My eyes mist. “What if taking something seriously is what kills my love for it?”
“Well, now you just sound like my exes,” she whispers with a sarcastic smirk.
I laugh brittlely, pushing away my hair. “Really, though. I’m terrified to lose the purity of this. Songwriting has never abandoned me. When I keep it to myself, music can’t outgrow me or move on from me or leave me behind,” I say softly.
Folly chews on her lip. “Like the rest of us have,” she infers.
I shrug.
“Remember when I said the guy I followed to Portland convinced me to cut myself off from you all?” she asks, and I nod. “That wasalsoso he could keep me to himself. So I couldn’t outgrow him, or move on from him, or leave him behind.”
“You’re saying I’m treating this thing I love like something I want to control.”
“I’m saying people aren’t meant to be controlled, and neither is art.”
I shake my head. “But what if it’s not evengoodart?”
“What if it is?” she asks. “And what if you had the chance to make it even better?”
She watches me with hope. A kind of optimism that kinetically transfers. I wonder if Folly’s aware she’s wearing me down, if she understands she’s turning a one-way door into a clear, open window.
Then Iknowshe is when she says, “You can go and still be pissed at them. You can go and be frustrated at how you got there. You can be so angry that you block phone numbers, and write mean, ruthless lyrics, and do what they want out of spite and absolutely nothing else. I give you permission. I’ll be pissed at them too.”
I laugh briefly. “They don’t get to sayI told you so.”
“They don’t get to sayyou’re welcome,” she adds.
“I’ll learn enough to write one scathing song about each of them. And then I’ll drop out if I feel like it.”
“And you’ll meet me in Mexico.”
“And you’ll pick up the phone if I call,” I say, though it’s also a question.
Folly nods and whispers, “I promise.”
“I’m so fucking scared,” I say.
She grabs both of my hands and locks her green eyes on mine. “But if your curiosity and your fear were on a balanced scale—which side would weigh more?”
Stage five: acceptance.
Chapter 33
August, Now
I keep circling back to why I never wrote about Liam beyond that one song. It seems like I should’ve done one or the other—contacted him to keep the door open or written more extensively about him to lock it closed.
One or the other, and I did neither. Almost as if I’d been in a four-year-long holding pattern.
Even after I enrolled in school. Started classes. Made friends.
Even after I worked through my disappointment with Zara and Maren, over one tense weekend when all four of my sisters came to Nashville for a surprise visit. In a family as big as ours, we were bound to grow up fundamentally different. But we finally reckoned with just how vast our differences are in a therapeutic conversation.
“We wanted you to stop selling yourself short,” Maren had said to me in defense. I’d heard that line from her a million times. Which had, over the course of my young adulthood, made me resent the sentiment.
“If it had ever been a suggestion,” I remember explaining, “instead of a prescription, then maybe I’d have developed some agency a long time ago.”
In exchange, she and Candicefinallyshared with us what it was like for them to grow up with memories of Mom, to witness her leaving, to claw the burden of our family onto their backs alongsideDad. Folly apologized for deserting us, Zara for shutting down, me for infantilizing myself. We all agreed that we love our dad, but that he’s fallible and imperfect like the rest of us. Most importantly, we promised to have better grace and understanding for each other for the rest of our lives.
