The Awful Part of Me

This original emotional pop ballad is about a woman who is relieved that her best friend's boyfriend is dead, and who can never say so out loud.

The song comes from a confession posted in r/confession by a woman watching her closest friend grieve a man she was quietly glad to see go. Her friend is twenty-five and raising a three-year-old daughter. She had already left the girl's father, moved into a safe home for women and children, and was starting over on subsidized rent and free childcare when she met a bartender from a dive bar who was in his sixties.

He kept turning up at a house where no men were allowed, the poster writes, and the rules caught up with her: mother and daughter were asked to leave. He offered them his place, a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, and she went. Then he died in an accident, and the grief that followed swallowed everything. He is all she talks about. She spends money she does not have on tattoos of his name. She keeps telling the poster that she does not want to live.

What the poster cannot get past is what sits underneath her sorrow on her friend's behalf — a quiet relief that he is gone. She knows the friend's grief is real, and she still cannot make herself mourn him. The two feelings refuse to cancel each other out, and there is nobody she can tell.

The song is a slow piano ballad that moves at a walking pace. Fingerpicked guitar and bare piano carry the verses; strings and light percussion arrive with the first chorus and step back out of it. The bridge drops away to piano and voice, and a single piano takes the last word. The vocal stays close and unadorned, so the chorus lands on the plainest line in the song: I am not sorry he's gone.

Listen on the drive home from a funeral you did not want to attend; on the nights you are the one holding someone together and cannot say what you really thought of the person they lost; or any time you have loved somebody through a grief you do not share.

Content note: a death, a friend's grief that turns toward self-harm, and a secret the narrator cannot put down.