Starting with our run in Chicago, Kieran always teased me for skipping songs that came on when we all hung out outside rehearsal. I’d interrupt charades or video games to stop something I associated with high school from taking me to another place. “Desperadooo,” he sang, referencing the constantly-having-Proustian-moments guy from Seinfeld. I didn’t know how to explain that it was just too much to go back to my teenage bedroom at the same time that I was in his and his wife’s apartment in the city. It was more confusing to literally go back to my parents’ house after rehearsal or a late night of hanging out. I tried to be stoned whenever I was there so I would be too tired to even try and reconcile my past with all the changes taking place. I painted signs for the wall above my bed to keep myself from regressing. A watercolor of all of Emily Brontë’s “Remembrance”: “Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain.” W.H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”: “You cannot conquer Time.” And the physical reflexes I’d developed to combat any stimulus which evoked a wave of missing: WHITE BEHIND THE EYES became a command for stamping out anything that was not right in front of me.

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I aimed, whenever possible, to place my “Desperado” songs in a new context with people and places from my new, post-high school life. Singing along when Michael played one of them on guitar up in the skyscraper, or on piano at the Old Town restaurant where we always stayed past closing. Petra took me out the weekend I was in New York for show publicity, and dancing, with sort-of-grown-ups, and alcohol, under pink light, to the Cranberries, was EUPHORIC! I ascended in the morning from subway to hotel. My dad was still in the shower. Like a whisper among the news radio coming through the bathroom door, I texted Petra, my New York edition of Rayanne: “The songs you cry to as a teen are the ones you dance to as a young adult.”

One night in NYC, we all went out for burgers. I sat back and watched Kieran and Michael catch up their respective significant others on what had happened that day, content to be the kid who was flying solo but taken care of. “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac came on, barely discernible through the chatter and sticky smells. I had to interrupt.

“You guys! Listen!”

They stared blankly.

“Songs come on in restaurants, Tavi.” Kieran was grinning.

“Okay, sorry.” I put away my newsboy cap and old-timey paper printed with the headline, A SONG WE TALKED ABOUT THREE MONTHS AGO IS PLAYING IN THIS PUBLIC SPACE. “I’m 18, so like, five things have happened in my life, and this is one of them.

At another burgers outing around the time we opened, Kieran and I had a minor miscommunication that flooded me with guilt. I stewed over it for half of a new conversation before apologizing and clarifying, to which he said, “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.”

“A few minutes ago? You said you weren’t in the mood to talk about whatever’s going on and I said ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ but I know you’re not like obligated to share anything with me, it’s not that I expected you to—”

“I’m sure I wasn’t offended! Trust me. I forgot it as soon as it happened.”

“You really don’t remember? It was just now.”

“I couldn’t even tell you what I did yesterday.”

“Well I’ll be thinking about this for the rest of the night!

Kenny once described to me a spectrum of stage actors from intellect to intuition. “On one end, there are actors who show up on the first day of rehearsal knowing exactly how they’ll do the show every night, and it totally does the job, but might make your costar want to blow his brains out after you repeat it for months and months, and makes doing live theater kind of pointless. On the other, there are those who need everything to be completely organic and spontaneous and can’t premeditate a delivery without feeling they’ve killed it, but might also be so in the moment that they change a bunch of stuff without telling you.” Anna once did the same: “Even if an actor doesn’t like to anticipate how they’ll do anything, you need some kind of plan in case you stop feeling like you’re inside of the scene. You have your plan. It’s great. But you need to be able to break out of it.”

To actually, finally live in a work of fiction myself, I believed I had to stop writing, taking pictures, noticing punctums, or hearing music. These had gotten my imagination far enough to conceive of these characters and their world as real, but they also placed me firmly, time and again, in the audience. Or, as the star of a one-woman show. I once lent my high school boyfriend my journal from when we first started seeing each other so he could share in all the memories I deemed too lovely not to write and illustrate, but when he gave it back to me, he said he felt erased.

“I’m a human being! Monica was a human being! So was her daughter! And so is your mother! We are not supporting characters in the fascinating story of your life!” From Kenny’s movie Margaret. A wake-up call to the protagonist, Lisa, who the movie is not named for. Directly. But the teacher character does read the following Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to her class. It’s titled “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” but is presented, in the film, “to a Young Girl.”

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

No more self-eulogizing, replaying, hoarding. The goal was to forget everything as soon as it happened.

We got to the part in Act II when Dennis has to sell Warren’s antique toys he’s been collecting since childhood. “Tell me which of these I should try to hang on to and which I should immediately toss into the gaping maw of Donald Saulk.”

“That’s what it is—a gaping maw.” Kenny’s voice came from the darkened audience, impossible to see. “Dennis and Warren and Jessica have no sense of the future before them. They just know that it’s terrifying, and quickly approaching, and they have to jump in.” ♦