By the time the board met in my studio, I was already sick.

Not metaphorically. Physically. A fever that had come on fast and hard, the kind that makes the room tilt slightly even when you’re lying still. The meeting was scheduled for early evening. I remember climbing the ladder to the loft just before they arrived, telling myself I’d lie down for a few minutes and then come back down when I could think straight. I never made it back down.

The loft was small and low, tucked into the back of the studio. From up there, I could hear everything. Voices carrying upward, chairs scraping, papers being shuffled. Aldo. Brooke Portman. Bruce Wright. People I trusted. People who believed in me enough to show up, to sit at a table and talk seriously about the future of a project that had begun as an idea and was now threatening to become a life.

They were doing exactly what a board is supposed to do. Talking about scale. Money. Timelines. Fundraising. What it would take to raise a million dollars. What it would mean to commit years—maybe a decade—to a single work.

Lying there with a temperature of 103, wrapped in a blanket, I listened as if I were overhearing a meeting about someone else.

At some point I realized I wasn’t just sick—I was trapped. Not by them. By my own momentum. By the fact that I had said yes too many times without stopping to ask what the yes would cost. The Bird City had grown beyond the size of an artwork and into the shape of an institution. Nonprofit paperwork. Boards. Grants. Strategic plans. A future that would be coherent and impressive and utterly consuming.

From the loft, the voices sounded calm. Reasonable. Responsible.

Inside my head, everything was loud.

I remember thinking, very clearly, that if I went through with this, I would lose something essential. Not money. Not reputation. Freedom. The ability to follow ideas as they emerged. The risk of failure. The messiness that had always been my way of working. I had other ideas already forming—things I couldn’t yet articulate, but could feel pressing at the edges of my attention. Glass. Animals. Systems. Fragile structures that might collapse or might not, and would only reveal themselves if I stayed uncommitted long enough to listen.

The next day, I ended it.

I told them I couldn’t do it. That I was stepping away. That the grant would be returned. That the nonprofit would be dissolved before it hardened into something I couldn’t escape. I let them down. I knew that. Especially Aldo. Especially Stuart, though he wasn’t in the room that night. It was one of the hardest decisions I’d made up to that point, and also one of the clearest.

The relief came almost immediately. The doubt stayed.

A few weeks later, it was December.

Minnesota winter had set in fully by then. Gray days. Early darkness. Leslie was leaving—back to New York, back to her life. The affair had burned bright and fast, as affairs tend to do, sustained as much by intensity as by misunderstanding. We drove to the airport together, the car quiet, both of us aware that whatever this had been, it wasn’t going to become something else.

I was smoking then. Too much. One cigarette after another, as if the act itself were doing the thinking for me.

At the curb, we hugged. There was affection, but also distance. She went inside. I stood there for a moment longer than necessary, cigarette burning down between my fingers. Then I put it out. Crushed it under my shoe. And that was it.

I never smoked again.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no vow. No announcement. Just a quiet recognition that I was done damaging myself in ways I could no longer pretend were temporary. The year had taken enough.

1986 ended without a crash, but not without consequence. I had let go of a project that would have defined me. I had let go of a lover who had unsettled me. I had stopped a habit that had been stitched into my daily rhythm for years. I didn’t yet know what would replace any of it.

What I did know—lying in the loft, listening to voices decide my future without realizing I was already elsewhere—was that I couldn’t keep saying yes to everything that looked like success. I had to protect the part of myself that didn’t yet know what it was making.

The next year would test that belief.

But for 1986, that was enough.