For his 9th birthday, I took my middle kid and theater buddy to see Hamilton in San Francisco. I've listened through it hundreds of times, and watched the recorded performance several more, but seeing it in person is always different. Particularly in the headspace I've been in lately after making some sizable life changes.

It was a good performance (Paul Louis Lessard turned the sassiness up to 11 as King George), but the story sat wrong with me. I found myself just hating the second act.

No shade to Lin-Manuel Miranda: he chose the set of creative liberties he'd take, and stuck to the story as offered by history otherwise. But I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, not as a musical interpretation of history but as a story on its own terms that we repeat and celebrate and share.

Eliza deserves better. She has a powerful song in "Burn" and as she enumerates the consequences of her husband's betrayal she comes up with... him sleeping in his office. And then various terrible things unfold, including the death of her son (no thanks to his father buying into an absurd and foolish ritual of toxic masculinity). I remember some of the thought pieces that were written around the time the recording went public: how amazing it was that Eliza got the last word, in some sense she was the real hero all along, and so forth. Seeing it live, that didn't land for me. It just seemed sad: that we have this strong, thoughtful, capable woman who spends 50 years devoted to her dead husband's name and legacy. What an awful waste.

This is not the story I want to celebrate. And in my head, on the train back from the city, I dreamed up what I wanted to see as an end, a crossover between Hamilton and Our Flag Means Death. (Sure, the actual chronological timelines don't quite sync, but fantasy doesn't concern itself with those constraints.) Eliza burns the letters and walks out, taking her kids. She decides to go help manage a pirate ship; a chance to go see the world, do what she wants, and be So Done with politics. The ship teaches Philip some discipline and sense; he grows up and settles down with his own piano repair shop and lives a quiet life. It doesn't take long before, in every port she stops in, Eliza faces bags of exceedingly long letters from Hamilton. Some are begging her to come back to him and stop making such a scene. Some are just him going on about politics, or New York, or the weather. It is too much, too many words. She dumps them into the ocean unread. The night she gets the news that he's died in a duel (because of course he does), she sits on the deck under the stars and raises a glass of whiskey to him. And that's it, that's the gesture, the moment, the action to commemorate him and his legacy. Just that.

And she crawls into bed that night with her lover and carries on with the life that makes her happy, where she can make meaningful choices far beyond curating the shape of an archival record, and be with someone who wants to stay.