Page 76 of Always Been His

I watch the comments instead of the counter.

SIENNA! SIENNA! SIENNA! SIENNA!

oh my god she’s actually live

the blue hair is so pretty

sienna we missed you so much

wait is this real?

Echo nation assemble

she looks so rested

SIENNA WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

we love you sienna

i’m crying why am i crying

I read them as they come, faster than I can catch them all, the words layering over each other in the comment strip at the bottom of the screen. And I let myself actually read them instead of skimming past them the way I do on Echo’s livestreams, when there are so many they become noise, and I stop being able to register them as individual people.

Seven hundred thousand comments in the first two minutes, and still climbing, and they came for this version of me, the unpolished, tired version, the me who doesn’t know what she is doing but is doing it anyway.

It’s the most overwhelming thing I have ever experienced and I’ve performed at Madison Square Garden.

“Hi,” I say eventually, and my voice comes out raspy and low, nothing like my melodic Echo tenor I default to on the press circuit. A hundred comments say ‘hi’ back simultaneously, and I laugh before I can stop myself, the sound surprised completely out of me by the warmth of their love.

And the comment strip detonates.

HER LAUGH

the laugh the LAUGH

i forgot what her real laugh sounded like i am not okay about this

she’s so pretty without all the glam i’m ill

I press one key on the keyboard. A single note, just to settle my hands.

“I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you all for a while,” I tell them, watching the comments stream past. “And I kept coming up with nothing. And then I realized it was because I was trying to figure out what Echo would say… Echo has good publicists, and I’ve been letting them do the talking for so long, I forgot I could just...” I press the key again, a quiet percussion under the words “…talk.”

I look at the camera properly.

“It happened so fast,” I say, and the comment strip slows, everyone reading instead of typing. That collective stillness is its own kind of pressure, its own kind of intimacy, the feeling of a million people leaning in at the same time. “I was eighteen. I was at a talent show, and someone saw me, and six months later I had a record deal, and a manager, and a name that wasn’t exactly mine, and I loved it. I want to be clear that I loved it, I love you all, I have always loved you all, but I didn’t know that so many people were going to love me back.” I glance down at the keyboard and back up at the camera. “Nobody prepares you for that. Nobody sits you down at eighteen and says, ‘Hey, in a few years, millions of people are going to know your voice and your face and your name, and it’s going to be simultaneously the most incredible and the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to you, and you’re going to spend the next six years trying to figure out how to hold all of it without disappearing inside it’.”

The comment strip is barely moving. Everyone is reading.

“I love performing,” I continue, and my voice is steadier now, because this is the truth. “I love you all, genuinely, the way you come to my shows, and learn every word, and make signs, and cry and scream, and make me feel like I’m not alone up there on that stage.” I press another key, a different note, higher. “But I got so deep inside the machinery that I stopped being able to find the part of it I love. The music. And I needed to stop and find it again before I lost it for good.”

she’s so real right now

sienna please i am on the floor

i love you sienna r u ok?

“I’m okay,” I say, and my voice catches on it, a small crack that I let happen because I am done smoothing everything over for the camera. “I’m more okay than I’ve been in years. I’m back home. Around people I love, feeling loved. It’s exactly what I needed.”