Just Talking (2026)

Five years after the accident, the poster had a working theory about themselves: that they were over it. The crying had stopped. His name could be said in the middle of a sentence, at a dinner table, without the evening ending. A whole year had gone by without pain, and they took that as proof.

Then his channel came up while they were scrolling. Just saw my dead cousin's youtube after 5 years since his accident is what came out of the next ten minutes.

The channel held the safe things — him singing at church, the clips you can sit through because they are a performance. This one was him talking. Not singing. Joking with whoever was holding the phone. The poster heard five seconds of an ordinary voice and their throat closed.

The post keeps the plans he never got to finish: a house he was planning to buy, a store he built for his mother, a proposal he was ready to make to a long-time partner who married someone else not long after he died. A teacher, a preacher, generous in the way that costs something. And it keeps the thing he did for one odd kid in the family — picking them up from school when nobody else could come, always early, never late.

Just Talking is the ballad that came out of it. Piano and voice carry the first verse alone, the first chorus opens up with strings and light percussion, and the second verse pulls back again. The bridge is the quietest stretch in the song, almost nothing under the vocal. The last chorus is the widest and loudest thing on the record, and the final twenty seconds fall away to the piano, and then to nothing.

The chorus is those five seconds, and it does not resolve:

I wasn't over you. I never was. I just got good at not listening.

Play it late, on the couch, phone face up in your hand with no intention of opening anything. It is for anyone who has decided they are fine and has not yet found out otherwise.