The cabin was on the side of a mountain. Asheville was the nearest city, but that doesn’t mean it was nearby. I was nowhere. It was quiet and chilly. I spoke to nobody. November was almost gone. I wasn’t looking forward to December.

It was the end of a long, painful year. I’d lost some people that I loved very much. I’d found myself in a cold place.

My goal on this mountain was to write a feature-length screenplay. I’d had the idea for the script for almost a year, and had written exactly three words: Off. The. Black.

In my brain, the script was complete. And sublime. In actuality, the screenplay was as real as a unicorn tap-dancing across an invisible dance floor all the way to the moon. Which is to say, the possibility of even beginning the script — not to mention completing it — seemed like utter fantasy.

I’d grown bored of, well, me.

Each morning I would walk to the edge of a mountain lake. I would stare at the lake. I believed that this lake would inspire me. I tossed things into the lake (pebbles, pencils). Day after day, I tossed. But there was no inspiration, just ripples.

In a few more days, I might have considered tossing myself into the lake. I’d be found with the spring thaw. People might believe that the title page of my script was a suicide note (“‘Off the Black’? He must have been very depressed.” “Yes, but at least he understood the value of brevity.”)

Then, without warning, something terrifying and new arrived from Atlanta:

Hope.

My sister and her boyfriend pulled up the gravel driveway in their station wagon. They would stay for two nights. Now, my sister and I have a peculiar relationship. We fight. We’ve always fought. We anticipate glorious fights we’ll have in 20 years.

But on this occasion my sister didn’t come to fight with me. Or even to visit me. She’d come for the cabin. She and her boyfriend hiked. They enjoy walking up mountains. I like to stare at mountains while remaining stationary.

We barely spoke.

But my sister was a saint in disguise. She’d brought her CD collection. I devoured her CD collection. Most were CDs I’d heard before, though I finally came to one I didn’t recognize. The group was called Hope for Agoldensummer. I played this CD.

The music was exotic, ethereal, fragile — full of childlike wonderment. There were spare arrangements with singing saw, xylophone, clarinet, acoustic guitar, strange percussion, so much reverb that it seemed to be playing in another dimension, and, at its center, one of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous female voices I’d ever heard. The singer’s voice was booming and haunted, and the lyrics were full of mourning, yet also managed to be hopeful and at times even silly.

This was summer music about winter themes.

I listened to the CD on repeat for the next week.

I began to hear it in my dreams.

It colored the way I looked at everything around me.

And suddenly, I knew that I could write my screenplay. While I’d understood the plot for some time, I had no sense of tone, and the characters had no pulse, or soul. But now they did.

The world of my script was peopled with funny-sad characters, and funny-sad themes, and when the moon hovered in the night sky of this world, and when the train ran by in the distance, and when the characters were at their loneliest, there was a tone that was both gentle and non-judgmental and occasionally humorous.

The script became a summer story about winter themes.

Flash-forward to this exact moment: Mon., Dec. 19, and I’ve spent the entire weekend in the recording studio with Claire Campbell (the brains and soul and voice behind Hope for Agoldensummer). We’ve barely slept. But the score for Off the Black, my first feature, is finished.

And I love it.

I’ve told Claire that for the next film I want to make, the score will require Hawaiian steel and slack-string guitar—even though the story takes place on Cape Cod in the middle of February.

This one will be a winter story about summer themes.

The silence is gone for now. I can hear a melody. I’m hopeful again.

-James Ponsoldt