I ended up taking her to that same town in France where I was hiding out for a while during my dad’s whole meltdown. I wasn’t able to get exactly the same house I had stayed at before, but it was more or less the same area, and it was just as beautiful. I just thought it would be a good place for Mandy to get her bearings, you know? To remove herself from the scene for a second and remember that this thing was way bigger than her. Obviously, she felt really attacked by the whole thing, and she also felt really responsible for what had happened, and I just thought like, the best possible thing for Mandy at this point would be to take a step back and to realize that like, there were so many different forces at play that made what happened happen and that absolutely none of it was her fault.

Sometimes it’s hard, you know, to remember that you’re just this tiny little seahorse in the middle of the ocean. When you’re someone like me or you’re someone like Mandy, your existence just gets stretched out way beyond yourself, and for all intents and purposes, it feels like your concerts or your press packages or your music videos or your merchandise or all of the shit that people have branded with your name on it is a part of YOU—like it’s actually one of your limbs, one of your appendages—and so when something like what happened in Berlin happens, I mean, it just feels like it happened inside your stomach, you know? Or like, it feels like someone did it with your hand: like a little alien crawled inside your body and made its way into your finger and forced you to pull the trigger.

So, I don’t know, I think the trip was really useful for her.

We didn’t leave the house that much at all. Every day, I would just have my guys go to the market and get us some bread and cheese and veggies, and like, I’d cook us all our meals—I’m actually a pretty decent cook—and sometimes I would be cooking for everybody, like, Mandy’s security team and my security team and the two of us, but most of the time, it was just me and Mandy in the house, and so everybody else would do their own thing.

I remember one night, it was raining outside pretty hard, and so Mandy and I made a little fire and like, I made us some hot chocolate, and we just sat on the rug in front of the fireplace and imagined what our lives would have been like if we were normal people.

LOL.

We tried to imagine what would’ve happened to us if somehow we never got famous.

Mandy sort of imagined that she’d end up being a high school teacher—since that’s what her mom was doing, and she always really admired that—and I sort of imagined that I would’ve gone to college and become a doctor or something, since, like, when I was still in school, I would hear all these stories about the older kids getting to dissect a pig or a frog or something like that in junior high, and I was actually kind of pissed that I never got to do it.