- Content warning: Pregnancy mention - Content warning: Pregnancy mentionThis is usually the kind of thing I'd put on my unlinked diary page, but it turned out too long for it, so I'll have to use the blog instead.
As you probably know, "Kiss Sim Me (Rosenthal's Canon in C)" is track #4 on Freddashay! More Music Inspired by The Sims. I wrote it late last year as a simulacrum of Silas Hite's and John Enroth's score to The Sims 2's canon of expansion packs, where it followed the Mark Mothersbaugh-inspired "Can U Dig It". The song was built on Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, which has a long association with Christian, mostly protestant, wedding ceremonies. The title is a play on "Kissimmee", a place in Florida I think. I've never been there, but I recall someone trying to sell vacation real estate there on daytime TV once. It's also an inside reference to a Sims 4 sim I made back in 2020 as sort of an early trans-simself, named Katie Kissimmee who I said was "the cutest girl you'll ever meet and sweeter than a candy store". Finally, if you install my simself into your game and your sim falls in love with her, you can, quite literally, kiss Sim me. Hence, "Kiss Sim Me".
Due to a bout of food poisoning early yesterday morning, my hormone levels are sort of imbalanced as I most likely threw up my evening meds, which include my HRT, and then slept right through my morning oestradiol alarm. This meant I had to take my morning E at 15:00 and I rushed my evening meds that night, taking everything except the evening E at 19:00, whilst I took my evening E at the regular time. I went from having low E and crying about the past, to having high E and crying about not being able to have kids. At the time, both seemed like immediate, necessary problems to which no solutions existed; looking back at it now, I only remember analogue TV static. The only thing I remember with any clarity is daydreaming about cradling my illusory infant daughter in my arms and singing her lullabies; most likely, the only reason I remember that and nothing else is that I came on here and wrote an entry on my unlinked diary page about it. Something about "whole-ass mourning a child I can never possibly have".
On my oestrogen high, I accidentally unlocked a hidden property of "Kiss Sim Me" that I didn't even know about while I was writing it... on Cohost last summer, I wrote about a dream that I'd had where I was getting married, which wasn't an unknown subject necessarily, but all the past marriage dreams I'd had always featured me wearing a tuxedo. This one was different, in that I was the one wearing the dress. I could see myself cinematically; the gown, the veil, my hair styled into hanging curls, the makeup, I could smell the bouquet, feel that I was secretly wearing my tennis shoes under the dress because who's gonna see? And, most importantly, the music was playing from a presequenced MIDI on my Roland workstation. As though I'd leave something as important as music up to someone else, even in my dreams! It was a Christian ceremony for some reason (I'm Jewish), but besides that tiny detail, it felt absolutely real. The dream ended when someone told me I was pregnant and I woke up crying. It was so perfect, but it wasn't real.
"Kiss Sim Me" was suddenly the soundtrack for that bit of the film. As it played, I could see the wedding, the morning sickness, the pregnancy test coming up positive, the endless shopping for baby clothes, my partner (identity unknown) helping me do things, me continuing to do household chores despite their insistence that I should sit back down, and finally holding the baby in my arms and rocking her to sleep. My phone didn't like me crying onto it because it warned me about moisture in the power socket. That broke into my unreality and I got up to take a shower, whereupon I cried some more.
I have no objection to music moving one to tears... but my own music? That's a bit embarrassing. The only other time I ever cried at one of my own songs, it was as I was recording a viola take for "Get To You", shortly after I started taking HRT. I'd like to think I'm not so shallow that I only ever cry at my own music. Fortunately, that's not true anyway. In amongst other things, I've cried at Dennis McCarthy's theme for Dr. McCoy in 101 of TNG, Uncle Matt and Gobo's duet in 101 of Fraggle Rock, and Shirley Henderson's performance of "The Sun Whose Rays are All Ablaze" from The Mikado.
As to the whole "having a baby" thing— I know it's a major ick to a lot of people, thinking about that. But throughout my entire transition, sometimes it's been the only thing I've thought about. I guess that, even though the world has been sucking major ass ever since I was 21, I'm still jealous of other people who don't have the same qualms as I do about the current state of affairs and go ahead and have kids in spite of it. That girl downstairs back in 2022, the girl in that same flat now, Mrs. 2, "Rachel", that TV meteorologist from Alabama, my high-school French teacher, Nina Phoenix, even my own parents.