great for them. But I’m not them.”
“How do you know?”
In exasperation, he looked at her, shaking from her need to make him something he could never be—one of the talented people who had dreams and ideas and who things worked out for because they believed in themselves and their vision. “Why is this all of a sudden so important to you?”
She dug into the depths of his soul. “Why is it not important to you?”
“Be… cause… Because…” He put his head down so she couldn’t see the pointlessness he lived and breathed every day. “Because I know what it’s like to want something you know you can never have, that’s why.”
“So you never even try?” she asked as if that was unfathomable to her.
His gaze came up then, reality having killed it dead. “Sometimes a dream is better off just staying a dream.” He sighed and looked at his watch. “Listen, I’ve got to get something done. I haven’t even finished my Chem lab stuff yet.”
“Yeah,” Taylor said, defeated. “Go on. I’ve got this.”
It was strange as he got up and left the room. She had always believed that dreaming lifted people up. It didn’t break them down and crush them. But watching him, she had to admit that maybe she was wrong. Seeing Greg like this, she had to wonder if dreaming was even worth the price it exacted from the dreamer.
Instead of Hamilton, she brought her laptop over and turned on Hauser instead. No words, just deep, mournful cello music. That’s what she needed right now.
The soft music floating from the kitchen splattered across Greg’s heart. Why had he argued with her? Why? This was obviously so important to her. Why had he stood himself up like the devil’s advocate against having dreams and visions?
But it wasn’t her he was trying to talk out of it. It was himself.
If he let himself get sucked into the vortex of believing dreams could come true if you only tried for them, he knew on the other side of that was simply soul-crushing defeat. He’d been there before, thinking that maybe she would see him the way he saw her, only to be shredded by the fact that it was never going to happen.
No. Maybe for her, the impossible was possible. But for him…
She came through the living room, carrying her laptop, and she stopped only for a breath. “If you want, I can help you study for the cert test when you’re ready.”
Greg nodded but never really lifted his gaze. “Okay. I’ll let you know.”
“K.”
Although Taylor had stats homework that was due Monday, she put all of her own studies on the back burner and stubbornly let her dreams take her where they wanted to go. She watched Hauser and Benedetta for a few songs, then she watched Helpless, falling ever-deeper into the lyrics of the young woman, Eliza, smitten to the core by the eyes of a guy she had just met to the point that she was helpless every time he glanced her way.
That led her to a video called Eliza’s Chord Progression, which wasn’t about Helpless like she had thought it would be. It was instead about how Eliza took the chord progression in the first song of the musical and revised it to make it hopeful as she told the story of her beloved, though not perfect, husband in the end. The video transfixed Taylor. Having learned a bit of piano chord progressions as well as trying her hand at writing her own songs, she was fascinated by the depth of musical storytelling Lin-Manuel had to have in writing even the melodies.
She had never had cause to contemplate just what a descending base line in a piece of music could make you feel, but she could hear it and feel it in every example given. When the presenter talked about Les Miserables, she shook her head. Watching the snippets presented, she wondered at the convergence of the two stories. It was crazy to realize how the two must have overlapped, seeing the French Revolution was referenced in Hamilton. Wondering at that, she looked up the timing of the French Revolution—1789 to 1799.
No wonder Hamilton argued against getting involved. They were barely six years out of their own war. And Lafayette had been involved in both. Going down that rabbit hole, Taylor looked up something that had been lurking on the fringes ever since her first viewing. Two of her favorite characters in Hamilton—Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson