I finish “Novembers” with sweat glistening on my arms, feeling like I’ve run marathons down memory lanes. I’m immersed in the song, emerging from the person I was in its lyrics, the girl saying goodbye to the singer-songwriter she dated for exactly one year.
She was twenty-seven, sitting in her car under Crescent Heights’s streetlights, pulling up her iPhone notes so the lyrics wouldn’t leave her. She’d just gotten dumped one year to the day since her first hookup with the guy she’d met before his Palladium show. Reflecting on the calendar quirk, she’d started to feel like every beginning was just the beginning of something ending. What’s November in love over November in pain? What’s November mean when every one’s the same?
In the roar of the crowd, I pause, returning to the Riley who stands on this stage, no more or less me than the one in the song.
I live for shows. The kaleidoscope they let me become, how I shift through pieces of my past, memories summoned on guitar strings. The three-minute slivers of my soul I pull on like the costumes waiting for me in my wardrobe.
With every song I’ve played tonight, I’ve uncovered past versions of myself. Past Rileys who fell in love and had their heart broken. It doesn’t matter how many people stand in front of me, screaming my lyrics. While my hands are on my guitar, my lips pressed to the mic, each song is a time capsule containing pieces of my heart.
When the reverberating echoes of the song fade, I feel connected. Not only to the people surrounding me, the glittering dark expanse of cell phones held high over the heads of the crowd. I feel connected to myself.
The lighting changes, and I place my guitar on the stand positioned exactly where I requested it. With a sip of water, I collect myself. I let go of the girl who wrote “Novembers.” I close my eyes, immersing myself in the sounds of the stadium, ready to become the next Riley.
Every stage is its own field of play, with its own feel, in its own relationship with the surrounding space. Mine is curved, made of smooth gray paneling with metal lips. I step up to the mic stand, where I notch the microphone into the clip.
The audience waits. I smile. “Has your life ever changed in a moment?” I ask.
They cheer. The roar is exhilarating. It’s what popular music is meant to do, what popular art is meant to do. The point isn’t just pleasure. It’s unity.
“This next song changed my life forever. Because of you.” When they cheer louder, I look out over the endless lights.
It was worth it. Every hurt, every breakup—all of it was worth it to be standing here now.
“The subject of this song probably doesn’t know he changed my life twice,” I go on. “Once when he first kissed me on a piano bench, then again when I thought about that kiss years later and got my guitar out in the middle of the night to write a song.”
I feel my heart pounding. It’s not nerves—it’s the new Riley. She’s laying herself open, her soul naked.
I know Max is listening, and I’m not embarrassed. When you’ve written a breakup song about a guy who splintered your heart ten years ago, it’s hard to be embarrassed about anything. The vulnerability in my voice is no stage persona, no rehearsed intro. It’s real.
In the drum of Madison Square Garden, I know my introduction is working. The crowd is fervent. I hear cheers, screams, even crying. The anticipation rolls over the stage in electric heatwaves.
I let them. I welcome them.
Finally, I speak again.
“This one is called ‘Until You,’ ” I say. Into the eruption of sound, I go on. “And I’d like to invite an old friend of mine up to play it with me.”
I look back over my shoulder, expectant.
Max stumbles onto the stage. He appears immediately out of place. Not just because he’s dressed not like a rock star in slacks and a button-down, but because he’s a piece of my past, stepping into my present. He’s a secret standing in plain sight. He’s a name I used to whisper on my lips now surrounded by speakers.
“Max Harcourt and I used to play together when we were twenty,” I explain, feeling like I’m walking out to the edge of everything. The fans know a piece of our story without knowing it’s our story—yet. “He’s still the best piano player I’ve worked with, and since this song has to be played on piano, I knew I had to have Max join me.”
Max looks up into the lights while the audience welcomes him. The spotlight’s powerful glare glints off the lenses of his glasses. It’s like he’d rather reflect the light instead of stand in it.
The piano is on the side of the stage, dark finish shining, the polished white keys stark in hyper-saturated contrast. When Max steps forward, the audience hushes. Suddenly, I feel the first nudge of nerves of the night. What if this doesn’t work? What if we perform so stiffly together everyone ignores Max completely?
Then Max sits down at the keys, and his eyes find mine.
When I nod, he begins the intro.
In a few notes, he transforms. He’s a different person—or, he’s the person I fell in love with years ago. The feelings overwhelm me. It’s hard to recognize they’re from the past when he’s right in front of me. I’m not in love, I need to remind myself. I’ve just opened the time capsule.
He plays with methodical grace, his shoulders rolling while his hands cover the keys. His hair, swept up from his forehead, stays in place precariously, like it was combed quickly. His expression is intense, his eyes fixed on the instrument. Visible beneath his rolled-up cuffs, I watch familiar forearms ripple with elegant motion.
Remembering how I would notice those forearms while those fingers were on me, it occurs to me playing piano is one of the sexiest things men can do.
“Late nights, new homes,” I sing, my melody joining perfectly with his. I feel him in his playing, and I know he feels me, the language we used to speak to each other rushing back.
I’m reaching the first chorus when he finally looks up. Right at me.
His eyes light up with luminescence I’m pretty sure isn’t from the spotlights. Instantly, it’s like he can’t look away. Singing the chorus, I’m struck by how it’s the look he would give me when we used to perform while we were dating, the one I’ve noticed in old videos of our earliest performances. I feel like I’m in possession of something stolen, recognition circumstance meant to deny me. Like I wasn’t supposed to know how familiar every movement of his hands on the keys is. Like I wasn’t intended to feel my heart swell desperately when his gaze says mine is the voice he hears in his dreams.
It makes me pull my eyes from his.
In the final notes of the chorus, I’m hit with flashing fury. I’m not supposed to remember the expression on Max’s face or the way his hands caress the keys. I’m supposed to have lived with them for the past decade. Circumstance didn’t deny me them—he did.
In the slipstream of the stage, something happens. The Riley I change into is one I haven’t entirely inhabited even in the many previous performances of this song. I felt the memory of her, the ghost. She walked with me down the sad pathways of “Until You” in studios and soundstages.
Now I feel her fully. Like she’s drawn to the one new piece of tonight’s performance.
Max.
I’m twenty, packing my car, my heart racing with happiness. Our amps, mine and Max’s. My guitar. My luggage, clothing enough for fifteen days in Nashville. The June sun sweltered down on the driveway of my place, from which we were planning to leave because it was closer to the freeway. I didn’t even care how much I was sweating. I felt like nothing could shake my excitement. Nothing.
The only missing piece was Max. He was driving over with his luggage and, of course, his keyboard. I remember how with every car I heard on my profoundly ordinary street, I got the same giddy rush of hope.
Music meant only joy to me then. It meant only harmony. It meant only companionship.
Only love.
Except finally Max’s car did get there. I’d never seen the expression on his face when he stepped out into the glaring day.
He said nothing. It said everything.
With frantic disbelief I stared past him into his car. In the Camry’s windows, it was unmistakable. His luggage was nowhere in sight. Nor his keyboard. My heart stuck in my throat.
“What’s going on?” I mustered.
“I’m so sorry,” Max started.
I was struck by the lack of baby or love, the pet names Max had started shyly using in recent months. They were very him. Nothing exaggerated, yet everything he meant.
“I’m not going to come with you,” he went on.
“Why?” I gulped out.
Standing in Madison Square Garden’s lights, I still feel embarrassed for how fast I searched for other explanations. God, I hope nothing happened with his family. Or . . . Maybe he dropped his keyboard. Maybe it’s smashed into plastic pieces. Or . . .
I ran out of other possibilities quickly. It was none of those things, my mind’s cruelest voice reminds me. It was you, Riley. You weren’t what he wanted.
“I need to stay here. I need to start running Harcourt Homes,” he explained.
The heaviness in his voice conveyed what his succinct explanations didn’t. He wasn’t saying the roof would fall in or the money would run out or the residents would riot if he, Max Harcourt, were not personally calling bingo that summer. He didn’t mean the home needed him. He meant he needed the home.
“I shouldn’t—” He struggled to explain himself. “I’m not . . . meant for doing music with you. It’s not . . . me,” he said.
I knew it was his choice. His right to live the life he wanted. He wasn’t who he was on purpose, wasn’t choosing what he chose out of spite. It’s why I haven’t spent the past decade hating him.
Yet—somewhat selfishly, I recognize—I was hurt. I didn’t just feel like we’d realized we were incompatible. I felt rejected. I felt startled to learn the man I was head over heels in love with had suddenly come to the conclusion that the core of my hopes and dreams wasn’t worth very much to him.
I did something I haven’t done much since. I started to cry. “Please, Max,” I whimpered. “We’ve planned this for months.”
He shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said.
Not I won’t. I could have found hope in I won’t. I won’t can change into maybe, even one day into yes.
I can’t was impossible.
Except it wasn’t, I guess. Here he is, coaxing wonder from the keys like I knew he would. I can’t. For months, Max Harcourt filled my heart with three little words. With two, he shattered it in ways I’m not sure I ever mended. This, touring together, was our plan ten years ago. Instead, we’re only here now.
It isn’t even because he wants to resuscitate our dream, either. He just wants to try on my life before returning home.
I went on our Nashville tour. I stayed in the unspeakably shitty hotel room I’d dreamed of sharing with Max, instead using the exhausting vigor of the performing schedule to distract myself from the gutting loneliness.
In my unexpected spare time, I found myself writing new songs—my first breakup songs. I could write one complete song during the day, premiere the song for my small crowd of patrons, then repeat the process with something new the next day.
With each night, I started to notice the strange effect of this wretched routine. My breakup songs were the ones my listeners loved. While they nodded their heads passively to my up-tempo paeans of young freedom, I could watch their faces change when my wounded chords grabbed hold of them.
I immersed myself in it with wild, reckless zeal. I wrote more new lyrics, using Max for inspiration. I lived my feelings out loud, covering every sad song in my repertoire. It worked, every night.
It’s worked for ten years since.
What I’d discovered was undeniable. Heartbreak was horrible, powerful magic.
It was Max’s dark gift. In rending my heart, he reinvented my entire relationship with music, leaving me with what I’d suspected. What doesn’t kill you makes you a great songwriter.
It’s no longer only my proudest joy. It’s my first instinct when I’m hurting—how I reach impulsively to stretch the strings of my guitar so they sing the pain in my chest. It’s the lover I come to with my sadness as well as my passion.
Instincts hard-won from him. From the music we never got to make.
What a legacy.
This emotional hurricane has swept me up in the short moments separating chorus from verse. Madison Square Garden is resonating with Max’s playing, the notes filling up the darkness. If I get madder, the rage in me will interfere with the performance. I turn my back on him. I won’t finish the song with the memory of lost gazes looking me right in the face.
“Little lights, close hearts . . . ” I sing to the crowd, feeling disappointed with myself. The point of bringing Max on tour is to heighten the song’s mythos. I want them to see the music rendered in life in front of them, feel the lyrics written into reality. If I can’t make eye contact while singing, then I might as well be onstage by myself.
Hitting the second chorus, I reach inside myself. I’m Riley Wynn. I’m in Madison Square Garden. I didn’t get here because I flinch easily. When Max crushed my heart, I didn’t collapse—instead, I remade myself onstage.
I won’t ruin this night, the launch of my tour, because I can’t control my heartsick resentment. I need to find my way forward.
When I returned from Nashville, I was single. I remember the shock of realizing my pride was starting to outweigh my pain. If I no longer had Max, I had myself. I had my musicianship. I had my voice. I had stories—sad ones, now, which I was learning to use to spellbinding effect.
I had started living the songs I wanted to make my name, and I had no intention of stopping.
As I sing, I remind myself Max Harcourt isn’t the love of my life. He’s just a great song.