Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,198

You want this grand vision, and I don’t think I have one. I don’t think I ever did. I just knew the things I had to do—do as good as I could in school, which was never good enough, take care of my sisters and my mom, try to do enough for the band, work so I could do at least a little bit of what I wanted, not screw anything up.”

“And what about the future? Where do you see yourself in twenty years?”

He was perplexed by the question. “I don’t know.”

“Doing radiology or something else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Married?”

“Married?” he echoed. “Uh, I don’t know, maybe.”

“Kids?”

“Why is this all of a sudden so important?” he asked in frustration.

“It’s not?” she asked with surprise. “You don’t think it’s important?”

He sighed. “Yeah, I guess it’s important. I mean, of course it’s important. I guess I just haven’t thought about it that much.”

“Okay, so let me ask you this, why radiology? Why not engineering?”

“Yeah, no. I’m not smart enough for that.”

“Pharmacy?”

“Well, that was kind of an option I guess.”

“What’d you do, throw darts at a thing on the wall to decide?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I just brought the thing home, and Dad said medical was the way to go, so I chose something medical.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t like I really cared. I just knew I had to do something and that didn’t sound horrible. Besides, I could do it in two years—at least the Associates part, and I could stay home and save some money. At the time I didn’t even think four-year, that seemed impossible. And it still might turn out that way.”

“Yeah, but is this what you want?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice heating with the words. “Geez, how do you even know something like that?”

“Well, I think first, you have to get honest with yourself.”

“Yeah, but look at where that got you.” He said it before he thought about how that would sound, and she put her head down. “Oh, Sheesh. I’m sorry, Tay... I…”

“No,” she said, nodding. “It’s okay. You’re right. You are.” Her gaze slipped over to the laptop, and she tilted her head. “I just… I look at that, at Hamilton, not the story so much, but that too I guess. We talked today about being creative and what you have to do to be creative. Professor Peters said you have to fill your cup up with what you want to give the world. I watch that, and it’s so clear to me, you know? All of those people, all the actors and singers and dancers. They had a dream, a vision for their lives. But they didn’t know about Hamilton back then. Heck, even Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t know. How could he? He didn’t even know the story of Alexander Hamilton until he read that book, and he got fascinated with it, fascinated enough to try to write about it.

“Did you know it took him six years to write it? Six years. And there are so many influences that he drew from for it. It wasn’t like he all of a sudden decided one day to sit down and write a smash hit musical. He had worked to learn how to do all of that stuff for years before he even began to write Hamilton. And when he wrote those first words, he didn’t know where this was going. He didn’t know people were going to be willing to pay $1,000 a ticket to see it or that they would line up or buy tickets months in advance just to see the show.

“He didn’t know any of that. And it wasn’t just him either. Look at the cast. They were actors who had learned their art because they loved it, and then one day, they got this incredible opportunity that they didn’t even know was that big of an opportunity at the time. Their friend was writing this play about the Founding Fathers, and it was going to be a hip-hop musical, off-Broadway. Can you imagine how crazy that must’ve sounded?

“But think of how many pieces had to be in place for this to work. Orchestra people, choreographers, singers, dancers, the stage people, the lighting people, the costumers… All having worked their whole lives to learn their talent, their thing for this one shot that might have crashed and burned even before it got off the ground.”

“I get all that,” Greg said, cutting in to the avalanche of her words. “And that’s