And, immediately, when everybody left, Mandy just started bawling. Like, I think in the hubbub of the whole thing, Mandy was just like, too shocked, or too shaken up to really have any emotion about it—when I called her from the plane, she sounded terrible, but there wasn’t any feeling in it, you know? It was just so scattered, so dazed—but then once everybody left the room and she saw me, it was just like the whole dam burst open and she was sobbing, like wailing on the floor. I went over to her and held her and it was like she was shaking, you know? She was like a little hamster.

And the thing that was really disturbing to her, or like, the thing that she really couldn’t stop thinking about was that like, because she didn’t know what was happening—like, because it took a while for her people to realize that an attack had broken out—she was still singing as people were getting shot. Like, the attack had already been under way for a couple seconds, maybe even half a minute, before her team got up on the stage and covered her, and “Ray of Sunshine” has all these pyrotechnics and complicated dance moves and all this other shit, and so Mandy wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on in the audience while she was performing it—she just had too much shit to do. She was in the middle of doing the song just like she would do it at any other concert when all this horrible shit was happening out in the crowd, and, I don’t know, I think that’s what disturbed her so much: that, like, she could be so close to all this horrible stuff and not have a clue—or that like, in the moment, she could be so wrong about the reality of the space she was in. Not to mention, like, I think it was really kind of sickening to her that while all this shit was happening, she was providing a soundtrack for it, you know? Like, she was providing a live soundtrack to all these horrible murders, and “Ray of Sunshine” is just this very light, very fun and breezy and meaningless sort of thing, and so the whole thing just felt kind of demented to her. She even told me that a bunch of different people had already posted videos online of the moments leading up to the attack, and she couldn’t stop watching them. Like, she couldn’t stop going online and watching these videos of her face, like, smiling, and doing a dance move, and like, singing about how some guy is like a ray of sunshine while all these people were getting murdered. And I told her, like: Okay, that needs to stop NOW. Like, that’s order of business number one. You need to stop watching these videos. And number two, like, we’re getting the fuck out of Germany.

Obviously, Mandy’s team had decided to cancel the rest of the tour—there weren’t that many dates left anyway—and so I just told her, like, let’s go. You and me are gonna get as far away from all this shit as we possibly can. And so we got on my plane that night, and we left.