"The Thread Between"
You ever meet someone who just knows you?
That was June.
I met her in the backstage clutter of a tiny theatre, sweat sticking her shirt to her back, paint smudged across her collarbone, voice still humming from the last note she sang. She had that kind of cracked-open intensity artists wear like old denim—lived-in, untidy, too honest.
She looked at me like I’d interrupted a memory.
“Do I know you?” she asked, all raspy and dry, eyes unreadable.
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “I’m a journalist. I’m supposed to know people.”
June snorted. “That’s a lie.”
She was right. It was.
She’d bring her chaos, I’d bring my questions. But lately, she'd gone dark.
Angry. Shut in. Painting weird, furious things.
I showed up to her apartment one Sunday. No plan. Just a gut-pull.
The hallway reeked of turpentine and burnt toast. I knocked. Silence. Knocked again.
Then—“Go away.”
Her voice behind the door, sharp, tired.
“It’s me.”
A beat.
She opened it, slowly, eyes ringed with exhaustion, hair matted, paint dried on her neck like bruises. She didn’t move aside.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But something’s wrong. I feel it.”
She laughed—harsh and broken. “You feel it? Since when did you start listening to feelings?”
She turned then, walked back into the room like she'd already decided I could follow.
The place was wrecked. Canvases everywhere, like she'd been trying to paint something out of her. Music sheets torn. Half-written lyrics scattered like dead feathers.
I said nothing. Just sat down, watched the sun split through the blinds and land in strips across her back.
“Maybe that’s the point. Not all fire’s warm. Sometimes it burns clean.” I said finally.
She looked at me then, something old and scared in her face. “You think this is just part of the cycle?”
“I think... whatever this is, it doesn’t get to be the end.”
We sat like that, in the quiet.
Then she whispered, like a secret:
“When I sing now... something comes. It’s not me. It’s something else. I don’t know if it’s trying to help or hurt.”
The hairs on my arms stood up.
“And you still sing?” I asked.
She smiled, slow and strange.
“I have to,” she said. “That’s the deal.”
She turned back to her mess, picked up a charcoal stick, and began sketching something on the wall—slow, deliberate, like she was remembering it rather than creating it.
I watched the shape take form.
A girl, barefoot, eyes closed, mouth open in a scream or a song—you couldn’t tell which.
“You ever wonder,” she said without looking at me, “if twin flames aren't always meant to make each other whole? Maybe we're just supposed to survive each other.”
And then:
She sang.
Low, trembling. A sound like a storm under skin. Like grief in reverse.
And I felt it again.
That shift in my bones.
Like: there you are.
Like: don’t look away.