In March, I went back to my parents’ house outside Chicago for the first time since moving out. I’d lived there my whole life, but it was no longer home, more like a museum. The grass outside was frozen and the mess in my teenage bedroom was exactly where I’d left it. Heaps of clothes untouched, books lying open to the very same pages. The whole thing could have been a dream. I saw a doctor for the daily, sometimes twice-a-day, panic attacks that had started a few weeks after the show closed. I started looking for a therapist.

I gave my Fangirling talk at the University of Wisconsin. My parents and I sat in the hotel restaurant with glass windows extending all the way up to a very high ceiling, overlooking the frozen lake that Otis Redding’s plane crashed into (R.I.P. that time that Man tried to get me to dance with him to “Try a Little Tenderness”; Young-Girls get weary). I sobbed. “I did this show every night for eight months, I repeated the same words over and over, it was the most amazing experience, and now I have nothing. No document, no journal, no proof of what happened to me.” My dad suggested speaking into a recorder and just going through everything that had taken place. But that would mean it was over. Man was my last remaining attachment to the perfect little snow globe of those first few months in New York, and we all knew that was pretty much doomed. I broke down again days later in my dad’s office chair, said I just knew it was unsustainable. I moved into a friend’s, in the city, for the rest of my stay. I started a notecard system for working through my panic, reviewing our time together before the show closing broke the spell, without getting too painfully nostalgic. I tried to think back to the fall and winter, see what specifically I wanted to salvage. But it was just the simple being together that could happen when both people knew, somewhere only slightly consciously, that the long-term was not a possibility. The ease. The open eyes. I did feel like myself around him. I wasn’t always censoring and posturing. Sometimes we would just be lying around and joking and talking and it was so so so…and then I became aware of what was happening, and had to kill it, by making a joke or being a brat or something. I’m reminded of Oliver Sacks on when he took hallucinogens to see the controversial, rarefied, never-totally-agreed-upon color of indigo:

“[…] as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall. It again had the sort of luminous quality. I leant towards it in a sort of ecstasy. I thought, ‘This is the color of heaven.’ Or, ‘This is the color which Giotto tried to get all his life but never could.’ I thought, ‘Maybe this is not a color which actually exists on the earth, or maybe it used to exist and no longer exists,’ and all of this went through my mind in four or five seconds, and then the blob disappeared, giving me a strong sense of loss and heartbrokenness. And I was haunted a little bit, when I came down, wondering whether indigo did exist in the real world.”

I made progress on Christmas Eve when we were at his place after he saw the show. The city was so quiet and his apartment was all dark except for movies we had on in the background. He was sitting up in bed, sick, allowing me to see him a mess with a cracking voice. I was not worried about catching it, wanted only to show him how much I still liked him, sitting on his lap, noticing everything about him, until I just couldn’t take it anymore and had to throw my face against his shoulder and groan a bunch while he asked “What!” and I groaned some more and finally croaked, like a dying relative, like the old chocolate lady in Spongebob:

“Cuuuute.”

He pulled me up, my face in front of his. “I’m cute?”

“Yep.”

“You’re cute!!!!”

WE WERE BOTH CUTE!!!!! It was a Christmas miracle! I think I proceeded to form non-words with my mouth and flop around. Maybe he did the same. Or maybe we were both real people who managed to get over ourselves and get out more than that. I don’t remember, because I was really there. Now I was so afraid it would never happen again that I jumped whenever he texted me, labored over each response. I had to finally address the inklings of the ending that I’d felt while we were together, even in the circular time zone of the play’s run. My own version of Jessica’s hopping up from the bed to ask if Warren really likes her or not. One night in November, Anna gave us notes in the dressing room, and talked about how important it was that when Jessica is later upset with Warren for telling Dennis that they slept together, she’s not just grossed out, or embarrassed; she’s hurt. She translated Jessica’s dialogue to a simple, stinging, I trusted you.

I listened to “These Days” in the car in the dark on the way to Man’s from the theater, trying to grasp my responsibility to Jessica as the kind of character I’d love from the outside of the show the way that I did Margot Tenenbaum when I first saw her step off the bus to that Nico song at age 13. I tried to explain it all to him, pacing around his living room, how exciting and scary it was that there was such potential for the audience to understand her, to get through to them. I don’t remember if I did an adequate job of it or if he was responsive. I did wake up at 3 A.M. with “More Than This” playing in my head, the malady of death forever reminding me that the show would close, that that would be it, and my late-night head harped on every level in which this period of time was ending: the summer camp feelings of doing a show with so few other people for that long, our games and jokes and two minute-long pre-show chant of almost complete gibberish; our own language. Actually performing the show, this beautiful story, and everything that took place onstage—I was now trying to replay, in my mind, moments I wanted to remember, as I had so often done with love: Warren showing Jessica his toys, the abandon in their stupid fast dancing, the air thick with anxiety when their dancing slows. There were the experiences surrounding the show, my move to New York, paralleled with Jessica’s own leap into the abyss of adulthood, which I now hated myself for having neglected to write down.

And then there was Man. It simply made narrative sense to me that we would close, too.

He woke up and asked what was wrong. I sat up and sank into my own legs, trying to explain, withholding the parts about us, and worried that the parts about the play would seem dumb. Maybe they did, because when I was all done, we shared a moment of silence, before he asked, “Can I touch your butt?”

“…Um, sure.”

We lay back down and I cuddled up against his chest. My tears were soaking through his shirt. Perhaps this gave off a signal I didn’t mean for it to, because then he asked, “Do you want to have sex, or are you too sad?”

“…I…think I’m too sad.”

Back to silence, until a flicker of emotional intelligence: “Is there anything you want me to do?”

DO YOU LIKE ME OR NOT?

I didn’t even realize until I was telling a friend later that it was Jessica’s line from the show. I just got in a cab and went back to my apartment, where I had not slept in weeks, but where I could at least come undone more comfortably.

We can speculate as to whether my mirror neurons had picked up Jessica’s insecurity and anxiety and questioning like Kenny and Anna told me they would, or if Man was just too callous. I trusted you. But I don’t really care anymore. I’ve come a long way from childhood, when I went to great lengths to prevent temporary joys from taking place at all, staying home from birthday parties just to eschew the pains of them ending, preferring to lie on my back in our sunroom and stare at the ceiling while sounds of the kids outside laughing and having fun drifted in through the window.

It was fun for a while
There was no way of knowing
Like a dream in the night
Who can say where we’re going
No care in the world…

When I got back to New York, I met Kieran and his wife for dinner, and started crying into her shoulder as soon as we hugged hello out in front of the restaurant and I smelled her hair: suddenly I was back in their apartment, in Chicago, or the dressing rooms, or any of it. I gave a talk the next night at the Brooklyn Museum, and where public speaking had always come easily, I now felt like a fraud pretending to be any example of motivation or self-esteem. Later that night, I wandered into a psychic on 7th avenue, placed my hands on a crystal ball, and recorded our session into my phone: “You have very stressed, negative energy…You have recently gained more independence…There has been a major change in your character…You have had a past life.”

I do not get out of bed the next day, do not leave my room; at one point find myself backed into the furthermost corner from the door, street, window: not even crying this time, just screaming. I am listening to Judy Collins’s “Both Sides Now,” and the breeziness with which she recites nursery rhyme lyrics about the unknowing I am lost in only spins me out further. How can she be so cheery about what it’s like to really not know where you’ve been, how to love, who you are? I read old diaries and didn’t recognize my handwriting; read old blog posts and couldn’t remember having those thoughts. I found this passage, from a sophomore year editor’s letter, about Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook,” where she suggests that it keeps you on nodding terms with your older self:

“…It terrifies me to think that if I felt as sure in who I was a year ago as I do about who I am now, it means that, in another year, I’ll be sure about some new version of myself, and everything I’m currently latching on to—all of the songs that I think I could listen to forever and all of the friends whom I deeply trust—could mean nothing.”

I think immediately of Jessica’s monologue that friends and three journalists who’d profiled me throughout my school years had each remarked sounded like something I would have written. I’d always disagreed, until now:

“What you’re like now has nothing to do with what you’re gonna be like…Everything you think will be different, and the way you act, and all your most passionately held beliefs are all gonna be completely different, and it’s really depressing…It’s like when you find an old letter you wrote, that you don’t remember writing, and it’s got all these thoughts and opinions in it that you don’t remember having, and it’s written to somebody you don’t even remember having ever written a letter to.”

I guess the goal had been to become hopelessly susceptible to change. Station to station, ashes to ashes.