Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 96512 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96512 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
“Yeah, I just can’t shake something Gerry said to me. It’s probably bluster, but he said something about how I’ve taken something that’s his, and how he’s trying to level the playing field.”
“He’s trying to make things equal between you?” she asks, and leans her head on my shoulder.
“I suppose that’s what he means by levelling the playing field, but why? What does he think I’ve done to him?”
“Have there ever been any romantic entanglements?” she asks. “Like maybe—and I’m not saying you knew—but maybe you dated his girlfriend, or maybe a girlfriend left him for you?”
I shake my head. “Gerry’s been married since before I knew him.”
“Huh. I thought for sure that would be it. Did you go to college together? Like, was he at your college and you didn’t know? Maybe something happened there?”
“I was a geek at college,” I say. “My mom and dad went through a really bad divorce just before I left for college, and I spent my college years a little dazed. Their divorce came out of nowhere, as far as I was concerned.”
“I’m sorry, Fisher,” she says, and slides her hand into mine.
“It was a long time ago,” I say. “But it had lasting effects. I went off to college determined that I wasn’t ever going to fake anything.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
I sigh and set down my wineglass. “I spent my entire childhood thinking my mom and dad were the happiest parents of all my friends. Some of my other friends used to have parents who argued all the time. Others never spent any time together. But my mom and dad seemed to genuinely love each other. We’d spend the weekends as a family doing stuff. Even as a teenager, my favorite thing to do was to hang out with my parents. How geeky was that? They were just so much fun. I look back on those days, and I just remember laughing and… like you and Riley when we were having the kitchen disco. Every day was like that.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Juniper says.
“It really was,” I reply. “They made it wonderful.”
“Do you know why they decided to divorce?”
Darkness gathers in my chest at the memories of the conversation around the kitchen table. “When they told me, it was as if they were telling me that we were moving house or something. Mom was still full of smiles. Dad was cracking jokes. It was all so… fake.”
She squeezes my hand, like she wants to transfer her strength to me.
“I stopped believing what I saw from then on. I learned to read what was under the surface in people’s words and actions.”
“You stopped trusting people,” she says. “Because if you can’t trust your parents, who can you trust?”
“Exactly. So I was a bit of a loner in college. I kept to myself until I learned to operate in this new world where no one was who they said they were. Music was my sole companion.”
“Oh, Fisher,” she says. “That sounds terribly lonely.”
It was lonely. It felt like when I left home, I took nothing with me. No sense of security. No understanding of what was right and wrong. No real ability to cope with the world. I didn’t trust anyone and I didn’t trust myself.
“It was at first. I grieved the old world through music and created a new one. At first, I couldn’t listen to anything I associated with my parents, and that was everything I listened to before I got to college. It pushed me to look for new artists and new types of music. I became a musical gannet,” I say on a laugh. “Looking for salvation through new music. And I found it. Music became my therapy.” I blow out a breath. Thinking back to that time still stings.
“It wasn’t until after college that things started to change,” I say. “I figured out that I could be authentic, and so there must be others in the world capable of not faking it. I learned that I had to keep my circle of trust small, but still interact with the world knowing it was full of bullshitters who were pretending to be happy, competent, capable.”
“But you work in the music industry. Isn’t that all about image?”
“Right. But I know that. I learned how to keep my distance from all the pretense. Emotional distance, anyway. I try and focus on the music. Because that’s what I love. The rest of it… I have my shields up. The industry is full of people pretending to be someone they’re not. And I don’t just mean the artists. People are so desperate to ingratiate themselves with the artists that they’ll bend and change depending on who they’re talking to and what those people want.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It’s actually okay, because it’s so easy to spot. At least it is for me. It’s so obvious. All I can control is myself. I know I’m authentic. And I expect nothing of anyone else.”