There are relationships that don’t fit neatly into the categories that society has defined for us. The well drawn rules that outline what love or friendship should look like. And if you find yourself drawn into one, it’s often hard to explain the impact they have because of people’s expectations. This song came from a message about one of those relationships. The caller spoke about Greg, someone they never met in person. Not once. There were no shared photos or emotional train station reunions. No embraces at the airport or stories with a happy ‘then we finally saw each other standing there’ ending. But listening to the message, none of that mattered. The important bit was the love. They loved each other. For a while, their lives were tangled up in each other through messages, late night conversations, the intensity that can grow when two people build a world entirely made of words. The caller describes being drawn into Greg’s world, his friend circle, his days and nights, his struggles. They were building a future and trying desperately to reach it together. Then depression arrived. By 2014, Greg was gone. The heart of this message wasn’t the loss itself, though the ache of it is present in every line. More it was the shape grief takes when the relationship being mourned exists outside the margins that people recognise. The caller’s life continued into the future. A husband, a happy relationship in a new country, a completely different life. But Greg remained, not as a wound or unfinished business but as a thread running through everything that followed. Someone whose existence altered the course of their life. Someone who helped to create a future that they would never see. The whole message moved me quite profoundly, but the line that really wound itself around my gut? “He’s in those spaces between the lines of my everyday life. I don’t know how to remember him out loud.” Many of us carry people like that. Not necessarily the loud loves or the obvious ones. Maybe it’s the person who appeared at just the right moment, that friendship that changed your whole direction, the conversation that nudged open a door, the connection whose influence completely outlasted its duration. Our instinct is to think of grief as something that is attached to endings, but often it is attached to continuing. To futures that happened without them, or to versions of ourselves that only existed because someone crossed our path. I wanted this song to sit with that idea for a while and to acknowledge a relationship that doesn’t need defending. It holds hands across the years and the distance with the previous song ’Silvie’ in remembering someone who, although no longer here, still occupies a place in the world through the lives they touched. The Echo Line has been unexpected in so many ways, but I have been moved beyond words at how strangers have trusted me with stories that are so deeply personal and somehow universal at the same time. A man lost to depression, a love that existed almost entirely through screens and words, a life entirely reshaped by someone who never got to see where the road eventually led. The details belong to Greg. The feelings live inside us all. Thank you caller, for your message. Thank you Greg. The Lines (Greg) First, a picture on a screen A word, a friend, a dream The quiet of beginning You’re the note I couldn’t play The words I couldn’t say A song that’s not for singing And you Still leave the light on In the spaces in between The lines of me Love I knife that won’t be dulled A punch that won’t be pulled A fire that’s not for fading In the turning of a phrase The arc of borrowed days The voicemail I keep saving And you Still leave the light on In the spaces in between And you still turn the night on In the place I couldn’t be The lines of me And I leave you in things In the gaps of the day in the way the phone rings in the way the light fades On the edge of a thought At the end of a line I know It’s never you But I check every time