Chapter 2: Joni Mitchell and the Betrayal of Muscle Memory
The phone buzzed against her hip, a trapped insect of light and sound vibrating through the thin cotton of her sleep shorts. Ellie surfaced from a dreamless, thick sleep, one hand groping blindly on the tangled sheets. Her fingers closed around the cool, hard rectangle. She dragged it into the bleary tunnel of her vision.
The screen glowed. A notification. Not her mother. Not a spam alert for a vinyl sale.
Noah (Sweater Victim)
9:17 AM
Good morning.
Below the text was a photo. A simple white mug, steam curling in a fragile ribbon. Beside it, leaning against a sunlit wooden table, was the vinyl sleeve for Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Not just any copy. The one with the slightly torn corner on the top right. Her copy. The one from the store’s listening station yesterday.
She flung the phone. It hit the rumpled duvet, bounced once, and settled screen-down like a guilty thing.
The room was too bright. Jagged stripes of sunlight cut through the blinds, illuminating galaxies of dust motes dancing over the chaos. The air smelled of stale lavender from a half-empty diffuser and the underlying, coppery scent of anxiety—old pennies, indeed, left in the pocket of yesterday’s jeans which were puddled on the floor. Her heart wasn’t racing. It was pounding slow, heavy, sick thuds against her ribs.
Blue. That album was a raw nerve, a personal gospel of leaving and being left. It was the music she put on when she needed to feel justified in her own mess. It was hers. And he’d taken a picture of it. He’d seen it, recognized it, and somehow that felt more exposing than him seeing the chai disaster, more intimate than the falafel.
It was an echo. A quiet, “I see you.”
She shoved herself upright, the sheet twisting around her legs. She needed noise. Her own noise. Not Joni’s flawless, devastating clarity.
The small, oak-bodied acoustic guitar stood propped in the corner by her cluttered desk, a sentinel amid the paper avalanche of half-written lyrics, brittle pencil nubs, and empty tea mugs. She stalked over, grabbed it by the neck, and dropped onto the unmade bed, the springs groaning in protest.
She didn’t think. Her fingers found the familiar, comforting shapes. The opening chords of ‘A Case of You’ spilled out, the tuning slightly off, the strings biting into her soft fingertips. It was a song about devotion as a poison and a cure. Her voice, scratchy with sleep, joined in, low and rough.
“Just before our love got lost, you said…”
She played through the first verse, the anger funneling into the music. This was safe. This was translating feeling into pattern, into something she could control. But as she moved into the chorus, her fingers, acting on their own, faltered. They softened the brittle passing chord, rounded the edge off the transition. The melody, usually sung with a defiant, wounded ache, wanted to relax. It wanted to lean into the resolution, not fight against it.
It sounded… kinder. Hopeful, even.
She stopped dead. The last note hung in the sunlit dust, dissonant and fading.
It sounded like his voice. Like the way he’d said ‘Text me. Or don’t,’ with that quiet, open-ended patience that offered no pressure, and somehow created all of it.
“No,” she said aloud, to the empty room, to the guitar. She placed her palm flat against the strings, silencing their vibration. “Absolutely not.”
The phone, still face-down on the bed, pulsed with another soft buzz.
She stared at it for a full minute, warring with the impulse to throw it against the wall. Curiosity, that vicious betrayer, won. She snatched it up.
Another photo. Same table. The vinyl sleeve was now pushed to the side. In front of the coffee mug was a small, white ceramic dish. In it sat two pristine, rolled socks. One navy, one charcoal gray.
The caption read: Proof of systematic organization. And breakfast. The falafel guy isn’t here at 9 AM.
A laugh punched out of her—a short, startled burst of sound that echoed in the quiet room. It was immediately followed by a surge of sheer frustration. He was dismantling her panic with sock-based humor. It was unfair.
Her thumbs hovered. She could ignore it. That’s what the old playbook demanded. Let the silence stretch until it became a wall.
Instead, she typed, her movements jerky: Joni deserves better than to be used as a prop in your domestic propaganda.
The reply came almost instantly. Agreed. She’s back on the shelf now. Socks have been put away. The propaganda is complete. How’s the hand?
She looked at her palm. The red mark from the latte was gone, just a faint memory of heat. The skin was fine. It survived. Unlike your sweater.
The sweater is at the dry cleaner. They looked at the stain like it was a fascinating crime scene.
Another image formed in her mind: him calmly explaining a chai latte assault to a perplexed dry cleaner. She leaned back against her pillow, the guitar a weight across her lap. The sunlight felt warmer, less accusatory.
I’m listening to the new EP from The Broken Cables, she typed, which was a lie. She was sitting in her messy bedroom in her pajamas, listening to the frantic beat of her own confusion. It’s loud.
Good loud or ‘need to break something’ loud?
The latter. Usually is.
There was a pause. Three dancing dots appeared, then vanished, then appeared again. She held her breath.
There’s a place downtown. Old theater turned into a venue. Terrible acoustics, but the sound just swallows you whole. Perfect for ‘need to break something’ loud. They have a show tonight. A post-rock band. It’s mostly noise and cellos.
She read the message twice. It wasn’t a demand. It wasn’t even a clear invitation. It was information. An option placed gently on a table between them.
Her instinct was to deflect, to make a joke about cellos being pretentious, to claim she had to work, to invent a prior commitment that didn’t exist. She opened her mouth to say no, to the empty room, to practice the refusal.
What came out was a whisper. “Noise and cellos.”
She typed. What time?
Doors at eight. Music at nine. I’ll be there at 7:55. I like to watch the room fill up.
A specific time. A specific reason. No pressure.
I’ll probably be late, she sent. A warning shot. A reminder of who he was dealing with.
The dots danced. I know. I’ll save you a seat. It’ll be the one next to the guy who rolls his socks.
She didn’t reply. She set the phone down, screen-up this time, on the nightstand. She looked at the guitar in her lap, then out at the stripes of light cutting across the floor. The metallic scent in the air seemed to fade, overtaken by the ordinary smell of sun-warmed cotton and old wood.
For the rest of the day, the silence in her apartment had a different texture. It wasn’t just empty space; it was space waiting to be filled. With noise. With cellos. With the uncertain weight of a saved seat.
At 7:58 that evening, showered and dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans that didn’t feel like a costume, she stood on the sidewalk outside her building. Her phone was in her hand. The record store was closed. Her mother had called twice. She’d let it go to voicemail.
She looked at the time. She was already, technically, late. She could turn around. Go upstairs. Put on Blue and lean into the familiar, solitary ache.
She thought of a handkerchief, carefully folded. She thought of a smudge of tahini on a cuff.
She started walking toward the subway, her pace quickening with each step, the city lights blurring into streaks of gold against the deepening blue.