Lily couldn't
understand what had made me
start crying. I couldn't
take my eyes off the
last star left in
the sky. She just kept
talking about herself, over and over again.
It was
the end of the
worst two year period of my life thus far. Friends had died, I had been
abandoned by those I
loved the most, my parents were getting a divorce and in three days I was moving to
Boston. I had premiered my
first symphony and
fallen in love with Diana. Things had begun to
look up before Lily lost it.
Every day
she was crying, begging me to take her back. This was all after she had spent 7 months
manipulating me into the ground. She came to the concert where I made my world premeire as a
composer in which my symphony was played, that was written in the
memory of a friend of mine that had died, sure; but she came
wasted. She
resented the fact that
I loved music more than her, even though I would never have
a place in her heart that came anywhere near the value she placed on herself.
She left me the week after the concert.
Then she spent all summer
freaking out because I got over her, constantly using the same old manipulations to get at me, to
push my buttons. She wouldn't let it be.
So that night, in mid-august,
1997,
I listened to her talk for hours about herself and
I watched every star in the Texas sky go out one by one. I
burst into tears. I
screamed at her that I didn't understand why it was always about her. I told her that sometimes
I wished I could be like her and not care about anything other than myself.
There were only
two stars left when I had been crying for
three hours. I sat down hard on the
cement and I tried to
choke out the words.
"
I only shine at night. I'm like that star. We all have to
go out sometime.
I wish I didn't shine at all, because then
I wouldn't fade away."
It was the last
conversation we ever really had.