The stage lights switch on. The pit plays its first notes, and the audience goes quiet.

I’m on my eighth hour behind a soundboard, carefully watching the backstage curtains while I wait for the first actor to come onstage so I can unmute his mic at the perfect time.

“Feel alright for the rest of your life,” Mendel, one of the main characters, chants in Musical Forum’s rendition of Falsettos. The rest of the cast springs out alongside him and belts the line over and over, voices vibrant as the crowd cheers. I let them get loud, fingers nervously hovering over all seven actors’ sliders at the soundboard as I listen for the dreaded feedback loop that’s been plaguing the past two shows.

This is the Saturday night show, though—the last one, the saddest one, the loudest one—a goodbye. The audience is charged; the actors are singing like they need the world to hear; the pit is playing for their lives; my stage manager is reciting her cues through tears.

A spike of adrenaline runs through my fingers as Jason, Mendel’s stepson, croons a high note, voice ringing bright through the tired speakers. I debate turning her down until I remember that every line performed tonight will be the last.

Screw it. Let them have their moment.

I take my fingers off the soundboard and let the rest of the song run free. I close my eyes, riding the bass, surfing through the harmonies I’ve balanced for hours, sinking into the melodies I’ve come to know so well in just a week. For a second, it feels like I’m dancing at the edge of a cliff.

I remember how the sun looks in the mornings back home, golden beams draped over the snow-tipped mountains. I remember the tenor of my middle brother’s laugh, how it blends with my mom’s giggles and my oldest brother’s belly cackle. I remember the scrape of my dog’s claws on the hardwood, running to plant little kisses all over my face every time I come home.

Feel alright for the rest of your life.

The last line of the opening song rips through the auditorium. The crowd whoops while the actors gasp for air, grins plastered on their faces as the pit improvises extra chords to match the longest, loudest cheers we’ve heard all week.

I take a deep breath, partly relieved that the speakers let us go so loud, partly in awe that our show can bring an audience to their feet. Parents and friends, professors and general lovers of musical theatre, all cramming shouts and claps and stomps into every corner of little Fishman Studio.

As I balance the actors’ voices for the next song, fingers skimming across the soundboard, I wonder if I’m remembering how to breathe again or if I’ve found a new way to do it.

✴︎

Today in Vietnamese class, we learned that the words for “miss” and “remember” are the same.

This year, I picked up playing piano again. I played it for nine years and then, stereotypically, quit the second my parents let me and didn’t touch a key for a long time. Recently, though, I’ve found myself tapping my fingers on tables, wondering what they still remembered. Scared they might be hollow. Scared they might not remember anything at all.

If I said that in Vietnamese, it might also mean I was scared of missing it.

I wonder if I miss you or if I remember you. I wonder if I’m still allowed to miss you, even after I’ve forgotten how to remember you.

Restarting lessons has been fun. It feels a lot like walking barefoot over the lawn in my childhood backyard, except the grass is longer than I remember it to be, and the fence is drooping, tired. Most of my time is spent picking up after my dog instead of blowing bubbles and throwing water balloons, but I can see further past the fence, and I’m brave enough now to wave to the joggers passing by. I’m learning new habits, better habits, and it’s familiar, more pleasant. I’m wondering if I can keep these new patterns in my fingers without losing the old ones.

I wonder whether I’m more scared of missing or forgetting you.

✴︎

I tried listening to the show on Spotify. Scrolled through every version I could find, skimmed through every song. I couldn’t find any that came close to how our show sounded, so I stopped. I’m worried that listening to other versions too much would corrupt my memory of the only one I wanted to hear. I hear every song all the time anyway, each playing in my head in some feverish symphony: what would I do / buy a farm / I want it all / feel alright / to love you / is this therapy?

✴︎

Recently, I read “The Light That Shines When Things End” again. You know it—it's that one Tumblr post from the late 2010s to early 2020s that resurfaces again and again. In case you don't, though, the premise is that the narrator wishes there was a bright light that follows everyone around, shining whenever something is about to end.

Something about the image of the last line made me think of you. You with the lights, you with the show lights, you with the lights in your eyes. I wonder if any of them shone when you left, like the post imagines. I wonder if the lightbulbs in your mom's room flickered, or buzzed, or if they really got brighter. I wonder if your sister can stand to sit in an auditorium, and watch a musical, and look at the lights, knowing it's not you making them dance anymore.

I got to sit and watch the stars with you for a bit—a few little specks of time—and for that I'll be forever grateful. They've never looked the way they did with you.

But it's time to go now. I get this feeling that if I don't get up off the ground now, I never will.

I hope I’ll see you wherever we go next. If I don't, jump in some leaves for me. Play a good song while you're at it, and in the meantime, I'll remember every once in a while what it was like to breathe through your lungs, to source my air through your skin.

In the meantime, I'll start learning how the lighting console works. And when I'm finally good enough, when I can finally create a bit of the magic that you did, I'll make them shine brightest on the Saturday night shows. I'll cheer your name on the last note of every Saturday night, always.

✴︎

My piano teacher tells me to slow down, play the measure note by note, slower and slower, until I can get through the entire line without a mistake.

Saying goodbye to you worked the same way. I'm slowing down, day by day, minute by minute. That house you pointed out, that house you liked the color of—this time, I stop and look at it. I breathe, and I remember you, I hear the leaves you walked through, I feel the crisp October air on my cheek. I am slowing down our time together, minute by minute. Gently, quietly, until I can feel the rubato of Chopin and the pressure of my fingers on ivory, slowly until I can feel your absence shrink into a quiet ache, and the spikes in my stomach dull.

I keep walking, hands in my pockets, as I huddle against the wind.

✴︎

While Marvin holds Whizzer and takes a deep breath, dipping his voice into the harmony line of “Four Unlikely Lovers,” I think about where I am. Standing behind the soundboard, I marvel at the life that has unfolded before me, the millions of choices flowing like tributaries into lakes and oceans so far away I can’t even see them. A week ago, I had never even stepped foot on the fourth floor of Granoff, and now I’ve spent upwards of fifty hours twisting in and out through its studios and floors and secret closets. I think about how much changes in the span of a week, a day, an hour.

I think about how unlikely it was for us to meet. What tiny choices did we make for it to happen? Fourth grade, if I had failed my placement test like I meant to and never switched schools; fifth grade, if I had never met M, and M never dragged me into her band rehearsal; sixth grade, if you hadn't watched that one episode of The Flash the same night I did and thought to talk to me about it—what were the chances, really, that you'd stumble into my life the way you did?

What were the chances, really, that this show would come together the way it did? I joined without a lick of experience on the Monday of show week; the pit didn’t have a drummer until the Monday of show week; the set was still getting drilled together Monday night of show week.

“What a group we four are / Four unlikely lovers / Let's be scared together.”

It doesn't matter how much I stand here and think about the shape of my choices. You grew up halfway across the world, you grew up breathing salt air—meeting you was unlikely. Meeting you was inevitable.

Four unlikely lovers, and yet every single night, on the fourteenth song of the second act, they inevitably coalesce around a hospital bed and sing quiet “I love you”s to each other. Every single night, on the final song, Whizzer dies, Marvin loses him, and he asks a tearful audience, “What would I do / If I had not met you?”

✴︎

I’ll forget you. I’ll forget how to hurt over you—it’ll be my way of missing you. The ache will get quieter and quieter, shaking itself loose from my head the same way this show will eventually drain from my ears. I won’t be able to turn it up and bring it back, no matter which levers I flick on a soundboard.

Sit me down in front of a piano, though, and my fingers will never forget the way they ran hungry across the keys, hammered out the chords to your favorite song under the cover of the blazing afternoon sun. Sit me down in front of a stage, and I’ll never forget what it feels like in that last breath—the actors’ gasp before they belt their final lines, the pit ballooning their stomachs to play one more phrase, the audience opening their mouths wide as they dry their eyes and leap up off their seats.

The lights flick off. In that moment, that last, dazzling, feverish breath, I remember how to begin again. My hands come off the board, and the studio falls silent.

All I can hear are the ringing echoes of “Do you regret?” followed quickly by “I'd do it again / But what would I do / If you had not been / My friend?”