I was cleaning up dried out cat puke under the piano. I hadn’t noticed it before because I rarely go to the piano. Standing in front of the keyboard, I felt a vague inclination to lift the cover and sit down. This is the first time in three years, or since the beginning of the crisis that led to autism diagnosis, that I have actually almost wanted to play the piano. 

For about twenty-five years of my life, I stood on stage and performed as a classical singer. But when I was young and started working in opera companies, I quickly understood that something was wrong. I would crawl home after rehearsals and performances shaking, never comprehending how my colleagues carried on afterwards, going out to dinner or drinks. I was exhausted by the socializing that working in an opera production required. I continually heard the music for whatever production repeating in my brain twenty-four hours a day, meaning while I slept, and this added to my stress. I quickly moved away from participating in large productions and focused on teaching and small concerts. 

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Fame. What did I hear about fame? Fame is a manner to normalize alternate behaviour. It was dangled like a carrot in front of my nose when I was growing up in a dysfunctional family. My father was supposed to become a famous writer and I was supposed to become a famous opera singer. Except that being the center of attention of a group was and is overwhelming to me. 

Yet I could do it on stage at a distance from the audience. For years on years I was trained to stand on a podium and represent some concept or character. But then I am not me. What’s actually more distressing is being the center of attention in daily life. I tend to divert the subject, refocus on who is standing in front of me, and jump into the routine of gently prodding that person to talk. It’s an act to circumvent being misunderstood and the pressure of not meeting expectations. 

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Busy writing Routine Apparitions chapters, I ordered an obscure book of poetry written by one of my father’s friends. I recall the poet well, mainly emerging from the garage where he and my father had been getting stoned. The poet was drawn to teenage girls and I remember him leering at me at least once. I wasn’t really his type though. I don’t know whether I actually liked him. I was supposed to like him because he was a favored person at home and he generally had a gentle demeanor. A faint reference to my teenage self is in a poem in his book, something about not being interesting enough to be a mistress. 

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A few years ago I stumbled across the works of an illustrator who had been employed at the restaurant where the poet worked as the manager. She wrote two books about her years there as a waitress. In the second book, the teenage daughter of the poet-manager runs away from home and is having a wild time doing teenage things.  The name of the fictional daughter is Persephone. I was not very happy at this discovery and I remembered that Isabella (the actual name of the poet-manager’s daughter) had run away and been into all sorts of typical teenage “pushing the limits” behaviour. As for myself as a teenager, I was at home with the cat and practicing the piano…..getting ready to become famous.