against the wall.

“Thanks again. I’ve had it since I was nine.” He smiled at me over his beer. “You’re a musician.”

“Bass mostly. Keyboard too. Mostly, I prefer the production side of things.”

“Perfect.”

I tilted my head.

“Well,” he said, leaning against the table. “I’m starting something. Not just this random house show crap. Like, real rehearsals. Original stuff. I need someone who can write songs but isn’t, you know… a dick about it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re trying to start a band?”

He nudged my ribs with his elbow. “I’m trying to start a band.”

“Let me guess: begging for gigs and maybe we write some uninspired alt rock?”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

There was a neon flash of a moment where I realized that coming any closer to him meant a rearrangement of things. Time. Attention. The careful distance I’d learned to keep from everything.

I said yes anyway. “Count me in.”

“Incredible.” He raised his beer bottle and winked at me, as if we’d already known each other for years. “I can already tell we’re going to be friends.”

Abby Ives is a college dropout, a neurotic artist, and a crazy cat lady. She’s spent all 23 years of her life in Upstate New York. You can find her running calls on an ambulance, wandering dive bars, catching every concert available and bothering her neighbors by playing guitar too loud. She loves alt rock, flashing lights, electric guitars, and of course, writing stories.