Chapter 8 #2
Every night is the same. I tell myself I won’t go to the wings.
I tell myself I’ll stay in my dressing room.
I tell myself that respecting his boundary means disappearing from his line of sight.
Keeping my end of the contractual obligations, keeping my distance.
I make these promises in the quiet moments before soundcheck, in the shower as I prepare, in the car on the way to the venue.
Every night, like an addict needing his next high, my feet carry me there anyway.
The pull is magnetic, irresistible. I feel myself being drawn to that same spot without conscious thought, my body remembering what my mind tries to forget.
I stand in the same place, half in shadow, ignoring the whispers of the crew working around me, watching him take his seat at the piano like it’s an extension of his body.
Watching the way the lights find him no matter how still he sits.
Watching the way the audience quiets the moment his fingers touch the keys.
His control is absolute, over the instrument, over his body, over the room itself.
He commands attention without asking for it, draws every eye in the house with nothing more than the precise movement of his hands.
I didn’t realize how much I missed watching him play until I started doing it again.
The delicate precision, the way his shoulders relax just slightly when he gets lost in a particularly complex passage, the almost imperceptible tilt of his head when he reaches a resolution that satisfies something deep within him.
These are the details I stored away years ago, and they’re all still there, unchanged by time or distance or pain.
Or maybe I did realize, and that’s why it hurts the way it does. Maybe I knew exactly what I was walking back into and did it anyway.
He doesn’t watch me anymore. That’s the difference.
There was a time when he couldn’t help it.
My personal cheer squad, my motivation, my symphony.
When his eyes would track me the second I stepped into the light.
When he played like he was answering something I’d started.
We fed off of each other, our music a call and response.
Two instruments having a conversation only we understood, speaking a language created between us in late-night practice sessions and early morning compositions.
Now, when it’s my turn onstage, he’s already gone. Vanished before the lights fully find me, before the first note leaves my saxophone. My solos feel incomplete without his witness, like I’m sending messages into a void with no receiver. His absence lands harder than any confrontation could.
I play my set on autopilot most nights, fingers moving from muscle memory, saxophone warm in my hands while my head is somewhere else entirely.
I give the audience everything they came for.
Big notes. Open heart. Soul bared on command.
I smile and engage and prowl the stage with all the confidence I’m known for.
I meet their energy, feed it back to them amplified.
Inside, I feel emptied out. A performance of a performance, layers deep in pretending.
There was a moment in one city though, I don’t remember which, where I looked up mid-phrase and caught his eyes on me. He stood in the back of the venue, Eli beside him. The crowd between us seemed to disappear, the distance collapsing in that single shared glance.
Just for a second. He was there, looking at me the way he used to all those years ago.
Open and free with pride shining in his eyes.
Then the light shuttered out and the hate returned.
I can almost hear my name being called in a chorus of applause, feeling his love turn into betrayal when I stood and walked toward a future that should have been his.
I blinked and he was gone, swallowed by the darkness at the back of the hall, leaving me alone in the spotlight.
After that, I never saw him again. It was as if his presence was a mirage, a trick of my desperate mind creating what it most wanted to see.
I searched for him each night, eyes straining into the shadows beyond the stage lights, but there was nothing.
Just the weight of his absence pressing against my chest, making it harder to draw breath into my lungs.
Like I told Asha, maybe this is what I deserve.
Maybe this quiet erosion is the price of what I took.
Maybe standing there night after night, feeling his anger burn without ever touching me, is the closest thing to accountability I’ll get.
Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment, confusing suffering with growth because it feels cleaner than doing the real work.
Maybe I’ve built a narrative where pain equals redemption because that’s easier than facing the possibility that some things can’t be fixed, no matter how much you bleed for them.
Either way, the chasm between us widens with every mile we travel.
Each hotel room, each new venue, each performance driving the wedge deeper, confirming what I’ve feared all along; whatever we once had is too broken to repair.
Two passing ships in the night, Asha said once.
I didn’t understand it then. The metaphor seemed too simple, too clean for the messy tangle of history and hurt between us.
I do now, and the worst part? Despite the separation, the coming and going.
Despite his silence. Despite the fact that his life no longer includes me in any way that matters.
Despite the coldness that radiates from him whenever we’re forced into the same space.
Despite the way he looks through me rather than at me, as if I’m already a ghost in his life.
I still show up. I still stand there. I still watch.
Night after night, city after city, my heart breaking a little more each time he walks away without looking back.
Some part of me believes that if I endure this long enough, it will mean something. My heart exposed and open wide for him to see my sincerity, my apology. As if persistence alone could bridge the gap I created. As if simply showing up could erase the pain I caused.
Because some part of me thinks pain is payment. Suffering is the currency that will eventually buy forgiveness or at least understanding.
Because some part of me knows something is coming, this will come to a head at the end of all this.
Whatever is waiting there feels bigger than either of us is prepared to survive.
It’s building, like pressure before a storm, like the electricity in the air before lightning strikes.
An inevitability we’re both hurtling toward, powerless to stop it, perhaps not even wanting to.