Dreams

“Thunder only happens when it’s raining

Players only love you when they’re playing

Women, they will come and they will go

When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.”

I still don’t fully understand what those lyrics mean.  I didn’t understand it when I was a kid and all of the songs from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors would be on repeat from the CD player in our car, and I don’t understand it now.  I don’t know if I’m supposed to, though.  I’ll always be able to fall asleep to “Dreams”.  Much like me, my parents understood the importance of having a carefully-curated night-driving playlist; the sweeping guitar, wistful lyrics, and steady tempo put me instantly back as a kid falling asleep in the back of the car, thinking 10PM was the peak of being up late.

My oldest sibling traits were more apparent when I was at elementary school age, even more so than now.  I got told I was bossy a lot, but if I didn’t initiate the video of my sister and I singing one of the Rumors songs that embarrassingly lives on my dad’s Facebook account, then who would be creating all the happy memories?  My parents did, but I thought all they did was take embarrassing pictures of me.  I wanted my own thing, and I wanted it done right, so I filmed my own video and I had that.  

I tried what felt like every form of making stories.

Notebooks piled up in my childhood bedroom, looking completely scattered compared to my parents' pristine cleaning style in the rest of the house.  In my tiny room, there was a vent that would always blow sheet music off my music stand, so I clothespinned miscellaneous sheets of music to it, and since I practiced so much, the music stand was almost never folded and put away.  The viola sat on the case next to it, a miracle I never tripped over anything.  “Aren’t you tired of stepping over that every day?” my parents would ask.  No one could understand the organized chaos of my room, the feng-shui that would lead me out of my bed to a notebook, then to my viola spot, and as I got older, to the scripts of the three plays I’d be in at any given time, and of course the archive of all of these when I felt like reminiscing.  Oh, and the path that led out of my room when I felt like bothering my sister to film something.  I don’t know if I’ll ever work at that level of productivity again, but I didn’t know anything else.  

“Nothing’s forever, nothing is as good as it seems

And when the clouds are ironed out

And the monsters creep into your house 

And every door is hard to close”

When March 13, 2020 rolled around, I was the busiest I’d ever been.  I’d be up at five to do my homework or go to my early mandatory IB class, have my normal classes all day, have rehearsal until 10 or 11PM, rinse and repeat the next day.  And I loved it.  I’d see all my friends in school, their energy like a cup of coffee that would make me forget how tired I was.  Just when I’d start to feel sick of doing assignments in class, I’d get another boost of energy from the creative collaboration of theater or orchestra.  The flow of my childhood bedroom, out of shock to absolutely no one, bled into my early high school lifestyle.  Then it all just stopped.  My math teacher said there was no way we’d shut down, and my biology teacher showed us the map of the most impacted areas from google.  

It wasn’t just COVID, either.  2020 and 2021 was hit after hit after hit.  I started my first job (which I hated), it was an election year (and I couldn’t help but do anything but worry, stuck in my house all the time with my family who was starting to irritate me more every day), and the things we were learning in my history class about racism and violence were ever-so-present in the news I had nothing else to do but watch.  On top of it, I didn’t even get to have a senior year of high school.  Every door was hard to close.  I had to do something but there wasn’t anything I could do.  What was this world I was entering into that seemed to be on fire?  I had no way of being the little girl falling asleep in the backseat to “Dreams” anymore.

“Does she know how proud I am she was created

With the courage to unlearn all of their hatred 

We don’t talk much, but I just gotta say

‘I miss you, and I hope that you’re ok’”

The first time I cried to a song, I mean, truly ugly-Kim-Kardashian-crying-face wept, was when I heard those lyrics for the first time.  The unfinished laundry I had, the victim of a sudden productive streak remained unfinished as what was just a breakup album somehow flashed me forward and backward at the same time – I was about to go back to in-person high school for my last week of senior year when Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour came out and it hit me that the changes of the last two years were only the beginning.  Online school was about to become in-person college classes.  I was about to live somewhere else for the first time in my entire life after barely leaving my house for two years.  The childhood bedroom where I made stupid little videos with my sister is somewhere I wouldn’t live anymore.  I’ve always needed patterns and routines, and just as I was getting into some kind of routine with being trapped in my bedroom, unable to get my pre-teen workflow back, it was about to change again.  The chaos of the world at that point felt insurmountable, but then, I learned that unlearning hate is just another form of learning, the thing I have been ever-so-drawn to since the beginning.  I drove my friend Emma to school for the first time in over a year.  The talk of college plans bounced off the familiar sound of opening and closing lockers.  

“I miss you, and I hope that you’re ok” felt like I was talking to a past version of myself – maybe a child, maybe an annoying middle schooler, maybe the March 12, 2020 version of me.  But either way, one that needed to hear it.

“But listen carefully 

To the sound of your loneliness

Like a heartbeat drives you mad 

In the stillness of remembering what you had

And what you lost.”

I carry all of those people with me.  Five-year-old me, although she didn’t know it yet, liked when things slowed down.  She liked when she could be alone with her own thoughts and think up impossible scenarios soundtracked to “Dreams” before falling asleep.  The girl who wanted more than anything to be behind the creation of something.  She wanted to put her thoughts and imaginations on paper so badly that she tried every way to learn how, pushing herself to the absolute limit just because she wanted to absorb while she grows up.  The late high school girl deals with all of that coming to a screeching halt during a crucial coming-of-age period.   Change is hard, but change is necessary.  Sure, I might have lost the ability to be five years old, but I still have her hopes.  Her fears. Her dreams.