I used to fall asleep to the scratched DVD every single night. Over a year I did this, snuggled into my bed, a king size that fit almost exactly between two small walls. My bedroom was my childhood bedroom, though being home from college it felt different. They always feel different once we leave home and return to it later, older, changed.
I remember the DVD menu music, and I remember watching the movie until my eyelids grew too heavy and I’d drift off. I’d turn the brightness down on the small TV, I’d let the movie play, end, and return to that soft music. I remember reciting the famous line like a prayer before I drifted off. That line that is repeated twice, that line that meant everything to me then, and that I recognize as changing everything now.
“Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.”
I did, though I did not think I could. I did, though I thought I’d be stuck there, forever.
Sarah and I rewatched this Cameron Crowe classic the other night, settled into our couch and let the early 2000s simplicity wash over us. I don’t know if I’d watched it in its entirety since those strange years after graduating college, and I think in all that time, I’d forgotten: This movie changed my life.
Some films are called cinema and discussed with critical acclaim and subsequent accolade. Some are put up for shiny awards and are spoken about with some sort of reverence by those we’re supposed to trust in for their valued opinion. Some gain perfect Rotten Tomatoes scores, some, do not. Some are, to me, cinema of my soul, and I will always rate them, revere them, not for their technicality, but for their exquisite timing, for their perfect resonance in my strange heart that seeks so desperately little nods from a benevolent universe. I have a few movies that mean more to me than they’re probably allowed to. Joe vs. the Volcano is this.
Vanilla Sky is this.
I’ve touched on this before loosely, mentioned it and tried my best to explain, and so I’ll just offer the Cliff Notes today: For a long, long time, I was very sick, I was very lost, I was very alone, and I really did get to a point and a place where I wondered if that was the life ahead of me forever. I wondered if I just needed to resolve myself to the fact that I’d never have what others had, never be what others could be. I wouldn’t travel, I wouldn’t see the world, I wouldn’t find someone to love, to love me, to trust with the bizarre vulnerability laced with unbelievable passion that filled up my chest to the point of overflowing.
I’d watch Vanilla Sky and I’d see the vignettes of two falling in love, I’d see the freeze-frame moments that felt like photographs snapped in the middle of an ordinary moment, I’d remember thinking my brain worked that way, that I wanted it to work that way again. I remember watching and wondering if I’d ever know 7:30 am morning light streaming through a window with my hands on another’s skin, laughter and sighs the soundtrack to those early hours. I’d watch the film and I’d hear her say the famous line that brought you here today, I’d hear him say it again at the end of the film, and I’d believe. Somewhere in me, I’d believe.
I did, in the end. It took help, it took hope, it took time, it took ache, tears, loneliness, waiting, so much waiting, and above all, it took love.
I turned it all around.
Sometimes we have to choose risk over numbness, we have to be comfortable with uncertainty and reject safety. Sometimes we have to realize that Sofia was right, every passing minute IS another chance to turn it all around. It’s not a one-time event, it’s not a New Year’s Resolution, it’s a choice at a granular level, often at a seemingly microscopic one. It happens in a passing minute, and if we don’t take those chances, nothing will ever shift, nothing will ever improve, nothing will ever truly change.
As the movie reminds us, as Brian says:
“You can do whatever you want with your life, but one day you'll know what love truly is. It's the sour and the sweet. And I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet.”
I knew, I still know, the crushingly overwhelming sourness on my tongue. I’ve always known the sour, the emptiness you swear will never leave you, the mouth-puckering ache when you just cannot seem to get together what everyone else somehow manages. I know the sour of years spent alone, watching a life be lived without me, I know the sour of unheld hands in a giant king bed smashed between two walls, window the size of a postage stamp on the wall of your childhood bedroom. I know the sour of waking up alone, of all that morning light going to waste.
Now, I know the sweet, but I know I only taste it as such because of the sour I am able to compare it to.
I know this will be clichè, but I also know that sometimes, that’s precisely why you come here, clichè things become so because they are true, after all, but I say this to you now in closing: To get the life you wish for, the “real world” that lives just beyond, you have to “jump off the building first.” You have to believe you’ll fly, you have to believe you’ll build wings on the plummet towards the earth. You have to wake up from your dreams, you have to face your biggest fears, step to the edge, and fall until you hear that perfect voice telling you to Open Your Eyes, to abre los ojos, after so long asleep.
There is such a terrifying beauty in risking it all, and I think I write this Signal Fire because in so many ways I’m still jumping. I’m still pinching myself awake from what was a lucid dream so very, very long. I reach for her hand in the quiet hours of night to make sure it’s still there. I listen to her breathe when fast asleep to remind myself it’s real, that after so much sour, I finally found some sweet.
The minutes to turn it all around are here, they are all around us, all these passing minutes waiting for us to stop, to reach out, to grab hold. If it’s a sign you’re waiting for, if it’s the Tech Support to your dream you’ve been screaming for in that empty corridor, it’s here, it’s now, it’s this:
Wake up, open your eyes, abre los ojos, and risk it all.
Open your eyes.
