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far gone, to leave the music behind. She would glance at
that years-old pink Post-It, stuck with tape to the wall
above her dorm bed, her thirteen-year-old handwriting
still singing out her dream, and she would think to herself
that it had probably been too late for a long time.

She swore up and down that she loved it, lived for it,
but there was more desperation than joy behind her eyes
when she stood in the stage lights. She swore she was like
a helium balloon, floating away without her anchor. She
swore it kept her grounded, but she looked more like she
was sinking.

Sometime in her second week at college, she woke up
in the early hours of the morning, put on a sweatshirt,
and slipped out the door of her dorm to the city streets.
She could not see the stars, not really, but she sat atop a
low brick wall on the edges of campus and squinted up,
past the street lamps, toward the faint glittering dots in
the light-polluted sky.

She could not see the stars, not really, but when she
focused, she thought she could still hear them singing.

Late one night after a performance, sitting in an
almost-silent Denny's with some other singers, she leaned
back in her chair and lightly said that she'd sell her soul
if the bargain nieant that she could really, really sing. If
she could sing like nobody else had ever been able to. And
an acquaintance whose name she didn't really know, a
slim, short boy with golden hair and deep green eyes and
an angelic tenor, laughed and said, "Honey, wouldn't we
all." She smiled back, hoped it looked convincing, and

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