Gregory Warner

as though someone were reading over my shoulder with me and delighting in it along with me.

I was trying to get work done and you were always on the phone in interviews.

But the tone was... Like a place that I could go to.

It was like a dome I could enter.

that was almost insulated by static.

It let me let go of all this high cortisol shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I got my diagnosis, and I cried on my way home.

I always had in the back of my mind, like, yeah, you could be reaching enlightenment, or you could just be going deaf.

It's 2001.

I'm 16, maybe 15, and I'm sitting on my bedroom floor in front of my ancient clunky stereo listening to my CD of the original Broadway cast recording of the 1990s hit musical Rent.

I'm always listening to Rent.

I'm always listening to Rent.

Broadway stars fill my ears with lyrics of Bohemia.

I want to get out of the suburbs and make art and be a lesbian and not wear clothes from Kohl's.

I decide that I must record this CD to a tape so I can listen to it in my mom's minivan on the way to school because we don't have a CD player in the car.

So I take a blank tape I find in the living room.

I put the cassette in my tape deck, I sync it with the start of the CD, and I press record.

The next morning, I hop in the passenger seat.