Kirsten Raymonde—August

Kirsten Raymonde—August is a friendship within the Travelling Symphony, built through years of shared travel, practical companionship, and private understanding. Its defining terms are unusually explicit: Kirsten Raymonde and August made a secret pact to remain friends forever and nothing else. The pact does not make their bond incidental or distant. They break into abandoned houses together, share interests and confidences, and move through a world in which their troupe’s companionship is also their home.

The friendship and its terms

August is the Travelling Symphony’s second violin, a secret poet, and a comparatively recent actor; Kirsten Raymonde knows about his poetry, as does only the seventh guitar. Their closeness is known within the troupe, where a third violin makes insinuating remarks about the two of them. The text clarifies that they have only ever been close friends, and traces their promise to a night drinking with locals behind the ruins of a bus depot in a town at the southern end of Lake Huron. There they swore to be friends forever and nothing else. The pact turns the friendship’s boundary into something chosen and shared, rather than leaving it to rumor or inference.

The pair’s companionship is practical as well as intimate. Breaking into abandoned houses is a hobby they pursue together, tolerated by The Conductor because they sometimes find useful things. They search those emptied interiors for different kinds of remnants, and the contrast between their interests makes their closeness legible without making them interchangeable. Their repeated excursions also set them apart within the troupe: the first flute complains that August misses rehearsals to go exploring with Kirsten Raymonde and, until recently, Charlie. What looks to one member like misplaced attention is, for the two friends, a regular way of moving through and investigating the world they inhabit.

Different memories of the vanished world

Their shared explorations bring them into contact with objects that carry sharply different meanings. In Traverse City, they see an inventor’s improvised electrical system: a stationary bicycle must be pedalled to power a laptop, and the inventor’s real ambition is to find the Internet. The screen displays “This webpage is not available.” Kirsten Raymonde says she does not really remember what computer screens looked like, although she was eight when she saw one. Electricity interests her less as a route back to a remembered technology than as the possibility of ordinary illumination: a lamp, a nightlight, a dining-room chandelier, or a bright stage. August, by contrast, looks at the screen with a lost expression.

That difference reflects the uneven distribution of memory between them, not a division in their friendship. For August, television belongs to a particular childhood. When he and Kirsten Raymonde break into houses, he gazes longingly at televisions and searches for old issues of TV Guide. He remembers standardized programming across the different U.S. Army-base houses where his family lived, and the shows that filled hours spent alone after school. Kirsten Raymonde can picture him as a pale, thin child playing a small violin in electric-blue television light. She also knows that he looks for scarce poetry books and studies them in the evenings or while walking with the Travelling Symphony. Her ability to imagine his earlier life gives their present companionship a quiet element of witness: she recognizes what the lost objects recall for him, even when they do not carry the same memories for her.

Companions on the road and at rehearsal

The friendship appears in ordinary work as well as private recollection. During a slow march through unfamiliar territory in the heat, the troupe walks with weapons in hand, resting the horses in the shade and rehearsing as it goes. Kirsten Raymonde recites lines from King Lear while August, learning the part of Edgar, struggles to recall his speech. She supplies the missing words, and he repeats the line correctly. Their exchange is small and matter-of-fact: she helps him work, and he accepts the help, while the troupe continues to travel under difficult conditions. August’s recent turn toward acting sits alongside his established place as second violin; Kirsten Raymonde’s own earlier experience in a Toronto production makes the play part of a shared activity rather than a separate world.

Their friendship also operates within the troupe’s dense social life. The Travelling Symphony rehearses, performs, and travels together year-round, carrying petty jealousies and resentments alongside camaraderie, music, and Shakespeare. Kirsten Raymonde and August are not free of the group’s scrutiny: the third violin’s insinuations make their closeness a subject for gossip. But their pact gives the relationship a clear shape amid those tensions, while their shared work and outings keep it grounded in daily routine rather than gossip alone.

A shared home in an inhospitable world

When Kirsten Raymonde is fifteen and August is eighteen, she remembers speaking with him at three in the morning during a cold spring night near New Phoenix. She has been with the Travelling Symphony for a year and often sits up with the night watch because she has trouble sleeping. August speaks of the difficulty of entering new places, recalling a pre-pandemic childhood marked by children asking whether he is from around there and by the repeated arrival of moving trucks. His experience of being an outsider precedes the collapse; after it, the small towns the troupe encounters are even harder to enter. They have survived together through the worst years and do not readily welcome strangers.

In that conversation, the troupe’s internal frictions are set against the larger problem of belonging. The Travelling Symphony can be exasperating, but it is also the pair’s only home. Kirsten Raymonde and August share that condition as travelling outsiders, and their friendship gives it a personal form: a familiar companion within a company that is itself the closest thing they have to a settled place. Later, while the troupe is in St. Deborah by the Water, August tells Kirsten Raymonde that The Conductor thinks Charlie and the sixth guitar must have gone south along the lakeshore. His inference is straightforward—west is water, they did not go north, and the troupe would have met them on the road—but the exchange also shows the easy circulation of information between the friends. Their bond is not a separate refuge from troupe life; it is one of the relationships through which they navigate it.