🌧️ Silent Ache
The night was warm. So was the lie.
Inspired by the Song “Backseat (All I Got)” by The Sam MacPherson.. I recommend that you listen to it in the background.
Behind the Story
There’s a lyric in Sam MacPherson’s “Backseat (All I Got)” that stopped me the first time I heard it.
Nobody breaks up in the backseat.
Just that. The whole story in one line.
The song is about surface tension. The held breath of a relationship already over, two people sitting inside the illusion of it anyway. Not out of cruelty. Out of something that looks a lot like tenderness but is really just avoidance.
I knew that feeling. I knew it at seventeen, sitting next to someone I cared about and couldn’t find the words to leave. Not because the feeling was gone. Because I didn’t know how to be honest without becoming the person who hurt them.
Looking back, what surprises me is how much I convinced myself I was being kind.
What I didn’t want to write was a story about a bad person. Sam isn’t a villain. He’s someone caught between a good memory and an honest moment, choosing the memory because the moment feels too sharp to hold.
That’s not cruelty.
The rain in the illustration came later. But it was always there in the feeling. Something that falls on everything equally. The ending and the beginning. The lie and the truth underneath it.
It doesn’t choose sides. It just keeps coming down.
On the Visual Process
The zine opens on a cover saturated in cool, rain-drenched tones, the couple barely visible through fogged glass. They are close and look held. The blue light makes it look like something worth keeping.
That is what makes it uncomfortable to look at.
That was the mood I wanted to set before the story even begins. Not dramatic, not violent, but muted. The way grief looks when it hasn’t broken open yet.
The rest of the panels were built around that same contrast: the warmth of the couple’s closeness against the cold of rain-streaked windows. Sam holds her. His face gives nothing away. It all looks fine.
What surprised me working through the visual references was how much tenderness can exist in a moment that is quietly ending. How two people can look like love from the outside and feel like something else entirely from within.
Then there is panel seven.
A heart drawn in condensation on the fogged glass, paired with the line: so he kept the lies between their mouths, soft as breath. Neither character drew it. It just appeared, the way the truth of a moment sometimes does, outside of anyone’s awareness, in the space between two people who aren’t saying the thing.
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A Question for You
Have you ever chosen a good memory over an honest moment?