clairerobbin-blog

[clairerobbin-blog]

A Machine Made Me Cry

I'm hesitant to post this because I don't want to add fuel to the fire, but here I am on a Saturday, and I decided to listen to 'The Velvet Sundown'; the band that doesn't exist.

As someone who's been writing, producing, and performing live music for the entirety of my life, literally from age five into my 40s, music isn't just important to me. It's been my way of making sense of the world. The whole act of making music, writing it, producing it, listening to it, feeling it pulse through a live venue has been my life.

So I thought I'd give it a listen, more for the words running constantly through my head: "better the devil you know".

I pulled it up on Spotify, hit play on the first track, and tried not to pre-hate it. I just wanted to see how I'd feel, how my nervous system would respond, what my brain would do with it.

And then something weird happened. Out of pure pleasure, those opening guitars, that rhythm, that groove, it all just settled into my bones the way music does when something truly special hits you for the first time. I felt that feeling, that unmistakable yes, this is it, this is great. My nervous system lapped it up completely.

When the vocals came in, I'll admit I was only half-focused (doing some work that required part of my brain elsewhere), but even so, I noticed the lyrics were rudimentary. Basic. If I hadn't known this was AI, even if I'd stumbled upon it blind, those lyrics would have still surprised me. Musicians of this calibre producing words so... empty?

While the lyrics didn't move me, the vocals, as background sound, were somehow acceptable.

I listened through the first track, and it ended abruptly, no outro, no resolution, it just stopped. Like someone had forgotten to finish the song. It made me realise how much the outro matters, that gentle evolution of a life in miniature. This song just... ended. Lost its spirit in that moment, revealed its absence of soul, because of course it has no soul. It's a computer.

The next song came on. Again, those familiar feelings, dopamine firing, neurons lighting up with “I like this”. Similar disappointment with the lyrics.

And then a weird thing happened. I started to cry.

I started to cry because I realised that even though I've spent a lifetime, a very long work shift of a lifetime, in recording studios, in my bedroom, hunched over instruments, getting into the absolute nitty-gritty of what makes something special, this computer, this AI, has already, (not completely), but even in these very early days of its evolution, created something that moved my nervous system in a very positive way.

It made me cry because it made me realise: this isn't going away. People are going to like it. Love it! It won't be easily distinguishable.

And that's really sad. It's really fucking sad.

I did smile through my tears at one point, thinking, “Wow, humanity is incredible.” We've managed to create a machine capable of recreating us in such a way. For that reason, I felt almost proud of what I was listening to, of what we've created as a species.

But it makes me desperately sad as a musician to realise, I don't know if there will be many kids growing up learning to play guitar, shaking while writing down those lines that excavate their deepest feelings. My hands are shaking as I write this.

If I had any influence in this world, I would implore educational systems to encourage kids to continue making music, if possible. I would implore people to make time to write down their feelings in song, in written form.

I am scared we will lose this part of ourselves.

As someone who's spent their entire life doing that, knowing how it's elevated everything, how it's helped me through every single bad thing that's ever happened to me, and how I've been able to take pain and remake it into art, I'm so sad to think of a world where people won't do that anymore.

So that was my thought. On a Saturday, when a machine made me cry.

[clairerobbin-blog]

The Squeeze

I can work just fine. Better than fine, actually. If there’s one thing I can still do, it’s sit at my desk, open a document, and slip into someone else’s story. Also, I find that I am still able to build my business. Writing and working are the only things that feel easy, the only places my mind doesn’t feel caught in quicksand. The only space where I am still me. 

My gosh, I love being at work. 

It’s everything outside of work that feels impossible. The moment I shut my laptop, the weight drops back onto my shoulders, pressing down, tightening. Invitations, errands, favours. Each one lands on me like a bag of wet cement. I just don’t have it in me. Not for small talk, niceties, or anything that exists outside of deadlines and working towards ambitions. Although, so often, I still say yes. Mainly for the sake of my husband, who deserves the best life, to socialise, and travel. I have learned game face well, and it’s predominantly for him. I would do anything for my husband - my love, my life. He knows I am struggling, and he holds me in this grief, but I know he didn’t marry me to counsel me; I am acutely aware of this, and I do my best not to ask it. And so, I say yes to the dinners and the socialising. Grief like this that slips into depression becomes insidious; it steals from all the beautiful things. 

I never thought losing my Dad would feel like this, though. The losing, not all at once, but in slow, unbearable increments. A thousand tiny losses stretched across years. There’s no clean break, no single moment where I can say, ‘this is when he left me’. Just a slow erosion, memory by memory, recognition fading. I used to think grief hit you like a hammer - it did when my Mum died suddenly and split my world into a million pieces instantaneously. But this? This is more like being sanded down, piece by piece, until one day you run your hands over your life and realise how much of it has disappeared.

And yet, I can still write. My focus, my drive, my career; those things are untouched, maybe even sharper. Maybe because it’s the only thing I can control, the only thing that still makes sense. But everything else? Heavy. So heavy. And I don’t know how much longer I can carry it.

I just want this feeling to end. The waiting. The uncertainty. The awful, grinding inbetween.

And when people ask me how I’m doing, I say, "Fine." And in some ways, it’s not even a lie.

[clairerobbin-blog]

The Shape of Grief - Monologue

(Lights up. A single figure stands centre stage. The space is sparse. They take a breath, hesitant, as if testing their voice for the first time in a long time.)

I don’t know when it happened, what age, what moment, but somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like I could truly speak.

Maybe it’s because everyone is carrying so much, politically, emotionally, physically. Maybe it’s because life quietly taught me that my sadness isn’t big enough to take up space.

(Beat.)

My dad is going into hospital tomorrow. But in many ways, I’ve already lost him.

The man who shaped my world, who filled it with deep curiosity, music, and pure magic, who made me feel safe simply by being Alvin… is fading.

And as he disappears, piece by piece, I feel something slipping from me too.

His identity isn’t just his. It’s mine. Nestled deep in my bones, in the way I think, in the way I see the world. And now, as his sense of self unravels, I feel untethered. Like a part of me is unravelling too.

(A beat.)

The hardest part? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about the surgery. He doesn’t know what’s coming. The pain. The confusion. And I can’t explain. I can’t tell him. I can’t prepare him. And the cruelty of that… the sheer unfairness of it,

(Pause.)

And yet, what shames me most is how much this hurts. I’m not a child anymore. Not even a young adult. Shouldn’t I know how to handle this? With grace, with dignity, with some quiet strength?

I tell myself, people suffer worse. Far worse. People lose fathers younger. Some never have one to lose. And here I am, relatively old, relatively young, falling apart over my old dad.

It feels selfish. Indulgent. Embarrassing, even. To grieve this much for someone who still breathes, still laughs, still feeds bread to birds.

(A beat.)

How did love, something so pure, get tangled up with this much shame?

But grief doesn’t listen to logic.

It doesn’t care how old someone is. It doesn’t compare itself to the suffering of others. It simply is.

And maybe… maybe that’s what makes it unbearable. Not just the grief itself, but the damn shame of it. The embarrassment of being this sad, this lost, at a time in my life when I should know how to get on with it.

(Beat. A shift.)

But I am, after all, a writer.

And in these moments, when I feel squeezed of expression, when it seems like my voice has vanished entirely, I write anyway.

I miss the days when I could take the weight of existence, the sorrow, the fear, the love, and scribble it into a song. I miss standing on a stage, guitar in hand, letting it all spill into something real. Something I could see, something I could hold.

Back then, I didn’t feel embarrassed to be sad. I didn’t feel swallowed by shame.

(A breath. They shift, looking out at the audience, direct now.)

Do you ever feel like that?

Like the world has convinced you your grief is too loud? Too unseemly? Too much?

Like you should be quieter, smaller, more palatable in your sadness?

(Pause. The weight of the silence hangs between them and the audience.)

This isn’t a plea for comfort.

I don’t need reassurance. I don’t need sympathy.

I just needed to put words to the silence inside me.

To give this grief a shape,

(A breath.)

Even if only for a moment.

(Lights fade to black.)

[clairerobbin-blog]

Drone of an Old Trombone

The red dust has settled, but the cold keeps me from sleep.

The gravity so light I cannot experience myself. My hand slips straight through my heart.

Alive now only in reminiscence, but spiralling frantically within my DNA, the blue sphere we bolted from and the memories that haunt, and taunt, and strangle, and weave, insidiously, and continually into every unwelcome wispy dawn.

I wish to feel my own weight against another. The heaving heat of love upon the earth.

I wish to see my mother. A grieving heart will stalk across moons for the debt of your birth.

We came as one, but just as the the dried up seas, we evaporate each day, as we lay here together alone.

So far from home.  

The music has ceased. You hear sometimes, the drone of an old trombone, coming from bunk 23-FB, but I’m not sure if it’s their reluctance, or the remembering.

I smile at the others, and they tip their steel hats to me, it’s almost quite funny, our pale bodies wrapped in soda cans, but it’s long since been a joke, being stuck here with these folk.

As dried up as me, as dried up as the sea. As dead as the sea life when the atmosphere changed.

No one expected that…

Our ‘symbiosis tanks’ were simply plastic seas. Like a young widow brought to her knees, she wailed for earth, and her pain ricocheted throughout our habitat for years.  

The fish died but we are still alive.

Alive, weightless, loveless, and lost. Tired, bored, desperate and shopped.

And though there is no ticket home, my heart sings a song of you. Just to get through the hours.

And at night, when the drone of an old trombone drifts into my bunk, I hum along, my old same song of you.

You exist now only in the memories, but once on the earth,

someplace in time,

you were mine,

and I was yours,

and we ate fresh fish upon the healthy shores.

And we visited our mothers, and we had each other, and we used to look up, as if there were the answers.

Now, I know, the answer was you. You were simply love, and I came too far this time to realise that.

[clairerobbin-blog]

Just Panic

Grappling at my lungs and breast, making it’s fury in all the crevices of my chest

A portly bully stands on my rib bones, pressing as the crack and the voices whisper, “please, please stop.”

And the heart, a terrified rescue dog pounding so hard to alert the brain for help, for attention.

But the brain, so useless, too far away to push the aggressor from the malevolent gait.

The tormenter's boots muddy, smearing grit and brown soil all over porcelain breasts.

The innocence of a poor bosom, still as snow as they clothe the urgent pushing of each organ, each selfish, struggling to not die.

The heart banging for help, the lungs gasping, the adrenal glands in a flash flood, the ribs shrinking around my adult body. The brain, useless.    

Panic promises with a demon’s spit to slay the whole machine.

Sometimes, I wish it would succeed. To no longer prevent the slow strangulation. Lights out. No more clutching at my chest with my grasping hands, as the deafening metal and lead trains mercilessly roll over my frame. My brain attempting to trick the body, calmy telling the lungs to breathe. In and out, slowly, with purpose.

“The train cannot hurt you.” The brain gently kneels and strokes my hair as it shows a mixture of empathy and kindness.

The brain reads a lot of books, but has never been in the ring.

It does hurt.

I believe each and every single terrifying time that I will die. Never mind how many 100,000 times I have survived before.

“Are you okay?” they ask, observing my breathlessness and widened, scared eyes.

I exhale slowly, collect myself, and lie, “It’s okay, it’s just panic.”

It slides off the tongue easier than, “my body it is being crushed, I am humiliated, and I will definitely die.”

[clairerobbin-blog]

Ice Cold Beer

ICE COLD BEER

Why did we stop in that shabby little bar last Friday, After our long weary walk to nowhere?

Was it a chance to talk among strangers? Away from the danger of being alone, With our unspoken need to atone, For something unknown.

The first thing I saw was a sign in the mirror.

ICE COLD BEER.

That seemed to spell backwards, through distorted reflection,

ICE COLD FEAR.

Funny thought to get caught in my head, But all I said was “It’s chilly in here, I should have brought my coat.”

Suddenly I was hungry; (This time for food). So I asked for a cheeseburger, With cheese on both sides.

It was quite a jar to the gregarious fellow Behind the bar. He really lost his cool. Remember the look on his face.

“Now how in the hell can my cook do that, Without the cheese sticking to his griddle. In fourteen years standing behind a bar, I never had anyone want cheese on both sides”. “You never met anyone like her before” You told him. As he mumbled, “AMEN”.

When several minutes had crawled by, And we still hadn’t started to talk, I began to pray We’d find a way, to end the awkward silence.

After a while my beer tasted flat, And I took a sip of yours to see If it was the beer; Or me.

Then you asked that blasphemous question, “What are you doing, Taking Holy Communion?”

Well since Communion and Confession go together; I suppose I’d better tell you. The stale taste of my beer was an excuse: All right, it was a lie. I just wanted to drink from your glass, And I swear on my life I don’t know why.

Finally, the waiter brought over my order. With cheese on both sides.

Bursting with pride at his cooks baptism In gourmet dishes, “Well whatta ya know, he made it, And he didn’t get none on his griddle!”

It was such a happy moment, I almost made three wishes, Like I used to do, When I saw a white horse, From a car. Or the first evening star Of the approaching night sky.

Strange how the smallest things Sometimes suffice, To break the ice, Of the lonely distance between us.

We grinned at each other then, And started to talk at last. And stayed so late, over a few more beers. We missed our date with a couple of friends, We hadn’t seen for years.

When we remembered the time, You paid the bill, And left some change on the plate.

But did you notice the light, Through the stained glass window? (Stained by tobacco and years of grime). And the freckled faced lad playing the pinball, With a smile like an altar boy.

There was a kind of an aura Around that place we found, On our Good Friday search For God. It reminded me of a church; Isn’t that odd?

[clairerobbin-blog]

The Trombone Player in the Wardrobe

Dear Man in the Wardrobe

I wonder if you ever think about me.

Not in the way I’ve thought about you, obsessively, involuntarily, like a useless foreign phrase stuck in my head for decades.

I imagine you never saw me as a person, just collateral damage in the quiet war you evidently waged against yourself.

But still, I wonder.

Do you ever recall the way you turned deception into an art form?

The way you made a theatre of your lies, performing for an audience of one—me, the child.

Do you remember the phone calls, Marcus?

Every morning. 9:10 AM.

Always when I was supposed to be at school. 

The phone would ring. I always knew who it was.

And I always picked up.

“Hello?”.

Silence.

Then breathing. Slow. Measured. You were thinking. Then the voice. Your voice, but, theatrics.

"Oh, hello, is that the doctor’s office? I need to make an appointment."

A weak cough.

I didn’t say anything.

"Please," you tried again, "it’s an emergency."

I gripped the phone. I knew it was you. I slammed it down.

The next day, you, but a different voice. Older. Softer. Theatrics. 

"Oh, hello, I’ve lost my cat. Have you seen a tabby around?"

Every morning, a new game. A new trick.

And every morning, I knew it was you.

"I know it’s you, Marcus."

Silence.

The kind of silence that makes your ears ring and your breath feel too loud.

And then, a laugh.

Soft. Amused. A chuckle, like I was a joke.

Messing with a child’s head was funny to you.

Oh, I knew your voice, Marcus.

Then the line would go dead.

And the next morning, and every morning, you did it again, over and over.

You laughed at me, Marcus. I was nine years old.

Every morning. 9:10 AM.

When the phone rang, I began to run for it.

I would wrestle with my mother for the receiver.

She always tried to snatch it away, her fingers and long nails clawing at mine, digging in, hurting me, drawing blood, desperate to keep me from speaking to you.

Because she knew what I would say.

I would tell you, "I know who you are, Marcus."

I would tell you, "I'm going to tell my Dad."

And every time, you laughed at me. 

I was so happy before you.

Do you remember the nights, Marcus?

Because I do.

I remember them in a way I wish I didn’t. The long, empty hours sitting at the front bedroom window, watching every car and person that passed, hoping, praying, breathlessly sobbing into the empty room, hoping that one of people or cars would be her.

I would stare at the headlights, trying to make sense of their shapes, memorising the sound of engines, convincing myself that if I looked hard enough, if I listened carefully enough, I could somehow will her home. I tried every bargain with a  God I didn’t believe in. 

But she never came. Never when she should have.

And you knew.

You knew I was alone. You knew my father was away, playing music to crowded, spirited rooms while his own house sat silent. You knew my mother was out with you, wrapped up in whatever fantasy you were feeding her. You knew you were lying to her. You knew she was lying to me. Lying to herself. Lying to him.

And you let it happen.

You sat across from her in restaurants, or in parked cars, or in places I don’t even want to picture, while I sat alone on the dark windowsill, staring out at a world that I was sure had forgotten about me.

I told myself that Mum would be back soon. That she’d just lost track of time. That she was simply “with friends”, like she always said.

But I knew.

I knew because I watched.

I watched those roads for years, Marcus.

I waited.

For her.

For the truth.

For something that would never come.

And you—you had her the whole time.

Do you remember the wardrobe, Marcus?

There were no disguises the first day I found you in my house.

There were no fake voices.

Just a man who didn’t belong in my home.

It didn’t happen just once.

It happened again and again and again and again.

I would come home early from school—maybe I was poorly, maybe there had been a fire alarm, maybe I had forgotten something, maybe because I wanted you gone. 

And the moment I stepped inside my home, I felt it—you.

Something was wrong.

I knew you were there.

The house was too still.

The way a room feels just before a door slams.

I’d run up the stairs - Mum and Dad's wardrobe door. Slightly ajar.

I didn’t need to check.

I knew you were in there.

Even after all the years you hid in there, I never opened that wardrobe door to expose your pathetic naked body.

Not once.

Not because I was afraid of you, Marcus, I wasn’t.

I was furious.

But by then, I had learned to hold the world together while the adults tore it apart.

And maybe, deep down, I knew that opening that door wouldn’t change a thing.

Maybe I left it closed because I wanted you to feel it.

Trapped. Waiting. Powerless.

Just like I was.

Instead, I slammed my fists against the wood.

I pounded the doors so hard the hinges rattled, and the wood splintered into my hands.

I screamed, a child’s desperate, wild howl,

A sound ripped straight from the gut, raw and animalistic.

“STOP LYING! STOP HIDING! JUST LEAVE US ALONE! PLEASE!"

"I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! YOU’RE RUINING EVERYTHING!”

I screamed and screamed and screamed, my voice breaking against the walls,

while you stood inside, trapped in the dark, listening.

Did you feel anything, Marcus?

Did your hands sweat?

Did your pulse race?

Did you stand, motionless, heart hammering, waiting for me to run?

Or did you just roll your eyes,

Amused by the child pounding against your hiding place,

Knowing, even then, that no one would believe her?

I’ve blocked out what my mother would say while I howled. I knew she stood motionless in a towel, covering her infidelity with a dirty old pilling bath towel, the small fuzzy balls scratching her porcelain skin. 

Eventually, I told my father about the man in the wardrobe. 

Dad's eyes narrowed like he was trying to piece it together before shaking his head. "No, Claire. That’s just not possible. I don't know what you think you saw, but that doesn't make any sense."

Dad believed Mum would never do that to him. Or do that to me.

And my mother?

After, she told me that if I ever said another word to Dad, I would "ruin the family.".

That if my father left, it would be my fault.

So, I carried it alone.

But I remember, Marcus.

I remember that when I could take no more, when I stood outside that wardrobe, sobbing with rage, voice hoarse from screaming, I would make you a promise.

"I’m going to my room. And when I come out, you’d better be gone."

And every time, I would hear it as I stood in my room.

The thunder of your footsteps down the stairs.

The door slamming.

The screech of tyres as you disappeared back to your own life, or another woman's bed.

And while you were out seducing women in orchestra audiences,

I was cleaning up your wreckage.

I was dragging my mother, drunk and incoherent, out of the street.

I was calling ambulances, begging paramedics to save her life.

I was scrubbing piss and shit off the floor,

wiping vomit from her chin,

watching her turn grey in hospital beds after another overdose, another fall, another night spent chasing oblivion because you showed her in your cowardice that reality was too unbearable to live in.

Ambulance after police car, after ambulance, for years, Marcus.

And you won, didn’t you?

Because my mother never truly came back from what you did. 

She died alone, Marcus.

Alone, on the floor.

Years later, a policeman broke down the door and found her dead body crumpled on the floor - cold, alone, blue, already gone. I called the police that day. After years of having to trust myself, I knew she was gone half a day before a policeman confirmed my gut’s knowledge.

And do you know one of the first things my dad said when I called him to tell him she had unexpectedly died, as I sat on my knees, shaking, stunned, and devastated?

"Marcus did this." Dad said. 

And I agree, you emotionally murdered her, Marcus.

Those words tumbled out like a feeling my dad had held in his bones for many years.

And now, my dad's slipping away, too.

Dementia has stolen all his precious memories, yet, thankfully, erased the pain you left behind.

He doesn’t know who I am anymore. He certainly doesn’t know who you are.

But I know who you are.

I am the only one left who remembers all of this, Marcus.

The only one left who still carries the weight of what you did.

And thank God for that.

Because my mother and father? They are finally free.

But I am not.

So, I will speak.

I will say your name.

I will write because writing is what saves me.

And you, Marcus, you are, I guess, quite old now. You will soon fade.

Because no one will ever tell your story, at least not the way it should be told. Without the masks. Without the excuses. Without your carefully constructed version of events.

Helping people tell their stories is my career. I made it my life’s mission to give voices to the unheard and truths to the forgotten. I know what a voice is. I know what truth is. And I know when I am being deceived.

You taught me that.

When I was young, when I was screaming at the wardrobe, when I was banging my fists against the door while you stood inside, silent, knowing no one would believe me. That was your power.

But now, I have mine.

I get to live a life. I get to speak, to write, to carve meaning out of what happened. And you?

You are just the ghost in the wardrobe.

I am happy and successful despite you. You bastard.

You utter bastard.

-The Child You Left Behind

[clairerobbin-blog]

To Give This Grief a Shape

When Did I Lose My Voice?

I don’t know when it happened, what age, what moment, but somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like I could truly speak. Maybe it’s because everyone is carrying so much in all political, emotional, and physical ways. Or maybe it’s because life quietly taught me that my sadness isn’t big enough to take up space.

My dad is preparing for the hospital tomorrow. In many ways, I’ve already lost him. The man who shaped my world, who filled it with deep curiosity, music, and pure magic, who made me feel safe simply by being Alvin, is fading. And, as I watch him lose his identity, I feel like I’m losing a part of my own.

His identity isn’t just his; it is nestled so deeply into the atoms of me and into who I’ve become. And now, as his sense of self unravels, I too feel untethered, like a part of me is disappearing with him. The hardest part is he doesn’t understand what’s happening. He doesn’t know about the surgery or any pain he’ll have to endure. And I can’t bear the cruelty of that, of not being able to explain.

And yet, I feel so ashamed of how much this hurts. I’m not a child anymore, or even a young adult. Shouldn’t I be able to handle this with grace, with more bravery? Shouldn’t I be strong enough to carry it quietly? My dad is relatively old and relatively young. He’s lived a full life. There are people far younger than me, facing unimaginable losses, and yet here I am – relatively old, relatively young, falling apart over my old Dad. It feels selfish, grossly indulgent, and frankly disgusting and embarrassing to be grieving so deeply for a man who still breathes, still laughs, and still feeds bread to birds. How did those despicable feelings ever get tied up in the love I have?

But grief doesn’t listen to logic. 

Grief doesn’t care how old someone is or how much worse other people might have it. It doesn’t measure itself against the pain of others, it simply is. And maybe that’s what feels so unbearable, not just the grief itself, but the utter damn shame of it. The utter damn embarrassment of feeling this sad, this lost, at a time in my life when I should know how to get on with it and navigate it all.

When I should know to just shut the hell up.

But I am, after all, a writer. And in these moments when I feel so squeezed of expression, when it seems like my voice has vanished entirely, I’m compelling myself to write anyway.

I miss the days when I would take the weight of existence, the sorrow, the fear, the love, and scribble it illegibly into a song. I miss standing on a stage, with a guitar, letting it all spill out into something tangible, something I could make and share. Back then, during a time I can hardly remember, I didn’t feel embarrassed to be sad. I didn’t feel silenced by shame or swallowed in self-doubt. Now, I feel muted, as though my voice has been stolen by time, by life, by this unwritten rule that says grief should be small and polite.

I find myself terrified by questions I can’t answer. Is it pathetic, foolish, or ‘too sensitive’ to feel this way? To hold onto this sadness so tightly? Or is it brave to admit that grief, no matter how it comes, is always profound because it’s born from love?

Grief is a chisel, revealing the shape of what mattered most.

And yet, even knowing this, I feel so afraid to speak. Do you ever feel like this? Like the world has somehow convinced you that your grief is too loud, too unseemly, too much? Do you ever feel silenced, not by others, but by the weight of your own shame?

This isn’t a plea for comfort or answers. I’m not looking for reassurance or sympathy. I just needed to put words to the silence inside me. To give this grief a shape, even for a moment.