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The few months after that was the wildest time of my life. I had a buzz in the back of my skull that wouldn’t let me slow down. I don’t think I ate anything for two months, just cigarettes and stress. Everybody wanted to talk to me. We didn’t have a team beyond the two of us. Jamie didn’t have an attorney, so he had to find one through the whisper network, and he ended up with Johnny Rebmann from out of South Carolina, who was able to read through those contracts and keep us from getting eaten alive.

Even then, there’s only so much he could do. We signed some dud contracts, shit got stolen from us.

But that’s not what bothered me the most.

It was how one minute, I was a person. Then, I split down the middle and became two halves of myself. I guarded the half of myself who sat in that diner and never worried about how people saw him, if they knew him, if they hated or loved him. The other half had to be thrown to the wolves. That was the man who hit the road, playing lead guitar for Dax Williams for two years straight, who ended every other night soaked in sweat and pacing backstage, unsure what to do with all the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

Nothing I learned in school, or anywhere, really, prepared me for this life.

So, I numbed it. Not with drugs or alcohol, though I did run the gauntlet briefly. I numbed it by working, because…this kind of opportunity is rare, and I wasn’t going to be so ungrateful as to throw it away.

Then, it was what’s next?

Next superstar?

Next person who wanted me to play with them on tour?

I was a hamster on a runaway wheel, just going hard and taking things as they came. It was hard when I wrote a dud, a song that just didn’t hit. It was even harder when I wrote a double platinum success.

I could brush off failure and move on, use it to do better the next time.

Success is a lot harder to grapple with, it turns out.

And along the way, I started writing about different things. I remember when that started. I was on a plane with a pitch for an album in a folder on my lap, leafing through the concepts for it. In the back of my mind, I knew I didn’t want to write this fucking album. It felt plastic, commercial, almost like a computer had jumbled up the ideas and spat them out based on probability of success. Nothing made sense. There was no theme, no real stories in here.

I wrote the album anyway, in two hours.

It was my biggest hit to date.

That kind of broke me. It also humbled me, because it was the first time I realized talent wasn’t everything. It was when I had to understand the value of easy listening music, the kind you just flip on when you get in the car and relax as you run errands. Nothing else. Nothing to echo in your head later. When it locked in my brain, I wrote another album. That was my summer of hits, just making money hand over fist. I don’t think Jamie took a single day off. I know I didn’t.

Producing came next, and that was a whole different beast.

That was when superstardom came. That was when I turned everything off, my own wants and needs, and cruised. That was the year I was the one on the cover of the album with my name across the top. It was my name in lights over my head when I played onstage. It was the brightest I’ve ever burned.

Until I burned out.

That led me here, sitting in a little house in the middle of Wyoming, trying to salvage anything left of myself. I’m a car that ran too far, too long, and now, I’m digging through for spare parts.

I draw lines in the margins of the notebook. Sometimes, when I write around the center of the page, I feel more comfortable.

The big open space is intimidating.

During the day, there’s usually something to do without having to go looking for it. Once, Serena has me unloading straw bales from morning to dinnertime. It’s the best I’ve felt in a while. The work is too hard for my brain to talk to me. The next day, Bill asks me to go into town and pick up an order from the feedstore. That takes the better part of the day, because everyone has something to add onto my list. I’m glad they’re not treating me like I’m made of glass. I need to do something that isn’t pushing words out of my brain onto paper.

I feel the sun on my face for longer than it takes to walk from one building to the next, from the tour bus to the venue.

I don’t go to interact with the wranglers. Right now, I can’t take the stare of recognition I always get when I show up.

About a week in, I start to feel a slight twinge somewhere beneath my ribs. It first appears when I get up and go to the ranch house to find Bill sitting on the back porch with a cup of coffee. He’s the quintessential grizzled rancher, squinting up at the sun. But in this light, he looks so much like a musician I used to know who passed about five years ago. He was a real Kris Kristofferson type, had some big hits in the eighties, and went on to produce after he stepped off the stage. He never told me his surname. He toured under just Waylon, and it was he who taught me the rudimentary bits of producing.

Bill kind of looks like him.

“Hey,” I say, pausing at the bottom of the stairs.

“You got anything going on today, cowboy?” he rumbles.

I shake my head. “Figured I’d just help with the chores a bit. Maybe talk to Sabrina about giving me a chance to check the fenceline tomorrow.”