Rent first came to San Francisco in 1999, when I was in seventh grade. My best friend Dylan and I were allowed to go see it unaccompanied, which was a big deal.

Dylan and I were good kids. Kids who reacted to our differently difficult home lives by being extremely active in things like theater. Kids who sought mentors. Kids whom teachers would befriend. His mother dropped us down the street from the theater and we found our way inside. Our seats were decent and I remember as we took them wondering whether the people around us knew we were only 12. I wondered if they thought we were older — high-schoolers perhaps, basically adults. It was insane, the idea that we would be adults.

I don't recall whether I knew anything about the play before it began; I'm fairly sure I didn't know much. Rent is a rock opera about a group of twentysomething artists living in squalor in Alphabet City during the dawn of the '90s. Its plot is based loosely on Puccini's La Bohème — though its ending is not actually tragic, as its heroin-addicted, HIV-positive heroine Mimi ultimately survives her near-death experience.

I had never seen anything like it. Its music was gorgeous, its spectacle captivating. But then there was the scandal of it to my 12-year-old self. I'd never heard something as horrifying as having your ex-girlfriend break the news that you both have HIV and slitting her wrists in the bathroom. I'd never heard someone say the words "dildos" or "masturbation" or "marijuana" or "erection" or "faggots lezzies dykes cross-dressers too." I'd never seen a depiction of a romance between a gay man and a drag queen, let alone one so beautiful it made me weep. Most importantly, it depicted what to me was a fantasy as attractive as any I'd ever seen: that you could be in your twenties, living in New York City, surrounded not by the family you'd left behind but by the ones you'd made. That you could pursue above all else art and love. At its end, I leapt to my feet in applause. After, Dylan and I waited by the stage door and got autographs with every actor we could. In the photographs his mother took we are beaming.

In late middle school and early high school, on weekend mornings, I would sit at my desk in my bedroom, the blinds still drawn, and listen to the soundtrack, which hadn't come with a lyrics sheet, and listening on my Discman try to write out the words to the songs in my journal, especially those to the epic, two-part, 12-minute number at the play's center, a sort of manifesto to the lifestyle embodied by the play's characters, "La Vie Boheme." I'd have to carefully press the button down to backtrack and listen to the contours of the words I didn't understand — "Sontag," "Vaclav Havel," "Pablo Neruda," "Antonioni, Bertolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana." I don't recall trying to search the internet to see what these things were. They were strange and beautiful symbols of the unknown. For years to come I'd encounter them in museums and textbooks and life and they'd ping that Rent part of my brain.

It was the schmaltzier stuff in the play, though, especially, that made me love it, that made me listen to its soundtrack over and over and over. The romance between Collins and Angel and to a lesser extent the one between Mimi and Roger. And the specter of mortality, both within the play and without: Early on the morning of the play's off-Broadway premiere in 1996, its creator Jonathan Larson dropped dead at age 35. At that point he'd put about eight years of his life into the show. He'd had an undiagnosed heart problem and, without ceremony, was gone. He wouldn't know Rent's mega success. He wouldn't accept its Pulitzer or its Tonys. (Thankfully he wouldn't see the bafflingly bad movie version released a decade later.)

These were the saddest and realest things I could imagine: that you could pour yourself into a person and they could die, or that you could pour yourself into art and you could die before you knew that art changed the world. On the front of my journal, I made a collage that included the phrases "seasons of love" and "the opposite of war isn't peace / it's creation," and the play's motto and last line: "No day but today."

But I kept my love of Rent quiet, especially as I tried to eschew some of the intense uncoolness that had so defined me. Eighteen — that was the last time I could love Rent without shame, when I was first, finally living thousands of miles away from my family, in Providence, Rhode Island. When I was having my first drunken evenings, my first heartbreaks, my first exposure to intellectual texts and to people who had been raised among art that was much better than Rent. When I was finally beginning a thing called adulthood and would therefore begin to see that, yes, Rent is kind of dumb.