girl singing in the wreckage ✰ dave grohl

sixteen

dave had kept true to his promise, calling her every night from his hotel rooms. each time the phone would ring, she would feel the familiar lovesick feeling rise in her stomach.

"i miss you." she had hummed through the phone speaker one night, leaning against the wall.

"i miss you too, aurora. but i'll be back before you know it." he replied, a smile dancing on his lips from where he lay in his hotel room. they were so far away, but as april heard dave's breath on the other line, and as he heard hers, they could almost feel the other next to them.

melissa had, of course, pelted april with questions when she saw her at work the day after the show. april sheepishly told her her story with dave, and her life in olympia, prior to san francisco. melissa was fascinated, to say the least. she promised she wouldn't spread the story around, and april was grateful. melissa was a good friend, and they had grown closer since the show.

it was a monday night when she excitedly awaited his phone call, waiting to tell him exciting news.

that afternoon while she worked by giving exhibition tours, she was pulled aside by the owner of the gallery. they had offered her a whole exhibit for her to showcase some prints in a coherent theme of her choice. she accepted the offer graciously, and dave was the first person she thought to tell. he was always in a new hotel room in a new city, and since she couldn't keep track of phone numbers, he would always be the one to call her.

over the years that she had worked at the gallery, she had put energy into building relationships with people in the art world, and she was giddy to see how it had paid off. her work had circled around the local art scene, and over the years she had sold a couple of different prints.

they owner of the gallery, miriam, had told her she was free to her own form of creative expression, but encouraged her to focus on a raw subject matter.

"too much of art these days is focused on looking at the world through rose tinted glasses. i've seen your work first hand and i know that you can make beautiful photos as well as skin crawling ones. bend that to your will, april, and you'll do just fine."

it took her the rest of the day to ponder, but she came upon a theme that she thought would make both a great art piece, as well as some kind of emotional closure. after making a couple of pages with extensive notes and streams of consciousness, as well as looking through old diaries and flipping through old photo albums, she had created a rough outline.

from olympia, with love, is what she would call it.

and as the phone rang in her apartment, now littered with papers and photos scattered across the floor, she jumped up to answer it. she knew who it was before he spoke.

"hey, it's dave."

"dave, you won't believe what happened at work today!" she spoke giddily, a grin spread widely across her face. he chuckled from his side of the line, feeling warmth spread through his body as he heard her melodic voice ring through the speaker.

"tell me, 'rora." he replied, smiling to himself as he could envision her wide smile.

"i'm going to have my own exhibition in the gallery!" she exclaimed. "i mean, i've only just begun... and it's probably going to take a while to sort out and make, but... i'm really excited."

"that's fucking amazing, you of all people deserve this. you work your ass off." dave spoke with a grin, april blushed and wrapped an arm around her waist.

"ugh, i don't deserve you." april groaned, leaning against the wall, closing her eyes. "when are you going to be back?"

"the tour ended today, actually. we just have to do press and other boring shit for a couple more weeks and then i'll be getting on the first plane to san francisco, and i'm all yours." april bit her lip.

"promise?"

"cross my heart."

----

two weeks had past, and after work every single day since, april had rifled through photo albums, gone through entire bottles of glue and turned through the pages of old journals, reliving memories. she glued clippings of quotes from her journals over photographs, painted abstractly across the large white canvas she had, and stapled her first zine on as well.

her exhibition was located in a small corner of the gallery, but she didn't mind the size. if she had lots of blank space, she wouldn't know what to do with it all. quality over quantity, right? from left to right, the exhibition progressed in years-- from youth, to adolescence, to adulthood. she included a baby picture of her, along with one her father took of her innocently flipping off the camera at age four.

when it came to adolescence, and her early adult life, she included lots of pictures she took at shows, along with an excess of the holographic glitter that was her calling card back in those days. there was a photo of cherry drunkenly doing karaoke, one of max perched on her drum kit with a smile, and one april had taken in a bathroom mirror with the two people she loved most in the world. cherry and dave.

although the thought of sharing intimate moments with god knows how many people was scary to april, the clippings from her journals were what she was more scared of sharing. you would be able to glance directly into a specific moment in time of her head space.

above a photo of a rather startled looking dave, there was a clipping from a journal entry she had written the day of kurts funeral.

i think there are some people who will always stay in your life. not in a particularly good or bad way, but people who will exit and enter your life as seasons change and people come and go. they will always be the one person you can rely on to return to you at some point. like a ship going out to sea and returning to the same dock each time without fail. i think he's a bit like that to me. i don't know if he'll ever stay for long each time we reconnect or reunite because of some twist of fate, but knowing he's bound to come back into my life sooner or later gives me ease. it also keeps my heart from completely breaking.