The Complicated Coast

There were things I did not know about Sunny Lewis when we decided to room together at Stanford. I did not know she was going to be a psych major, that she played sad songs on a sad steel-string acoustic guitar, that she hummed along as she strummed her sad guitar with wrinkly swimmer fingers, that she hummed and strummed other objects that were not a guitar when her guitar wasn’t around to calm herself down from all the human behavior classes she was taking that were secretly making her crazy. I already knew that she liked to give free psychological counseling, but I didn’t know that I would be her guinea pig for the human emotional experience, that I would look up from my position on my recliner when the sad strumming suddenly stopped and she would be staring at me, analyzing.

Swimmers fall into two camps: those who want a balanced life and those who don’t care. Sunny cares. I don’t.