I like to sing in my car, alone on the highway, between the suburbs and the city. If you have ever had the misfortune of passing me on one of the nameless Texas highways I often frequent then you have undoubtedly been subjected to one of my performances. I don’t sing when I have passengers or when my windows are rolled down, and I don’t let the radio fall soft enough to hear the sound of my own voice. This isn’t because I lack confidence, this is because, despite my efforts, I cannot sing. A fact that seems of little consequence given that there are a great many things that I am incapable of doing and a fair few that I am generally considered quite proficient at, but it is the singing really bothers me.
When I find myself alone in my house I will shutter the windows and blast Freddie Mercury, or Beyoncé, or some unpronounceable Swedish metal band my much cooler friends have introduced me to, and pretend just for a while that I can sing. It’s a fantasy of mine that I indulge in when isolation allows. Wanting to be a rock star is the kind of aspiration that is as common as hydrogen and as achievable, for me at least, as cold fusion. Knowing this doesn’t stop me from dancing around my living room using whatever screwdriver, spatula, or hair brush is nearest for a microphone to croon the off-key lyrics to “PILLOWTALK” by Zayn. If you haven’t heard of it trust me it’s a banger. My dog might disagree, but that’s just because I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it. I’ve digressed. You see my point isn’t that I would like to be a singer or that I waste my time lip syncing to popular music. My point is that even now as a fully-fledged tax paying adult I indulge in make believe. It isn’t just playing pretend. It’s an exploration of a person I never got to be, one that I would like to have had the chance to know, a story I am constantly rewriting.
That’s what stories have always been for me, a chance to live as someone else, to think as someone else. Fiction isn’t just a respite from the harshness of our realities, it is a gateway to every version of ourselves we haven’t gotten the chance to know. There is a version of myself that grew up in a space station orbiting some distant planet in the Orion Nebula, and one that learned French while studying at La Cordon Blu, and yes there is a version of me that can sing. They have different friends and different ways they look at the world and their being fictional doesn’t change how imagining them has changed me. Reading and writing fiction is a chance to explore worlds and understandings beyond our own. People are by nature explorers. We’ve gone to the moon and the poles, we’ve trekked jungles and crossed oceans, and all because someone imagined that they could.
I have heard more than once that fiction is escapism and to that I say you’re not looking hard enough. Every astronaut was once a child looking at the moon imagining space in all of its infinite glory and themselves in all of theirs. Fiction is the chance live outside of ourselves and bring back the lessons we could only learn in shoes that are not our own.
No matter how many times I imagine it, I am still not a rock star. My singing still sends my dog cowering into the closet when I reach for the high notes, but that isn’t the point. It’s the ten minutes being someone else that changes how you view next ten minutes being yourself.