where we have been
the chapters that brought us here
the quiet between us
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the echo between us
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the voices between us
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the quiet between us ✳︎ the echo between us ✳︎ the voices between us ✳︎
I didn’t know I was writing a series when I wrote the first song.
I certainly didn’t know there would be chapters.
There was just something I needed to say, and for whatever reason, saying it inside a song felt possible when saying it anywhere else didn’t.
One song became another.
Questions became themes. Themes became stories. Songs started answering songs that came before them. Sometimes they contradicted them. Sometimes something I thought I understood changed completely when I heard myself say it three months later.
Eventually, I realized I wasn’t simply collecting songs.
I was documenting a journey.
I started calling it between.
Not because everything happens between two people, but because so much of being human seems to happen in the spaces between things:
Between what happened and what we remember.
Between what we feel and what we can say.
Between loving someone and knowing when to leave.
Between surviving something and understanding how we survived it.
Between who we were and whoever we’re becoming.
The first three chapters of that journey are now complete.
They weren’t planned together.
They found each other.
the quiet between us
the things we couldn't say.
the quiet between us began inside a relationship.
It lives in the distance that can develop between two people who still love each other but no longer seem able to reach one another.
These were songs about silence, but not necessarily the absence of words.
Sometimes there were plenty of words.
The quiet was everything underneath them.
The conversations we kept having without ever reaching the thing we were actually trying to say.
The questions we were afraid to ask.
The answers we weren't ready to hear.
The thousand possible endings imagined while still trying to prevent even one of them from becoming real.
There is love here.
There is frustration.
There is longing, uncertainty, hope, and fear.
And there is the exhausting belief that perhaps one more conversation might finally build the bridge.
I didn't know where any of it was going.
That was part of the story.
the echo between us
what remained after the silence broke.
Eventually, something changes.
The conversation ends.
The relationship changes shape.
Someone leaves.
And you discover that silence doesn't necessarily arrive when the other person is gone.
Sometimes there is an echo.
the echo between us lives in that aftermath.
It's the strange territory where something can be over and still be everywhere.
Memory doesn't observe clean boundaries. Neither does grief. Neither does love.
There are last times you don't recognize as last times until much later. Rooms that still seem occupied. Futures you had already imagined that continue existing in your mind even after the life that would have created them disappears.
And gradually, almost imperceptibly, the question changes.
It becomes less about what happened between two people and more about what happens inside the person who remains.
The echo gets quieter.
And another voice begins becoming audible.
Your own.
the voices between us
the things we carry. the truths we find.
Once I could hear that voice, it started saying things I hadn't expected.
the voices between us widened the lens.
The songs began reaching further backward—and further inward.
Memory. Trauma. Survival. The stories we tell about ourselves because they were once the only stories that made sense. The things we learned to call strength because we didn't yet have another name for them. The questions we avoided because asking them might change the meaning of something we'd carried for years.
And eventually, the possibility of speaking anyway.
This chapter isn't about finding one definitive voice. If anything, it taught me the opposite.
There are voices belonging to who we were. Voices belonging to people who shaped us. Voices we've internalized. Voices we've silenced. Voices we're only beginning to recognize as our own.
The work isn't necessarily deciding which ones disappear. Sometimes it's learning which ones we still want to listen to.
And somewhere along the way, the person who began Between wondering what would happen next became someone capable of saying:
We don't need to know what waits on the other side. We never did.
Let's turn the page.
three chapters later
Looking at these chapters together now, I can see a progression I couldn't have designed when I started.
the quiet asked: Can we find the words?
the echo asked: Who am I when the conversation is over?
the voices asked: Now that I can hear myself, what am I ready to say?
None of those questions received a permanent answer.
I don't think they're supposed to.
That's one of the things writing this music has taught me.
Songs don't have to solve the questions they're asking.
Sometimes their job is simply to tell the truth about where we were when we asked them.
And then life moves. We learn something. We misunderstand something. We change our minds. We forgive something we once hated. We become angry about something we once excused. We look backward and discover that the song we wrote months ago is still true—but means something entirely different now.
The song doesn't become wrong… the story got longer.
That's what these three chapters are to me.
Not a definitive account of who I am. Not three neatly resolved stages of healing. And certainly not instructions for how anyone else is supposed to move through their own life.
They're timestamps.
This is what I understood then. This is what I could say then. This is where I was standing when I wrote it.
Together, they show where I've been.
and now?
For the first time since this began, all three chapters are behind me.
Not erased.
Not discarded.
Not outgrown.
Carried forward.
There are already new songs.
Some of them seem connected. Some may not be. New ways of telling these stories are appearing, too.
I could probably give the next chapter a name.
I could decide what it's about and start sorting everything accordingly.
I'm deliberately not doing that.
Because if these first three chapters taught me anything, it's that the work usually knows what it's becoming before I do.
So this is where we have been.
Three chapters.
A lot of questions.
A few answers.
And enough road behind us to finally recognize that there was a journey happening all along.
As for where it goes next?
For now, I only know where we are.