I walked on stage.
The light hit me and the room registered me and a ripple of anticipatory quiet moved through it, the kind of quiet that was its own form of attention, and I stood at the microphone and looked out at the room and opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Not nothing—I made a sound. But the sound was wrong, pale and thin, a sound that didn't belong to me, a sound that lived at the surface of the thing and couldn't find the place underneath where the real voice lived.
I played the opening chord and it rang out fine through the monitors, but my voice when I came in on the first line was the voice I used at the beginning of a set at The Piazza when I was background music, when I was being unobtrusive. This room was not a room for unobtrusive. My body knew it, and my body was deciding, in real time, in front of three hundred people, that it wasn't going to do this.
I got through the first verse.
I don't know how. I was outside myself watching it happen, the way people described car accidents—the strange slow detail of a thing going wrong before you've understood that it's going wrong.
My fingers found the chords. My voice found the notes. But the space between what I was capable of and what was comingout of me was a distance I could feel with my whole body. The room felt it, too—I could see it in the way attention shifted, the way phones came up, the way two people at a table near the front began talking quietly to each other in the way people did when what was happening onstage wasn't holding them.
The song ended.
I stood at the microphone.
I saidthank youquietly into the darkness beyond the lights.
I picked up my guitar.
I walked off the stage.
I walked through the green room, stopping only briefly to pick up my case, past the two other performers who looked up as I came through, past the folding table with the pretzels, down the back hallway, and out through the fire exit into the cold Charleston night.
The door banged shut behind me.
I stood in the alley.
The cold hit my face and I stood there with my guitar case in my hand and my heart doing something that wasn't quite pounding and wasn't quite stopped but was somewhere terrible in between. I breathed in the January air and breathed it out and did not let myself cry because I was in an alley behind a venue on King Street and I was not going to cry in an alley.
I pulled out my phone.
I looked at Tommy's last text.
That's my girl. You're going to be incredible.
I put the phone back in my pocket.
I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet.
I wasn't ready to hearit's okayoryou'll get it next timeor any of the things that were probably true and were going to feel, right now, like kindness wrapped around a wound that needed a minute before it could be touched.
I stood in the alley for a long time.
The cold settled around me.
Inside, the muffled sound of the next performer starting their set came through the fire door—a man's voice, warm and confident, filling the room the way rooms needed to be filled, the way I had not done.
I put my guitar in its case.
I started walking home.
I was three blocks from the apartment when I stopped on the sidewalk and took out my phone.
I typed:I choked. I froze. I walked off the stage after one song. I'm such a loser.
