Since he was a teenager, from the moment he picked up an electric guitar, Ricky knew he was meant to be a rock star. He’d tried to play sports. Loved baseball since he was a kid, but couldn’t field a grounder or swing at a curve without flinching. He also got crushed in football freshman year, couldn’t dribble a basketball without staring at it, and although he made the JV cross country team as a sophomore, that only lasted one season, as he soon realized that the term “run for fun,” was nothing more than a sick joke told by endorphin-addicted maniacs and their sadistic coaches. So he turned to music.

Recording, touring, getting on MTV, and inspiring people just like him was all he wanted to do. He wanted to make the hair on their arms stand up like his did when he put on his headphones and listened to Death to the Pixies or Pablo Honey. Music quickly became the one thing that was like water or air for him, and he was convinced it was something that he could never live without.

His aspirations were further cemented the time his first band played two songs at the high school talent show. He was shaking nervously backstage, but once they started playing, those nerves morphed into euphoria. After that night, playing in front of a sea of adoring fans who sang along to his words and melodies was all he wanted to do. That would show all the cool kids from school who the real cool kid was. Plus he was a socially inept dork and knew it was likely the only way he’d ever get laid. 

In college, he studied songwriting and music theory and formed his next band, a three-piece power-pop group named The Floats. They played out regularly and after a year together put out a seven-song EP as part of one of his final projects. When they got a song licensed for an episode of the popular television show Saints, Ricky was certain they were bound for success. Nothing quite matched the ego-inflating elation that he got while playing on stage, but deep down he knew that if he kept at it he could write that number one superhit, with the grandiose expectation that it was all he’d need to make enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life. He didn’t have to be a millionaire. The song they’d licensed paid them twenty grand up front, and he and his songwriting partner and guitarist, Joey, started receiving a few hundred dollars every quarter for the placement. If the show eventually got into syndication, those checks would keep coming. 

A year after they graduated, however, Joey decided to move to the east coast to help his realtor uncle buy and renovate a turn-of-the-century Victorian home outside of Hoboken. The Floats, even with the song placement, hadn’t made it out of the dive bar, Tuesday night pay-to-play scene in LA, so Joey convinced Ricky that New York was the place they needed to be, where people would actually understand and appreciate what they were doing. Plus he already knew a drummer out there who could help him find a place to live in the city. 

The change of venues and crowds was exciting, and they even wrote some more tunes, eventually recording a full album with their new drummer. They kept pushing their songs to music supervisors for TV and movies, but they never landed another deal, and the momentum of playing live never picked up to the point where they could make any kind of living off of it. Begging all of your friends and coworkers to come to your gigs only works so many times. 

By the time he’d met Ana and convinced her to fall in love with him, Joey and his uncle had already made a decent profit from flipping their house, and had quickly bought another in Trenton, starting the process all over again. Ricky had been making more steady money as a server than he ever had as a songwriter or musician, but he still hadn’t shaken the feeling that he’d never reached his potential, and that he was meant to make serious money through his music. Slowly, his view of success as a musician began to get muddled up in comparison and competition, and while just making noise still fed his soul, it was more heavily mixed with a drive for material wealth and an egotistical view of success, one that would make Ana proud and keep her satisfied.

He kept writing songs, and the band kept gigging and pushing their recordings, but after a few more years, Joey’s motivation dried up, and so did the gigs. Eventually he bought another property in Pennsylvania and decided that he wasn’t going to have the time to focus on the band. Ricky joined the Yarblers, an indie pop-punk band that his coworker, Dave, had started, but he was also on the brink of starting a family and phasing out his aspirations of becoming a successful, paid musician. By then, Saints had been canceled, and the royalty checks eventually got smaller and smaller until they stopped arriving altogether.  

Still, even with the struggles and his lofty, long-shot aspirations, few things made Ricky happier than getting on stage. In college, weed made him feel almost as great for a while, but the buzz always wore off, and eventually he was smoking out of habit, to fit in, to help coax his appetite, and to keep him from wanting to strangle the people around him. The few females he’d fallen in love with also came close to matching the elation music brought him, but things always went sour, either he or she got bored, or expected too much, or took things personally, or wanted the other person to change, and he’d ultimately convince himself he could do better and be happier with someone else.

With Ana, he was sure it was going to be different. And at first it was. She’d made him work so hard at pursuing her that his monkey brain convinced him the struggle had to have been worth it. Making him wait so long had somehow made her more desirable, like a rare, precious stone that people spent their whole lives mining for. He’d gone as far as using meditation and using power of intention techniques to get a little help from the universe, something he never felt was necessary for his music career. He even wrote down her full name, Anastasia Nikolaeva Lebedev, on a small piece of paper and stored it in a little wooden box his sister had brought him from Australia. He looked at the box on his nightstand every evening before going to sleep and every morning when he woke up. The obsession was real. 

To his amazement, his persistence and focus got him what he asked for. And although the joy of waking up next to her and the heart-thumping freshness of their love lasted for several years, once he was no longer playing music regularly and was working more hours than ever, he was overwhelmed by feelings of captivity and domestication that only brought him down, pushing him to drink and smoke excessively as he searched for any sort of escape. Nothing, not even the love of his life, could touch the euphoric delusions of grandeur that music had once instilled in him.