He gave a frustrated laugh, “It’s not about liking you or not liking you or—” He stopped, turning away from her to look out at the Pacific and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s about doing something because you feel it. Throwing convention out the window and going for what you want. Not being like everyone else, standing out—that’s just who I am.”
“But how can you always stand out? It seems impossible. Not to mention exhausting. Besides, why would you want to? There has to be some sort of balance between conforming and rebelling.”
Especially when it’s rebelling just for the sake of rebellion.
He glanced at her sideways, one corner of his mouth turned up in amusement. She wasn’t oblivious. She knew he was mocking her for being so far on the other end of that particular spectrum from him. She huffed out a laugh. “Fine. I get it. I’m not exactly the best example of balance. But I have a good reason for that.”
“And what is that reason?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He laughed then, too, but it was a tired, resigned sort of laugh, and he kept staring out at the waves, not looking at her. “It’s not that I’m trying to be different all the time,” he told her, it didn’t sound completely convincing. “It’s that I’m being who I am. I am different.”
She sighed. “Okay, fine, you’re different. But don’t you ever wonder if people will see you and get the wrong impression? Like you’re not—”
A weird shadow crossed his face, and she wondered whether he was thinking of a memory, or if he just didn’t like his life philosophy questioned.
“If they get the wrong impression, that’s their problem,” he growled. “At least they don’t look at me and think I’m an easy target.”
Where did that come from? An easy target for what?
Again she wondered whether his constant drive to be different and her need to follow the rules stemmed from the same motivation. Safety. Protection.
But even though this wasn’t the first time she’d thought it, she couldn’t figure out what he could possible need protection from. It was ridiculous. After all, this was Chris. Brash and intense, 100 percent I-don’t-give-a-damn. She was probably just projecting, trying to put her own need to stay safe on him.
“So what do you want? I don’t understand. You can’t make an entire film score of songs that don’t follow the rules of music. People will hate it. They’ve done studies on this kind of thing, you know. The audience will run from the theater with their hands clapped over their ears.”
“I don’t want to do what all the other guys do. I don’t want to be that corporate, swaggering type that churns several movies a year with the same storyline, the same recycled music. That’s the kind of guy I want to be least like.”
Minh exhaled loudly. “Yeah, okay. You’ve more than hammered the point home. I get that part. You don’t want to be like everyone else. Like the big studio guys. But what is different? To me, it’s a disadvantage, but to you…what means different to you?”
He was quiet for a second, then pointed out to the sea. “Do you see the waves out there?”
“Yeah…” She said it like she was questioning his sanity, because of course she saw the waves.
“Well, in math, there’s a concept that describes those waves. It’s called transverse wave. The earthquakes that sometimes rock the city? They roll in on seismic waves, and you feel them through Rayleigh waves. They’ve been measured, studied, and can be fitted into a mathematical formula. Math makes things safe. Just like how bridges are built according to precise mathematics because no one wants to risk vibrating and collapsing like the Tacoma Narrows. And in music, ‘good’ music follows another mathematical structure—the harmonic interval. You know what I’m talking about?”
She huffed. “Of course I know.”
“Right, well. Being able to use all of these concepts, following these rules, they keep us safe and make us feel comfortable, and that’s fair. I get that, okay? It’s fair. Fuck, I even majored in math in college. But I didn’t become an actuary or a civil engineer or any of that shit. I learned all those things, then got into animation precisely so that I could take all those rules and apply them to things that were impossible in the real world.”
“But without those rules you wouldn’t be able to do the impossible, in the first place!” She was completely baffled. She stepped close to him and put her hand on his chest, looking up at him. “You need a foundation,” she said softly, “upon which to build your stairway to the stars. Without it, you’re bound to fall.”
He shook his head slowly. “Better than staying low to the ground my whole life and never reaching for anything.”
“So you’d rather take one enormous risk in that reach rather than build up to something lower but guaranteed to be within your grasp?”
“What I’d rather do,” he whispered it against her lips, “is stop using this ridiculous analogy to have a conversation.” He smiled, and she could feel it against her. “Besides, I’d also rather be kissing you.”
And then he closed the tiny distance between them.