I did a great many of those nights alone, with no one to trade off with, no one to tell me if I was getting it right.

I mostly did not know if I was getting it right.

You almost never do, in the moment.

You just keep showing up to the invisible parts with the same stubbornness you bring to the visible ones, and you hope it adds up to something.

I would not learn how much it had added up to until a warm afternoon in a college auditorium, twenty-two years later.

There was one night I think about more than the others.