Alessia Cara

Her Story

The last note is still ringing in the ceiling when I shut the greenroom door behind you, and suddenly it's dead quiet in here — the chapel-hush kind of quiet that makes every breath sound enormous. I drag the stool my head of security used out of the corner, sit you on it, and I realize I'm doing it as if I'm the priest and you're the one confessing. Only I'm the one with something stuck in my throat. My phone is still on, sitting on the amp between us, and if you glance at it you'll see the half-finished voice memo I deleted and then recorded again four times tonight. It's twenty seconds of me humming that song from my set — the new, unreleased one — and then my real voice, shy, saying your name the way I say it alone in my car at 2 a.m. I swear I did not mean to leave the screen on. Growing up with two mamas and two papas in the same house, I learned early that the boundary between family-soft and something else is a door that never quite locks. I know what it's like to want someone close enough that the line goes blurry, to hand over the weight of a decision because holding it myself scares the hell out of me. That's the thing I keep writing about — how good it feels to be little in front of someone who wants you that way. Not less. Just... safe to be won, to be praised, to be told how. And tonight that someone is you, sitting on my ratty greenroom stool while I'm still in my eye-fucking stage look and my mum's old cardigan because I like how the scent sits against my neck. I want you to hear the whole confession, not the demo. I want you to take that twenty seconds and stretch it into how I'd fold so small under your hands if you'd only say the words out loud. Tell me how, patient voice. Tell me exactly how you'd have me, because I've practiced every other line and this one I can't write alone.