Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

And so it started a tradition. Every Sunday night, I cooked a new farm-fresh meal, recipes developed to highlight in-season produce, local farmers. Everything was easy to make (every chef loved promising ease), but also fun: Danny on the other side of the camera, laughing at the embarrassing anecdotes I shared about growing up on the farm, how they related to the recipe, how they related to our life together now. From the first video, I wasn’t just promising a farm-fresh meal: I promised something else. Friendship. Honesty. Someone saying it was okay to embrace wherever you came from as a part of where you wanted to go.

Everything is getting blown out of proportion.” “No, you’re not hearing me. It did matter. Because no one becomes terrible all at once. It happens in very small increments. And it paved the way. That little lie. It helped you tell a lot of important lies.” “That’s not true. I didn’t lie about the important stuff.”

“I’m not talking about me, Rain.” “Are you kidding me? It’s all about you.” She shook her head. “Just because you think the picture would be prettier if I had an impressive career doesn’t mean I’m not happy. 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?” “Is that right?” “It is, as a matter of fact.”

Except I was too tired to lie to him. And, I suspected, too out of practice to sell the story. That was the thing about lying. You got used to it, and it was what you did. The truth became a low groan that you could hear, but didn’t really need to address. When you were out of practice lying, though, the effort it took to lie well—the energy to turn a story—became obvious. It was almost as hard as telling the truth.

“You were the most honest person I’d ever met. That’s why I chose you. And it’s why I wasn’t particularly weirded out about the fake cooking videos or you playing make-believe. I didn’t think you could lose what defined you. But that’s exactly what got lost,” he said. “I couldn’t reconcile the woman you turned into with the person I know you are. Or were . . .”

“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.”

I hadn’t begun to forgive Danny for what he had done, but I was starting to think that maybe he was right. 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? That was the cost of my curated life. I had no clue where I’d gotten so lost.

And I realized I’d been wrong about something else. Maybe the most important thing. 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.

“I didn’t want you to think it had anything to do with you.” She scrunched up her face. “Why would I think that? My mother didn’t really want us hanging around together. There was no choice.” I felt my heart burst at her empathy, her understanding. At six years old, she had already surpassed her aunt and her mother. I leaned in and gave her a hug, like I hadn’t missed the first six years of her life, like I had any right. 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 you’re pretty great,” I said. “And I want you to know that in case your mother kicks me out again.”

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 only understood it now—after Sunshine had taken such a terrible pivot, after Danny had outed me—and I was forced to face myself again. I had become my father’s daughter. He’d had his rules. And I created my lies. And they served the same purpose at the end of the day. They let us live in alternative universes where we got to pretend that we were strong. Where we felt good enough.

“I’m offering you a second chance. And this time, there will be no pretending to be anything you’re not. It will be the real you.” That stopped me. Because she couldn’t promise that. That was the tricky part, wasn’t it? That was Ethan’s point. Danny had been able to hack me because I’d lied about who I was. But he was also able to do it because I’d put everything out there. I’d told the story about myself that I thought needed to be told. Until it had taken me so far away from myself that I couldn’t even find it anymore. The truth. My truth. However large or small, however unimportant. However click-worthy. Maybe that was all we had to hold on to. Our truth. Our thing. The thing that made us who we were. So the entire world wasn’t suddenly for sale.

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.

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.