Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. —Groucho Marx

It’s nice to know that when you hear the closing guitar riff of “Moonlight Mile,” what you’re actually hearing is a piece of music so soft and difficult, so dangerous and quiet, so full of life and death and love, that just below its surface, the song is telling you a secret—a secret that I was just starting to understand—about everything that matters in this world, everything that grounds us and eventually leaves us, all at once.

Did it ever occur to you that if you weren’t living in fear of other people’s opinions of you, no one would have the power to take anything away?”

My favorite song playing, like a chance, to remind me of who I was. Whom I’d been.

“I’m saying it’s the way of the world now to display yourself. And there is no putting that genie back in the bottle,” he said. “And some people integrate it well, they find social media connective. But for the rest of us, it’s a different story. Literally. And no one’s talking about it. The cost of curating your life.”

“And there is a cost to the people looking at that photograph and thinking that’s how their lives are supposed to be.

I’d spent so much time playing make-believe, I’d lost the thread between who I used to be and the person I’d been presenting to the world. How do you begin to trace it back to when everything you did wasn’t a perfectly calibrated extension of who you thought you were supposed to be?

I’d been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I’d thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn’t understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started.

Maybe that was the thing about regret. Once you felt it, you went out on a limb to try and feel anything else.

I think it’s a good thing to know what you want. If you do, you have a chance of getting it. If you don’t, you have a chance of getting only what someone else wants you to have.”

I was still trying to figure out what we all lost in broadcasting our lives for everyone else’s consumption. Before we took the time, you know, to figure out what we wanted our lives to add up to. Something important, it seemed to me. Something like the chance to write the song.

There was a lesson in that, which Z had taught me, about what we should pay attention to instead. About taking a hard look at what we are willing to throw away, about what we should be letting it show us.

We are and we aren’t. We try and we fail. We tell the truth and then we lie. We want to be a part of things so badly that we’ll pretend to be anyone to get into the room. And pretend to be someone else just to stay there. We want to be seen and we want people to guess. We want them to understand. We want to be forgiven. We forgive ourselves. We start again.