By Sylvia W. Chan

They say I'm hopeless

I WENT TO the movies alone that day, not for any particular reason, really, except that nobody wanted to go with me.

I'd like to tell you I was OK with that, that it didn't perturb me to amble up alone to the acned adolescent snapping gum between her two front teeth behind the grimy, grease-smudged glass that enclosed the ticket booth. I'd like to tell you that my chi was warm and strong and that my sniveling little inner voice wasn't going, "patheticpatheticpathetic" with the manic speed of a metronome on presto. And I'd really like to tell you that I was downright pleased to be alone, my confidence unencumbered by the fact that everyone else in the theater was paired, tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled to the nth degree.

I'd like to. Though of course, I can't.

Like a penny with a hole in it

I go lots of places by myself (aren't you proud?), but it was just one of those days when I needed to be around somebody, needed somebody to laugh at my jokes and tell me if I had food stuck between my teeth. I suppose that's why I decided to go see love jones in the first place, a movie about negotiating one's aloneness and finally surrendering to the pleasures of togetherness. But after calling everyone in my mind's Rolodex and coming up empty-handed, getting to the movie became a mission, a strange exercise in solipsism that just had to be carried out.

They say I'm no less

The movie was sweet – it had attractive people, had a mildly moving plot, and earned brownie points for telling the story of young not-white folks with complexity and compassion. It wasn't, however, sweet enough to keep me company. It was a film that would have been enjoyed much more thoroughly had a warm-blooded body been parked in the seat next to mine (where I'd stuffed my rumpled, goose-down coat), a body I could've shared my Red Vines and Sunkist with.

No less

As the last frame faded, I shot up to make a quick getaway, to lunge out of the almost-consoling darkness so I could catch the 51 bus home.

No less

But then the credits began to roll, and Dionne Farris's "Hopeless" started playing. I fell back into my seat.

No less, no less

I wish I could whisper in your ear right now, just to clumsily coo the dampened Casio chords that open the tune, so you could hear how simple, how easy, how soothing they are. And I wish I could accurately describe how profoundly and thoroughly the leisurely descending scale, set against the gentle tap-tap of classic R&B backbeat of the intro, salved my isolation at that moment, how the sound of the room's pre-THX speakers wafted the melody through the artificially buttered air and tipped my chin up toward the heavens (as well as the pidgepodge of grotesque curlicues adorning the faux-deco roof of the multiplex). Right then, it played like every song I'd ever heard on the oldies station in my dad's VW hatchback that I'd actually liked growing up, like those Cat Stevens tunes, except that "Hopeless" kissed the present-day with every breath, its austerity thoroughly modern and cloyingly retro at the same time.

Than up to my head on it

It was, for all intents and purposes, the most stunningly perfect song ever played at that moment. It didn't matter that the lyrics hardly made any sense at all, and that the movie would have been 87 times better if they'd just played this damned song at the beginning. Farris sounded like Karen Carpenter if Carpenter had been black, eaten three square meals a day, and done Tae-Bo; Nina Simone if she'd just loosened the headdresses, let the bitterness go, and stayed in the States; or Bill Withers if, by chance, he'd been a lovely young woman on a very lovely day.

Ba-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah

From that moment on, that tune became my default backbone for a good two months, a song that did not go unplayed for more than a four-hour stretch. Ever. Like I said, I had no idea what the words meant – only gleaned that there was some message about faith and healing, and not caring about what others thought, and believing in yourself, and some every-day-is-a-new-day thing. I mean, if Farris had come out and actually said any of that stuff, I would've probably screamed "Bitch!" and changed the channel like I do every time I see Oprah.

I think, perhaps, that I fell in love with "Hopeless" because it reminded me that I like what I like because I like it. That no matter how much I like Coltrane's Meditations, I like Blue Train better; that I can listen to the Mikado, but I prefer A Chorus Line. That there are things we listen to for enrichment, and then things we put on to forget we need enriching. I sat in that theater until the lights went up, and even though I knew some of the pairlets and triplets filing out were wondering why the girl in the big fluffy coat was still there, grinning like a psychopath, I didn't feel hopeless at all.

Hey hey hey hey.

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