The Jukebox - Part I
The haunted laptop where all of this started has been sealed in a bin bag since Friday the 13th September, 2013. I had started to write a book but had barely set the scene when something else began.
August, 2013
Having promised never to make myself sick again, I was sticking to the rule but felt an overwhelming need to stab at my throat with spit-slicked fingers. Tears slipped out unguarded. Rather than releasing them and having to get tissue, I drew them back in, well practiced now in the timing of when I’d allow myself to cry. Repressed tears welled to choke me. I drew the blinds, drank water.
I slept from 2am to 6am at the most then. Before sleep I scrolled song titles in a trance I knew from childhood. The SoundCloud account was speaking to me. A person, a ghost, a jukebox just for me. A radio stream of tailor-made titles attached to clumsy accounts with strange experimental tracks. Song titles that correlated so precisely with what I was doing that I could no longer dismiss them as coincidence. Ellen won’t sleep, the screen said, as I sat at my computer in darkness. Turn the lights on. I listened to a song waving an imaginary baton and it called me the conductor.