SAY YOU WILL

Mrs. "So Fly" crashlands in my room
Can't waste no time, she might leave soon

LAIKIN

I keep the beats playing on a permanent loop to drown out the thoughts in my head as I try to sleep.

While I lie here in the dark, I think they sound like the vital signs monitors you find in hospital wards.

And if I'm in relationship intensive care right now, then those doctors are lining up the defibrillators to trigger shock my broken heart back to life.

But I want to tell them, if she's not in my life then I don't want to live, but they just keep on with those shocks to my heart, trying to rebound me back into existence.

Man, it's crazy how my mind turns on me after she's gone, projecting all the worse case scenarios I don't even want to even imagine but am forced to see. You can't shut your eyes when those damn images are inside your head.

I swear if death wanted to take me right now, I'd willingly take its hand because this pain is real and I know it's only going to get worse from here on in.

The only thing that's ever saved me at times like these is the music, but right now I can't even stand to hear anything.

Execept that beat that isn't my heart.

AMULYA

As I catch a red-eye flight from Long Island to L.A. I can hear feel his pain in my own heart like distant drums.

But I'm moving on now and though I know he'll try everything to win me back, deep down he knows he's already lost me.

There's something about flying high above the clouds when you're finally breaking up with someone. It's almost like nothing matters once you reach a certain altitude and you get a kind of buzz knowing you're nowhere near the ground where reality is waiting to catch up with you. But for a few hours at least, I'm free of it and it feels good.

My friends think I'm crazy that I keep going back to see him but what they don't know is that it takes a few gos before you can wean yourself off a relationship as deep as ours was. It's not so easy to walk away forever when you both once believed you were the next Anthony & Cleopatra.

Besides, I know how much it hurts him each time I leave; it's not as if I don't know what I'm doing.

With every dramatic exit I now carry out, I can see him getting weaker, where conversely, I become stronger, his powers to persuade me back into his life fading like one of those slow dissolves on his sound mixer.

I suppose you might call what I'm doing a slow assassination attempt on his heart.

Downing yet another Mimosa, I start to feel more relaxed.

Those sunlit red and orange clouds look so pretty right now.

He'd always tell me, "Beauty will save the world" and I never knew what he meant exactly.

But up here, 30,000 feet above the earth, I think I have an idea.

SABAH

When I find him in the morning, strung out in his music studio, I figure him for dead, but when I check his pulse, I can still feel it, faint but steady.

Relieved, I draw the curtains in the room to let the light in and then set about making some juice and breakfast for my boss in the kitchen.

I blast his most banging track, "Wake Up Fresh", to help get him up.

Whenever he's down, I like to remind him of his greatness.

"Turn that shit off! I don't want to hear it!"

Though I'll admit it sometimes has the opposite effect.

Near silently, I whisk eggs in a bowl, making him the most basic omelette. He finds food boring and eating a chore. He likes everything he digests to be purely functional and ultra simple. I guess life is already complicated enough when you're a genius like he is.

"Are you trying to tip me over the edge? I don't need your 'everything is normal' bullshit routine this morning. You should take the day off. Go to the beach and get yourself a hook up or something."

"I don't want to leave you when you're down."

"I'm always down when she's gone. It's just the way it is."

It's true. He gets hit hard each time she fucks him over. Makes me so mad.

"Well, I don't think you should be on your own right now," I say, trying my best not to annoy him any further.

"I don't think I should have company either."

I try and think of something neutral and un-provoking to say in response to that, but there isn't anything.

I fold the meagre-looking omelette and turn the heat down on the induction hob.

Maybe you think he's being harsh on me, but I'm devoted to him cos he's inspired me since I was a teenager and taught me so much. I feel indebted even though he pays me a salary to do various day-to-day shit for him.

Then I hear a loud splash, like the sound of a whole ton of cymbals being struck simultaneously.

I exit the kitchen and look towards the pool where my boss has dived in.

I can just see his shadowy form at the bottom of the pool where he seems to remain ominously still.

After thirty seconds, I get nervous. He's no great swimmer at the best of times.

Forty seconds now, I head closer toward the surface, intuitively unbuttoning my shirt.

Fifty seconds. He's still at the bottom, unmoving.

I dive in and swim toward the floor of the pool where he remains, like a rock.

When I was at school we had to retrieve a brick as part of a swimming exercise drill.

But as I try and drag him from the watery depths, I realise this is well beyond my limited strength.

I panic.

My desperate lungs lead me back to the surface. I break the surface and breathe as if my life depended on it.

Looking back down at his immovable body, I try again to get him out of there, but it's no use. I can't save him.

Back at the house, I call an ambulance.

Somewhere, in my messed up head I can hear the sound of a drum beat even though I could swear I turned the music off a little while back.

I return to his studio, where my boss has left some beat on a loop, playing over and over again.

It seems a cruel irony to hear what sounds like a heartbeat, which is actually a drum.

I collapse on his yoga mat on the floor of the studio and curl up into a ball, unable to shake the image of him dead back there in the pool.

Shaking, I wait for the ambulance to arrive.

I can still feel the faint warmth of his body heat on the surface where he'd slept.

But soon it'll be cold again.