twenty-five
Here is what I know now and didn’t know then.
After meeting me for the first time all those years ago, Eden went home and got in by climbing up the trellis of her window. Then she crawled on her already ruined knee. She had to get back inside her room via a hole she had dug inside the casing of her window.
She would proceed to do that exact thing nearly every day for the next two years, just to walk two miles to the woods and meet me.
And she would be careful not to be found out, because she was a prisoner in her uncle’s home. His name was Solomon, but she was forced to call him ‘Father’.
…
All these years after Eden and I broke up, all I was thinking about was myself: my pain, my hurt. As if no one in the world had ever felt pain. I was stupid and immature. I was selfish.
There is no excuse: I should have known better.
I felt that I alone existed in my suffering, even though I was a daily witness to my little brother’s hellish existence and my mom’s hidden pain. Especially since she got sick with arthritis a year after I got my first album out, and had to face losing the one thing that made life bearable–playing the cello. But nothing could be compared to my pain, I thought.
No one else was facing anything as bad as what I was going through.
Then, I met Wes and Theo. Our paths crossed as I skyrocketed into their sphere of super-fame and billions, and for the first time, I met people who had real, life-threatening problems. They were both in pain. They were both fighting something unimaginably horrible. They handled it each in their own way, sometimes badly and sometimes better, but they had something in common:
They dealt with their own personal hell by helping others.
Meanwhile, all I did was win Grammys and wallow in my lyrics as I sank further into self-hatred and despair.
And it was no god who did that to me.
I did the worst thing that ever happened to me all by myself.
And all this time, Eden was somewhere out there, picking up what shattered pieces that monster had left of her life, and fighting to stay alive.
Without me.
Without anyone.
Her family were there for her, but they were all strangers to her. I was the one person she had known in her old life; and I wasn’t there.
I had abandoned her.
But at the same time, I was everywhere. She kept seeing my face everywhere, and my fame only mounted. If she read a post about me and clicked out of it, five more would pop up. The next day, fifteen would take their place, staring at her from the screen of her phone.
And so it went on, until seeing my face was unavoidable.
Her sisters told me later that she used to come to my concerts and just stand outside the stadiums, just to listen to my voice. She would just stand there and cry. When they found out that she was doing it, they always made sure to be there with her, thus unintentionally following my career as if they were my biggest fans. They thought she was just a superfan, but she wasn’t. She was just looking for the only person she knew in this vast, unknown world.
When she randomly found my songs, she thought she had found me.
But no. That wasn’t me. She had found poison.
She had found a bunch of songs that told her, with every single word, how much she had hurt me. How much I hated her .
I did this to her.
I, all on my own.
…
The first time I will see her after four years, it will be at my New Year’s Eve concert in New York.
I won’t know that, of course, when I step on the stage. I won’t know she’s in the audience and I certainly won’t know that she’s about to change my life.
I won’t know what’s happened to her—I won’t know what’s been happening to her since I saw her for the last time. I will have no idea that she has been fighting for her life, literally fighting for it, every day.
I will also have no idea that stupid Wes Spencer has hired her to work for me, on the request of Theo Vanderau, of all people.
‘Did you do this to me?’ I will ask Wes in a few months.
‘It was Theo,’ he will reply.
But the truth is, it’s both of them, both of those brilliant, powerful idiots—and neither Eden nor I will know it yet.
She won’t have realized it, that Spencer has already approved her application to work with the great Issy Woo. He will have made the decision by himself, without talking to me first. And why would he? No one knows that I had a girl once, and that she broke me. And no one knows that Eden is the same girl who has been on the news as the victim of one of the most horrific crimes that rocked the country the last twenty years.
Least of all, me.
So, Eden will get hired to work one-on-one with me, and will be so happy that she will cry non-stop for two entire days. She still can’t handle happiness or hope–she is too scared of them. Her sisters will tell me that afterwards, and much else besides.
Then, finally, with her tears barely dried, eyes still puffy with pain of hope, she will come to that New Year’s concert, to see me in person for the first time in years.
It is the first time she will actually be inside one of my concerts, a part of the crowd. Before, she always stayed away from crowds and stressful situations, but this time she will come, shaking and scared. Hoping I have hired her. Hoping I want to see her, finally. Finally .
And then, while she is watching me perform Heartbreaker , I will see her from the stage. I will catch her eye. I will have no idea it is her–she has changed so much.
But she will see me look at her.
And she will see the hatred in my eyes.
And that, right there, that will be the definitive moment. That will be the moment that exposes the truth, my truth. The truth of what I have become.
She will sees who I have become, who I am now, and it will nearly kill her.
I will watch her die from the stage.