As I was driving home after what was an unexpectedly interesting day at the office, my wise old iphone played a song I haven’t heard in a while: “Sunrise” by Simply Red. If you haven’t heard it, no need to rush to Google: it’s 1990s polite adult pop at its finest with a borrowed riff from the Hall & Oates song “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” (Enough said. Trust me.)
Yet, I’ll never forget the song because it bookmarks times in my life when (I’ve now decided) contains tangible evidence that I’ve been taking crazy pills (a fine prescription of FuckItAll) or that, in the very least, I’ve been nursing a mild case of delusional thinking for the past decade.
The story begins in 2009 when I’ve just finished my comprehensive exam for my second Master of Arts degree in English (Writing) and I successfully defended my thesis, which was a piece of historical fiction— a novel—set in the early 1950s in Catholic Quebec that explored gender, spirituality and identity through the context of sport. (My protagonist, a young woman, is asked by an old childhood friend to run the Boston marathon in his place because he’s terminally ill with cancer. Women weren’t permitted to run the race because common theory at the time stated our uterus would fall out if we did. But, she decides to do it anyway, which goes against not only social norms, but the values of her family and friends, which is tied to her deeply Catholic community.)
Anyway, let’s just say that it was a high point in life that was followed by a lot of low points. I was living with a boyfriend and the relationship wasn’t exactly going well and working at a small boutique in the mall in Tahoe City on the North shore of Lake Tahoe. The snow storms were especially prolific that year the first time “Sunrise” played on the speakers in the tiny store. I was completely alone in that empty mall, watching the thick snowflakes (thick like cotton) fall silently on the world that was turning degrees of white.
It was a moment not unlike a blank page, when you ask it: now what? Only, I didn’t really have an answer to that question. I only knew—or, believed—that if I stayed there, some essential part of me would go dormant (maybe die)—and with that song came the great idea to apply for the MFA program with the latest application deadline, Saint Mary’s College of California. I sent them snippets of my thesis/novel, a letter based on a news story I wrote about training for the Lake Tahoe Marathon (self actualization at its finest since I not only finished, but won the race).
I marinated myself in the hope that I could change my life because somehow my passion for writing stories would translate itself into a different time and place when I was no longer isolated and alone in quite the same way, and that my words— the elements that made up my stories— would be the very thing that saved me.
The second time I heard “Sunrise”, it was in a local bagel shop about a month later. I still hadn’t heard back from the program on whether they liked my application or novel (or not), and I was knee-deep in training for my next marathon despite the feet and feet of snow.
This meant that my daily schedule looked something like this: my boyfriend (who was the local harbor master) and I would wake up at 6 a.m. and make it into town no later than 7 a.m. I would trudge through the snow to the gym where I’d run 8-16 miles on the treadmills placed before windows where I watched the snow fall. He was at the marina next door, clearing the boats and docks of snow. At approximately 9 a.m. I’d wrap up my run (or whatever additional resistance training I was doing) shower, and open the boutique by 10 a.m. At 1 p.m., we would meet and go to lunch together at one of three local options. That day I heard “Sunrise” for the second time, we chose the bagel shop.
What follows is an excerpt from an essay I wrote called “Skin” that was (loosely) about the paradox of love: that we often say that soul mates “mirror” us, when in reality, they are, at times, our opposite. Or, that love is like the Pythagorean theorem: we all have two sides to our personalities that are more or less rational and a third really fucked-up side. And the goal of any romantic pairing is learning what kind of fucked-up you’re willing to live with.
Backstory: I really love the actor Patrick Stewart. It’s great that he did Shakespeare and all, but I’m a Trekkie at heart and I grew up watching him in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
From my essay “Skin”:
I’ve read that genuine personal connection consists of not only of accepting one’s faults, but also one’s fantastic delusions that reside in the regions of the brain protected by years of denial. Love? I’d scoffed. Irrational infatuation? I’d scoffed even louder. I was all grown up now and hadn’t had felt the pull of either since I was eight years old. But you know, the second you declare such things the Universe in all its sagacity has a way of showing your humanness in all its bare and embarrassing glory to the person you profess to love.
Outside it was as white as a blank sheet of paper and whiter still; inside the small cafe, it was the opposite. This storm had lasted for three days, and so not many lingered in the café that afternoon. Perhaps they were still skiing or snowboarding, or out of the basin entirely. The snow flew into my face as we pushed open the door and I was still brushing it off of me and specifically my face when he said, leaning down into my ear “Star Trek.”
“What?”
“Star Trek.” I shot him a ‘look’.
“Over there.” I followed his gaze to a bald man perhaps 25 feet away from us at one of the wooden tables with a dark-haired woman, both in black ski pants. The man sat, whispering to a woman, his face temporarily turned away from us.
“Star Trek,” he said again.
I tried to understand what he was saying me. Why “Star Trek”-- my guilty pleasure since childhood--suddenly mentioned in this public place? Why Steve, normally the sane one between us two, was trying to make a scene when all I wanted was a sandwich after having run 16 miles on a treadmill while staring at the snow which fell outside the window? While I had severe chafing that nearly bled under my arms where the skin had rubbed thin and a tuna sandwich might make me feel better, he felt the need to delay things, to call attention to what seemed so mundane-- a man and his girlfriend-- with the esoteric and incomprehensible words “Star Trek.”
“What?” I asked again, my tone obviously annoyed.
“Look,” he said, with a nod of his head. I did, briefly.
My unspoken thought was: You know, Leonard Nimoy isn’t bald (because, reportedly, Nimoy does live somewhere in the Tahoe Basin.)
But then, the bald man spoke. He said, “Let us get a sandwich.” It was a voice I knew which had once boomed from the television when I was eight years old.
Steve smiled as I fidgeted in the seat across from him at our table, one away from Patrick Stewart, my one and only lifelong infatuation. “Go talk to him,” he said from across the table.
“I can’t,” I hissed, worried he’d hear me.
“I think you should go say ‘hello.’ You won’t have another chance,” he said.
I shook my head, not even imagining it. “I can’t,” I said. “It wouldn’t be OK.”
“Just go.”
“Really?” I squeaked.
He nodded.
“What do I say?”
“You’re impossible.”
I felt myself grab onto the possibility that I could talk to PATRICK STEWART. Inside, I was going O-M-G. I tried to hold it together. “No, really. What do I say?”
“That you’re a fan?”
And so, I stood, aware that I was wearing a black sweatshirt and brown sweat pants with olive oil stains on the fronts of them that just wouldn’t come out in the wash and old running shoes which smelled, honestly, like some small and long-dead animal. I turned back when I was halfway to his table (perhaps a total of 5 feet) and my partner looked at me as though to say “go” and because I came this far already, so I kept on going.
Taking half-steps like a two-year old, I think it took me a year to get to that table.
When I arrived, I said: “I’m Rebecca,” shoved my hand in Patrick Stewart’s general direction. He looked up from the woman seated next to him and blinked as if he was wondering why he was supposed to know what it means that I’m Rebecca.
And as he blinked, because I am me, I noticed his skin. That, first of all, it was skin like yours or mine; that it contained wrinkles the professional lighting and haze of a television set concealed. It was human, that surface which confronted my eyes. It was not flat and one color, but undulating with several. Human, in a way that took away my ability to string words together to form anything coherent at all. It’s no longer adoration, but instead brute honesty: the realization I just interrupted a complete stranger who was having lunch with his girlfriend.
“I’m a fan, or was. No, am. A fan.” I envisioned myself a crazy person. Or maybe it was the expression on his face that led me to this conclusion. “I’ve watched Star Trek.” A pause. “But also saw you in a few Shakespeare productions,” I added because I had watched clips of A Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure for a class I took as an undergraduate student seven years before.
“Which ones have you seen? The productions in London, perchance?” he asked, eyebrows aloft.
And though I wouldn’t have framed it in such words at the time, there it was, proof that people are not nearly as perfect as circles: “I don’t know,” I said because every title of every Shakespeare play, according to my brain, does not, did not, did not ever, exist.
I sensed Steve shaking his head behind me.
But he held my hand as we walked back into the storm and to the car. He kissed me goodbye before returning to work. He saw the side of me which is the most revealing, the most mentally atrophied and still, he came home that night at six o’clock with a bag of groceries like he planned to stay a while. And he did, I suppose, in the grand scheme of things.
The next day, I arrived at work early, playing “Sunrise” on full blast, dancing with the vacuum filled with hope that Patrick Stewart would stop by with his wife looking for a cute new outfit or for advice for dinner. They didn’t, of course, but the song (and the possibility) carried with it this intoxicating hope that life was not always drab, dreary and covered in snow. It could surprise you sometimes.
The next few examples bleed together in instances when I’ve literally thought something along the lines of: “I studied poetry, what do I know about sexual abuse?” or “I crawled around on the floor once to get rid of writer’s block. Why do you think I’m capable messaging about some national disaster?”
I wonder, sometimes, if all adults ask themselves these questions or if it’s just me. If, by some chance, I didn’t quite grow up and now I’ve arrived at a point in life when I didn’t quite cut the mustard as a 100% artistic and expressive person, so now I’ve got to carve out my place in the quotidian and the practical. I can’t help but feel some elemental part of me say (simultaneously):
1) I’m not good enough for this, and
2) If I’m truly a writer, would I even have been asked?
I was accepted into the MFA at Saint Mary’s on scholarship, but only after they asked me to send along a sample of my nonfiction writing, which they liked more and admitted me on scholarship. This, too makes me wonder: is the writer of a certain kind of truth the kind you don’t have to read until you have to? How is it that I became so bad at what I loved that I have to figure out how to do something else in order to survive in the world?
The song “Sunrise” came up on random tonight as I was driving home after a modern dance class when I, again, didn’t quite cut the mustard. I’m strong and agile, but I attack the movements of modern dance like a butcher. I can jump, but I can’t glide.
I can write an essay, but it won’t move you.
I can write a poem, but you won’t feel my heartbeat even though (I promise) it keeps me up at night.
It is the moment when you hear the song “Sunrise” and the associations flood you. And then I wonder: is there (yet and again) something more?