Will you live forever with me, Riley?
I have only minutes until I need to leave the dressing room. I spend them with headphones on, listening to “Homemade Rollercoaster,” desperately hoping I can use my own words to drown out the roar in my head. It works for my fans, I know it does. I’ve seen the TikToks saying I help them escape their self-doubting whispers or their parents fighting or the ugly words of their exes.
Why can’t I work on myself the same way?
Will you live forever with me, Riley?
While they came with no note, Wesley’s flowers have left plenty of his words ringing in my ears. I hate him for them. I want to forget him as much as I regret him.
In the dressing room, I wonder if I ever will. In the midst of everything, the tour, the recognition for The Breakup Record, the photoshoots—Max—I’ve pretended I couldn’t feel him. His memory. The shadow of my greatest mistake has caught up with me now.
It’s easy to say I was young. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was wild. I was impetuous. I didn’t know fast love was different from real love. Or I was chasing fame, glitter-eyed, in love with the idea of the imposing movie star loving me.
I’ve heard every version. Cheap commentary cover songs explaining my doomed love story on the endless jukebox of public opinion.
None of it is right. I fell for my ex-husband for one reason I won’t ever disavow, despite hating the consequences.
He is like me. In desirable, destructive ways, I saw myself in him. I saw it when we first met, some magazine party the January before last with iPads in the gift bags. He was famous, with enough movies to his name for his dark magic to demand recognition. I was newly famous, notable singles making me “one to watch,” “on the rise,” “on the verge,” or whatever phrase each publication or podcast wanted to drop. The lights of the rooftop party glittered in our eyes. When my publicist introduced us, he kissed my hand.
The gesture was like him, I would come to learn. Overdramatic, except not. He has uncanny finesse for flourishes other men’s execution would make outlandishly overdone. Yet for him, they . . . work. The effect intrigued me in ways the formalistic flattery of the kiss did not. I understood, in the moment, how his cool star could continue to rise.
We exchanged numbers. Over the next months, I discovered his disarming other side. In texting, he wasn’t just informal or conversational. He was . . . chatty, effusive, even goofy. He sent me memes. We didn’t get together much due to his demanding international shooting schedule for Reckoning, yet I felt like we knew each other deeply when we met up in Paris for Fashion Week in March.
Instead of scheduled events, we returned to his hotel room. We had hours of sex. His penthouse opened onto the hotel rooftop, where I joined him, overlooking—what else?—the Eiffel fucking Tower. Once more, it was ridiculous, eye-rolling in its romanticism. It was him.
I was swept up. He was thirty-eight, I was twenty-nine. I could hardly comprehend my life carrying me here.
In the Paris night, he strode to the railing with imperial possession. When he started speaking, he couldn’t stop. He shared everything with me, how he felt like reaching long-held dreams only made him want more. He wanted everything. He wanted me.
I watched him, enraptured. The love in my chest felt like my own dreams did. Dangerous enough to demand I give them everything. He said he no longer just wanted fame or prestige. He wanted his work to live forever.
His monologue unceasing, he faced me. He swept over, the hurricane of a man he is. With my hands in his, he said he wanted me in his life for real. No more DM flirting. He wanted to date me. He wanted to love me. I’ll never forget his exact words. They repeat in my head now, the horrible refrain the flowers in front of me wrench up.
Will you live forever with me, Riley?
I said I would. In the lyrical workings of my mind, I found myself marveling, loving his phrasing, understanding exactly how he’d managed to convert overdone poeticism into undeniable charm. Part of it is swagger. Part of it is intelligence. He’s read hundreds of scripts. He’s reinvented Shakespeare on London stages. He intended the question within the question. Live forever. Immortalize ourselves. Live forever with me. Entwine your life with mine.
Will you live forever with me, Riley?
He’d finished important scenes for the Reckoning pilot. It was HBO’s new darling, which I knew made him happy. Fuck, it made me happy. Not just for him, either. I was starting to understand the stratospheric feeling of creative promise. I remember the loneliness of my new heights, however joyful. I remember feeling how fucking cool it was I found someone who could sing in the same chords of perilous promise and limitless hope. In him I felt I’d found the mirror of myself.
I didn’t notice how he never wanted to hear my same effusiveness when label meetings went well, or I booked my first stadium, or the cover story pitches started coming in, until I did. Then I noticed every day. I hid the glimpses from myself, pretended with my damn optimism not to care if this magnetic man didn’t want to know my career was soaring. I spent our fraught months waiting for him to feel lucky the way I did, waking up every day delighted to have found the mirror image of my own relentless joy.
Except he didn’t want a mirror image. He wanted a mirror. He didn’t want me to match his stardom, his stature, his legend. He wanted me to reflect it, so his showed larger.
Will you live forever with me, Riley?
Eventually his lack of praise changed into discouragement. Opportunities dismissed, recognitions downplayed. His dismissals hurt like the dull roar of online criticism never could, subtle knives instead of psychological steamrollers. Of course we were over in months.
I refuse to regret what I learned from our relationship. Seeking out someone exactly like you isn’t love. It’s narcissism. Someone can live like you, speak like you, strive like you, without loving you. Without caring for you. Our marriage was like playing the notes right next to each other on the piano. They don’t harmonize. They conflict. Their complements wait elsewhere. Not close, yet compatible.
It’s why he’s interrupting me now, why he’s grabbing onto “Until You.” I know he has nothing to offer me in the way of the companionship I’ve yearned for deep down.
Wesley, however, knows I could give him what he wants. He knows how dazzlingly I could shine my spotlight on him. The fact that I’m not makes him furious. He’s determined to steal from me like he’s convinced I’ve stolen from him.
It makes him want to exploit my song. It makes him want to upset me in every way he can.
Including the flowers. Their mocking faces peer into mine from next to the mirror. They’re white, with long, lip-like petals. I don’t know what kind.
It doesn’t fucking matter. They’re not the point.
It’s the echo. He sent me flowers the day I returned home from Paris.
Sending them now wasn’t out of kindness or a desire to win me back. It was a reminder. He knows how to speak in metaphors and images the same way I do, and he’s weaponizing the elegant language with unmistakable intent. I may have moved on from him, he’s saying, yet I’ll never really move on. I’ll always be at either the end or the beginning of the next relationship. My cycle of breakups is in the flowers.
He knows Max’s emergence in my life, in my headlines, is the perfect moment to carve his masterpiece message into me. It’s what reminding me of him when I’m moving on to someone new really means. Over and over, whether it’s Wesley or a guy from a bar, or Max, it’ll always end with me writing my hurt into a song.
It’s Max right now. The other rider on the next spin of my doomed carousel. I feel myself falling for him, or maybe dusting off feelings I never pulled down from the shelf. It’s not even our history worrying me, although yes, I’m scared he’ll walk out of my life once more. The real fear runs deeper.
I don’t think love can last for me.
Having put so much of myself into writing about heartbreak, I’ve written myself into a self-fulfilling pop prophecy. I’m the living embodiment of my lovelorn songs, the direction of my relationship to my music reversed, my romantic life reduced to main-character misery. Instead of writing my choruses, I find them writing me.
I wish it weren’t this way. It isn’t my choice, not entirely. The Riley my fans want is the one who offers them her endless romantic woes. I’m their favorite lovestruck Icarus, soaring for the sun right until I plunge from the sky, only to rise once more on new handmade wings. Everyone loves a doomed lover.
If I need to continue this way, ever reliving my own lyrics—the heartbreaks keeping me singing, the songs keeping me heartbroken—I will.
If love is the price I need to pay for my dreams, fine.
I’ve perfected using the pain in service of my shows instead of fighting its efforts to spite them. I remember fucking great performances I’ve given on the heels of sorrow. The Spotify Live session I did the week my parents told me they were getting divorced, the Nashville show I played promoting my first album on the night Jacob Prince—fucking Jacob Prince, with his horrible fans—dumped me. I sang stripped and shattered and honest, and it was great.
Tonight is not one of those nights. Leaving the dressing room with my hands shaking, the sweat slick on my face, I feel stuck, caught in the cage of regret the past year of my life has constructed for me.
Every night of the Breakup Tour starts with me stepping up to the microphone in my wedding dress while Vanessa hammers out the intentionally clock-evocative opening drum line of “One Minute.” When I join with my white Fender’s first chords, I spit out one of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever written.
Unfortunately, it’s long, multisyllabic, requiring me to preempt the verse’s first measure.
I walk into the wings with Wesley’s vicious reminder lingering with me like the rancid-honey smell of the flowers. Over the opening rhythm, I step onto the stage, adorned in the dress I walked down the aisle to him in, my head in pieces. The spotlights shock my eyes, the enormity of the crowd overwhelming.
Sweating into my silk, I fuck up the line.
“You want—”
The syllables don’t fit.
Instead of compensating, shifting the wording years of stage intuition should’ve helped me do, I just—stop. I feel my throat close off with tears, startling me so much I don’t even have the confidence to keep going. To pretend I meant it.
Even in the moment, I know why. I feel overwhelmingly embarrassed. Of how high I dream, of how deeply I let myself love the man who ended up inflicting on me the cruelties I relive in my lyrics every night.
Because while the song is Wesley’s, I start it describing myself.
You want a story of a lamb who led herself to slaughter
A romance of a wayward son who met a favorite daughter
Of course, while my mistake was amateurish, my musicians are not. With seamless flourish, they restart the verse.
It’s awkward. Everyone, probably every single person in the massive audience, knows I messed up. Riley Wynn, under whose neon lights they came to worship, fucked up within seconds of setting foot onstage.
Instantly, I scold myself into focus. On the repeated verse, I hit the line perfectly. I quietly commit to playing everything with precision. For the rest of the show, I’m in my head, focusing on my own lyrics and not letting myself feel the emotions of my own songs, fearing they might swallow me.
It’s not the performance I want to give, not the show my fans hoped for. I don’t want to be this human jukebox, offering my audience only the living reification of music videos. Nothing else goes wrong, exactly. I’m just not me. I feel guilty staring out at the thousands of people who came here for this show, who won’t get the chance to see me next weekend when I’m over this. Which I will be.
So I compensate. I add songs into the set list, stuff from my earlier albums. I play them just me and my guitar. Wanting to make up for the distracted performances of the main set list, I hope the extras come off intimate, even if in my heart, they feel desperate. Under the lights, I’m drowning up here for three hours.
When I step offstage at the end of the night, exhausted in every way, I feel like I gave everything I could. Still, I’m furious with myself. It overwhelms me quickly, the switch suddenly flipped without the music to distract me.
I shouldn’t have pushed myself. I shouldn’t have gone onstage when I knew I wasn’t ready. I should have delayed, should have given myself the mental space I needed. It’s common for concerts to start fifteen minutes late, or forty-five. Nobody would have noticed, and I would have given my fans the show they deserved.
Instead, I went on distracted.
Unable to fight the compulsion, I check my phone, in emotional damage-control mode. I have no doubt reviewers were in the audience, not to mention the fans who often double as my harshest critics. While I’m pretty sure one shitty show won’t hurt the entire tour’s reputation, I need to know exactly what magnitude of compensation I’m facing.
What I find on my first search is . . . worse. Yes, a few music press headlines and pop websites have chided me for the “embarrassing” opening moment. For the most part, however, the internet is chattering over a different story. The one of how, per a “source close to the couple,” Wesley sent me pre-show flowers. Reconciliation? the stories wonder. They praise my ex-husband for the elegant, high-road gesture of support.
Close source?
I fume. Close source, my ass. It’s undoubtedly Wesley’s agent. I clench my phone in my hand, ready to smash the device on the concrete floor.
No. I restrain the urge. I know what I need to do instead.
Charging into the corridors of the stadium like I’m half chasing, half fleeing, I find Eileen. No doubt reading my expression, she meets me with calm.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “The show was fantastic.”
I shake my head vehemently, not wanting reassurance. What I want is to cut the hurt out. To make it productive. In my career, I’ve learned to be grateful for every wound. Everyone has survival instincts they cherish like secret admirers, and this is mine. Emotions like these mean I get to press my pain into platinum records.
“Can you get me studio hours in Houston?” I ask, resisting my impatience.
Eileen’s eyes widen. “We leave tomorrow—”
“I know. I mean now,” I say. “Tonight. Only for a few hours.” The staccato of my voice grates on me. I exhale in the claustrophobic corridor, feeling ready to climb out of my skin under the uncompromising lighting.
Concern shadows over Eileen’s features. “We had a long drive,” she replies. “You just did a show. Maybe you should rest?”
“I can’t. I—” Tears reach up my throat once more. “I need to—”
I need to use this while I have it.
The long look Eileen gives me lands on sympathy. She nods. “Of course,” she says with reassuring resolve, then repeats herself. “Of course. I’ll see what I can do. I imagine somewhere in the city of Houston would want Riley Wynn to record there no matter the hour.” She endeavors to smile.
I manage to return the ghost of one. The way she’s used my name, invoking my recorded self, feels right. I want to use this hurt in service of Riley Wynn instead of feeling stuck with the sadness of just Riley, the me who signed divorce papers with not-yet-thirty-year-old hands.
I thank her. When I go to my dressing room, I shed my stage look as quickly as I can. I wipe my makeup off in front of the mirror, where my silent reflection stares back.
Holding her gaze, I’m grateful silence isn’t the only thing I’ll be left with tonight.