Chapter 9: The Ghost Boy
Sunday, May 17, 2015
The party had been a restart. A blow of noise and life that had shaken off the dust of her routine. Spending a night without thinking about beats, without obsessing over melodies, just existing among people, had cleared his head in a way he didn't expect.
For the first time in weeks, Michael woke up Sunday feeling something akin to clarity. It was not happiness. It was a calm, an absence of the frustration that had been eating away at him.
After a quick coffee, he went to his makeshift studio. The victory with his first beat had taught him a lesson: progress was slow, but it was possible. With that new, fragile confidence, he invoked the System's interface.
He went through his "Founder's Pack," the ten holographic covers floating in the gloom of the room. His gaze passed over the imposing guide of "Runaway" and the most aggressive songs. He didn't feel that way. It felt... invisible.
And then he saw the title.
Ghost Boy - Lil Peep.
'Yes,' he thought instantly. 'That's it. That's exactly who I am.'
He felt like a ghost in the halls of school, a ghost in his own home. The song was not a choice; it was a diagnosis. He selected it.
The guide appeared. It was similar to the others. A guitar melody in MIDI format. A description of the beat. And an "emotional impression" that hit him with the force of an acknowledgment.
'Feeling: Non-existence, the melancholy tranquility of being invisible.'
This time, there was no paralysis. There was a plan.
It started with the guitar, the heart of the song. Uploaded the MIDI file to Ableton. He assigned him the best virtual guitar instrument he had. He hit play. The melody was correct, but it sounded clean, sterile, too present.
'Ghosts don't sound like that,' he thought.
He remembered the atmosphere of the original song. It sounded old, distant, like a recording found on a forgotten cassette tape. It was a lo-fi sound.
He spent the next hour on YouTube, his new university. "How to make a guitar sound lo-fi ableton". "Tape saturation free vst". "vinyl crackle sample".
He returned to his project, armed with a new arsenal of tricks. He found a free "tape saturation" effect that he had downloaded. He applied it to the guitar track and played with the virtual knobs. Suddenly, the clean sound became warmer, with a subtle distortion at the edges.
'Better. Much better.'
Then, he added a "vinyl distortion" effect, adjusting it so that it only added an almost inaudible crackle in the background, like dust on an old record. Finally, he applied a generous amount of reverb to it, making the guitar sound as if it were being played at the end of a long empty hallway.
He hit play again. The melody now sounded distant, nostalgic, ghostly. It was perfect.
With the atmosphere established, he moved on to the drums. Using the sounds from his free packs, he built the trap beat: a soft kick drum, a snare drum that sounded more like dry applause, and the characteristic fast hi-hats.
He spent twenty minutes alone in the hi-hats, programming the little triplets and rolls that gave the song its hypnotic rhythm, almost like the patter of rain on a window.
Finally, the low 808. He programmed it to follow the low notes of the guitar, creating a deep, melancholic base that didn't compete with the melody, but held it like a shadow.
After almost four hours of concentrated work, I had the instrumental loop. He let it ring over and over again, with his eyes closed. The ghostly guitar, the limping rhythm, the deep bass. It was the sound of loneliness. It was the perfect soundscape for a ghost to tell its story.
He leaned back in his chair, this time not out of frustration, but out of satisfaction. He had built the world. Now, I just had to inhabit it.
…..
With the instrumental loop playing in his headphones, Michael climbed into his makeshift closet-booth. The air was thick and hot. He stood in front of the cheap microphone, ready to give voice to the ghost.
He pressed record. The beat began, the ethereal guitar floating around him. He opened his mouth and sang.
He tried to make his voice sound light, airy, "ghostly." He finished the verse and stopped recording. He sat down in the chair to listen.
What came out of the speakers was weak, without strength. It sounded like he was whispering so as not to wake anyone. There was no melancholy, only a lack of confidence.
'No. It sounds like I'm scared.'
He deleted the shot. He tried again, this time with a little more air, trying to mimic Peep's carefree style.
The result was even worse. It sounded fake, a forced imitation. It was the voice of someone trying to act like a ghost, not someone who really was.
Record. Listen. Erase. The cycle repeated itself for almost an hour. Frustration began to grow, a tight knot in his chest. He had the perfect soundscape, but his own voice was ruining it.
He took off his headphones and dropped them on the desk with a thud. The silence of the house pounced on him. He got up and began to walk in circles around the small study, his hands on his head.
'Why doesn't it work?'Thought. 'I'm sorry for this. I know what it's like to feel invisible. Why can't I sing it?'
He dropped to the floor, leaning his back against the wall. His gaze wandered across the room. He saw his father's old desk. The shelves with books I hadn't read. The walls with a wallpaper that he would never have chosen.
This was not his room. It was not his home. It was the house of a boy who had died, inhabited by a boy who shouldn't exist.
She thought about her day at school. How he moved through the corridors, a tall body among other bodies, but no one really saw him. They saw a quiet, strange boy, always with his hood on.
They didn't see the twenty-two-year-old man who was trapped inside. They didn't see the memories, the pain, the story of a lost universe.
And then, he understood.
His mistake had been conceptual. I had been trying to sound like a ghost, like something light, ethereal, floating. But that wasn't how it felt.
To be a ghost was not to be light. It was being heavy. It was dragging the chains of a past that no one else could see. It was being present in a room, but no one noticing your absence when you left.
It wasn't sadness. It was a deep, chilling nothing. A total disconnection. I didn't have to try to sound like a ghost. He was a ghost.
The revelation struck him with absolute clarity. His approach had been completely wrong. I didn't have to "sing" the song. I had to "say it." He had to tell his truth.
He got up from the ground, his movements now slow, deliberate. He returned to his desk. There was no frustration anymore. Just a cold calm.
He no longer saw the microphone as an enemy that judged him. I saw it as a tool. A means of making a confession.
He looked at the screen of Ableton, the empty voice track. I knew exactly what I had to do now.
With the instrumental loop playing in his headphones, Michael climbed into his makeshift closet-booth. The air was thick and hot. He stood in front of the cheap microphone, ready to give voice to the ghost.
He pressed record. The beat began, the ethereal guitar floating around him. He opened his mouth and sang, his voice a fragile, melodic whisper.
"Leave me alone, just leave alone..."
To him, the line wasn't a plea to an ex-girlfriend. It was a silent prayer addressed to the whole world. To school, to work, to the memories of a life I could no longer have.
"I'm growin' so tired of this..."
He sang the line with an exhaustion that was 100% real. He was tired. Tired of pretending to be a teenager. Tired of loneliness. Tired of being trapped.
"How do you fight the feelin'?"
"How do you fight the feelin', bitch?"
His voice hardened slightly at the last word, not with anger, but with genuine frustration. It was a question he asked himself every day. How do you fight a ghost?
"She callin' my phone, she callin' my phone..."
"I put it on quiet quick..."
It wasn't a girl calling. It was the past. They were the memories of his mother, his father, his sister. They were the obligations of this new world. And he did the only thing he could: he silenced him, ignored him, dissociated himself.
"I ain't never gon' answer it..."
"I ain't never gon' pick up my phone, girl..."
The last word, "girl," she sang with a tinge of bitter irony. She wasn't a girl. It was his previous life. A life I could never call again.
"I'm all on my own, I'm all on my own..."
This was the simplest and most brutal truth. He sang the line without emotion, with a coldness of resignation. It wasn't a complaint. It was a fact.
"I know you ain't high as this..."
"Puttin' my mind to shit..."
"Give me some time, I'll be flyin' bitch..."
Here, a flash of defiance crept into his voice. It was a promise to himself. A statement that I would use this pain, this loneliness, to build something. To escape.
"Breakin' my bones, you breakin' my bones..."
"You want me to line my wrist..."
It wasn't a girl who broke it. It was the universe. It was the pressure of his existence. And the next line, about self-harm, was a dark thought that had crossed his mind on lonely nights.
"I ain't gon' do it for you..."
"I'm gon' do it for me, 'cause it help me forget..."
His voice became an almost inaudible murmur, a confession. It was not a threat. It was a defense mechanism. A way to transform pain into something I could control.
"I ain't gon' do it for you..."
"I'm gon' do it for me, 'cause I'm tryna get rich..."
The armor was being built. Sadness was turning into ambition. Grief was becoming a plan.
"I ain't gon' put on no Tommy..."
"If I don't got Tommy to put on my bitch..."
"Doin' my thing, now, bitch, I can sing..."
"So don't expect all my flows, I just switch..."
His voice gained momentary confidence. It was the artist awakening, recognizing his own ability, his own versatility.
"Step in this bitch, let these hoes feel my drip..."
"If you ain't smokin' on somethin', I'ma dip (skrt)..."
She immersed herself completely in rap jargon, a mask of arrogance that felt both alien and strangely comfortable. It was a role I knew I would have to play.
The chorus returned, and he sang it again with the same tired resignation. But the last part of the song... that hit him differently.
"When you are on your own..."
"Just know that I need you..."
His voice softened, losing all edge. I didn't sing to a girl anymore. He sang to his lost family.
"I won't pick up the phone..."
The impossibility of that action was an open wound. I couldn't call them. Never again.
"Just know that I need you."
The last line was just a whisper, loaded with a vulnerability that hadn't been in the rest of the song. It was the only truth without armor.
The music faded away, leaving Michael in the silence of his closet. He stood there, gasping for breath, completely empty. He had left everything in that shot.
…..
Michael stood in front of the microphone for a long minute, shaking slightly. The emotional torrent had left him completely empty, like a bottle that has been suddenly emptied.
Finally, with an almost fearful movement, he approached the laptop. He clicked his mouse to stop recording. The blue waveform, jagged and asymmetrical, remained frozen on the screen.
He hesitated before reproducing it. A part of him didn't want to listen. I was afraid that the emotion I had felt hadn't translated, that it would just sound like another failed attempt.
But I had to know.
He dragged the cursor to the beginning of the track. He took a deep breath. And he pressed the space bar.
The melody of the guitar filled his headphones. And then, his own voice came in. The first thing he noticed were the flaws. The cheap microphone made his voice sound thin, without the warmth he had in reality. I could hear the subtle hiss of the cheap audio interface's preamp.
'Sounds cheap,' he thought, a twinge of disappointment.
I could hear the faint echo of the makeshift room, the sound bouncing subtly off the walls despite the sheets. I could hear the imperfections in his voice, the way it broke, the almost whisper in the last line.
He was about to stop it, to erase it like the hundreds of previous attempts. But he forced himself to continue listening.
And then, he heard it.
Beneath the poor quality, beneath the hiss, beneath the imperfections, was the truth. There was the excitement. The break in his voice was not a technical error; It was the sound of his heart breaking. The whisper was not weakness; it was vulnerability.
He realized that if he had good equipment or was in a studio, it would be one of the best performances, but it wouldn't have been this. It wouldn't have been real.
The raw recording, with all its flaws, was not a mistake. It was a characteristic. The technical rawness was what made it authentic. It was the sound of a real boy, in a real room, in real pain.
When the song ended, the silence that followed was different. It was no longer a silence of failure. It was a silence of amazement.
He looked at the blue waveform on his screen. I no longer saw an audio line. He saw a seismograph recording an earthquake. I saw the electrocardiogram of a broken heart. It was the visual representation of his soul.
He only had the vowel, an exposed nerve, captured in a digital file. The base was missing, the mixture was missing, everything else was missing. The song was not yet finished.
But Michael knew, with absolute certainty that ran through his body, that the hardest part was over.
He had found his voice.