notes from the apartment.

i have a folder on my laptop called maybe. it has, currently, four hundred and twelve voice memos. most of them are the same song. i am writing the same song. i think most of us are writing the same song. it is fine.

my friend henry, who plays bass on the record, told me once that every songwriter has maybe four songs in them, and the job is to write each one as well as you can, in as many different shirts as you can. i have been thinking about this for a year and i still don't know if it's a comfort or a sentence.

the new one is about a wegmans. you'll hear it.

niamh's cello case has a sticker on it that says SLOW DOWN, in a font that looks like it was printed at a kinko's in 1996. she got it from a stranger in portland. she will not tell me which one.

tonight is wilmington. there's a thunderstorm and the venue's roof is leaking onto the merch table. someone has put a bucket on the table and we are still selling shirts around it. this is the job, more than anything else is the job.

after the show a girl in a cardigan asks niamh if the sticker is meaningful. niamh, who is the kindest person i know, says not really, i just liked it, and the girl seems disappointed, and i think about that for the next four hundred miles.

she made me lasagna last night. she put olives in it. she has never once put olives in lasagna in my life and yet here they were, like commas in a sentence she meant to write a different way. i didn't say anything. i ate them. i am thirty next month.

she also asked me, again, when i was going to write a happy song. i told her i had written several. she said i meant on a record. i told her the wegmans song was, in its way, a hopeful one. she didn't ask what i meant. she has stopped asking what i mean.

i tried it once. four people in a sprinter van with a cooler that broke on day three. it wasn't bad — it was beautiful, actually — but i kept apologizing. for the songs being too quiet, for the rooms being too small, for the merch margins, for everything that was not anyone's fault.

now it is just me and niamh and a 2012 honda cr-v that does not have a name. we eat at every cracker barrel. we never argue. she lets me cry once per drive, which is a generous policy i did not ask for.