There Will Be Another Song for Me
For I will sing it
Last summer, a friend sent me the soundtrack to the movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with the message “IS THERE A SINGLE BAD SONG ON THIS?” I looked at the list and said, based only on track names and artists, that it looked like every song was good, and they said something like “no, you have to listen, preferably in a car with the volume way up.” It was a perfect confluence of events — later that day I would be driving for an hour each way to go swimming at a pool in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that did social distancing and temperature-checking and timed lap-swims. I started lap swimming again during the first winter I lived in Chicago; I wanted to do some sort of non-gym, non-yoga-at-home indoor exercise, and swimming had the benefit of letting me be basically naked and still warm in the middle of the winter. It let me remember I have a body. The public pool I swim at had closed in March, so I hadn’t been able to swim for five months. Finding the pool in Buffalo Grove felt like a lifeline, like maybe I could get a tiny sliver of my pre-pandemic life back for an afternoon.
If you haven’t seen it, Priscilla follows Anthony “Tick” Belrose’s trip across Australia with two fellow drag performers, Bernadette Bassenger (Terence Stamp, absolutely brilliant) and Adam Whitely aka Felicia Jollygoodfellow (Guy Pearce, shockingly young). Tick aka Mitzi del Bra (Hugo Weaving, captivating) has booked a four-week gig at a resort in Alice Springs (owned, we find out later, by a wife no one knows he has) and asked Bernadette and Adam to join him on the trip there. Adam manages to buy a giant silver tour bus, which they dub Priscilla, and the three of them set off across the desert.
That July afternoon, Priscilla’s soundtrack followed me as I set off across Chicagoland looking for that tiny sliver of my life and for the space to figure out whether to break up with my boyfriend of four years. I had been wrestling with an unusual amount of internal ambivalence: was it ridiculous to end a fine relationship with a very good person just because I wasn’t as in love as I wanted to be? Was I a bad person for wanting more than I was getting? I felt myself slipping into half-assing our relationship — leaving our shared apartment early in the morning, letting old routines like doing the crossword together fall by the wayside, spending more time talking to friends — just to avoid having to make a decision. So that day, I made a plan: I would drive to Buffalo Grove, I would swim for an hour and a half, then I would call my friend Melissa, who I trust implicitly with this kind of situation, and ask her for advice. I would decide what to do.
It was a hot, sunny, hot day. I got in the car. I queued up the Priscilla soundtrack. The chorus of the first song, “I’ve Never Been to Me” by one-hit-wonder Charlene, peaked just as I merged onto the highway. I howled with glee. To this day I remain absolutely overjoyed that I heard that song for the first time zooming in the car like that, with the speakers blaring, the sun beating down on my left arm sticking out of the window, my legs sticking to the leather seat. Every song on that soundtrack is an absolute hit. I pulled into the pool’s parking lot as Vanessa Williams’s “Saved the Best for Last” ended, having just wound through I-don’t-know-how-many miles of suburban-slash-country roads belting it at the top of my lungs. I got out of the car. I had my temperature taken and paid the seven dollars to get in. I took my shorts off. I swam. I dried off in the sun. I called Melissa. She asked me a question I will never forget. I knew what to do.
In the car on the way home, I put on the second half of the Priscilla soundtrack and was surprised to hear the Judy Collins version of Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now.” I was even more surprised that I remembered all the words. “Both Sides Now” is a supremely sad, almost hopeless song. “I've looked at life from both sides now / From win and lose and still somehow / It's life's illusions I recall / I really don't know life at all,” the last chorus goes. “I really don’t know [BLANK] at all” repeats throughout: I don’t know clouds, I don’t know love, I don’t know life. But there’s a glimmer of hope buried in the middle of all the not-knowing: “well, something’s lost, but something’s gained, in living every day.” I listened to it three or four times in a row, Collins’s almost showtune-y take on the song making it (me) feel powerful even in all its (my) ambivalence.
I parked the car during the middle of the Donna Summer cover of Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park:”
There will be another song for me
For I will sing it
There will be another dream for me
Someone will bring it
It was all a whole fucking lot. I got out of the car, walked into my apartment, and told the person I’d been with for four years that I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I had messed up a lot of things, up to and including my delivery of that message, but ultimately that didn’t matter, because I was finally letting the truth of my feelings lead the way.
Ending a relationship at that point in the pandemic, the beginning and the end both totally out of sight, felt so small. So many other things were ending at the same time, our lives included, literally and figuratively. And there was no one around to witness the break-up. No one to run into at the coffee shop who’d ask, no co-workers to butt in, no friends to break the news to over drinks. I told the people who I thought it would matter most to. I signed a lease for the first apartment I saw, six blocks from my old place, because it was close — my ex and I still share a car, and I wanted to be able to visit my cat — and because it had two bedrooms and because it would let me have pets. I lived at the old place, with my ex, for six more weeks. We worked out sleeping and working arrangements; we stayed out of each other’s way when we needed to and talked when we needed to. Some wounds emerged and then started to heal in those six weeks. I packed up my things, alone. Movers took them to my new place, where I unpacked them, alone. Sometimes endings take a long time.
Last week, I got the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. In a few days, I’ll be fully protected. This lonely stretch of my life, and our collective life, has started to end. On my way home from the vaccination site, I listened to, for the first time since that day last summer, the soundtrack to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
I got off the highway during the first chorus of Aretha’s “I Say a Little Prayer for You,”
Forever, and ever,
You'll stay in my heart, and I will love you
Forever, and ever,
We never will part, oh, how I love you
Together, forever,
That's how it must be, to live without you
Would only mean heartbreak for me
and knew for a few minutes that I would one day be that sure.