based on this song.
“We’re not gonna talk at all today, huh?” Sarah leans on the wall, watching him playing on the piano in the living room. They hadn’t said a single word to each other since the night before and Casey, content to keep it that way, continues playing as if he hadn’t heard her.
Sarah sighs. “Casey, I said sorry. I cleaned up all the glass, I did what I had to do here, so can you please just say something? I don’t even care if it’s rude at this point.”
“And if we bleed tonight, it won’t be for the last time…” Casey sings, his voice horse, unpracticed. The split in his lip stings each time his mouth moves.
“So we race, head on into the fire. These might be hard times but they’re our times now…” His chin finally lifts, but he still won’t look at her. Instead, he focuses on a framed photo behind the piano of the two of them — their first taken together at a random party. There’s a part of him that wishes he could go back, but he can’t decide whether he’d go back so he could burn the bridge, or if he’d go back just for the sake of reliving what their happiness was like. “Remember this one?”
“Are you f***ing with me right now?” Sarah snaps.
“No…”
“Really, because it sounds like a whole lot of sarcasm to me.”
“Then you’re missing my point.”
“What is your point?”
“You remember the next words?” Casey looks over at her. She’s unrecognizable. The Sarah he saw last night, chucking glasses around and yelling isn’t the one he wrote the song for. The Sarah whose first instinct in the face of a disagreement is a punch to the mouth isn’t the one he wrote the song for either. The Sarah forcing apologies for the sake of ego definitely isn’t the one he wrote the song for.
“You are f***ing with me.”
“No, I’m not, I’m telling you how I feel. You wanted to talk, right?” Casey turns his attention on the keys, but stops playing. “I always think about that song when we fight… because it makes me think of a time when it really was you and me against the world. Even though everyone hated it, we were like, well you know what, we’re getting married, so there. We stumbled down the aisle drunk to spite everyone who disagreed with it. We got a house in LA instead of Georgia like your parents wanted. It was always us and nothing else really mattered, you know? And now I feel like we’re against each other.”
“You really think that, huh…?”
“It’s really hard not to sometimes.”
“Casey…” Sarah steps toward the piano, her arms folded. She reaches a hand out briefly to try and brush his hair back, but he turns his head. She doesn’t falter; instead, she takes a seat on the bench beside him and starts mimicking his fingers across the keys while he scoots further away. “So, what do we do then?” She asks.
Casey shrugs, shaking his head, attention back on the photo. “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be talking like this, I guess, huh?”