Dear Celine Dion

Dear Celine,

I remember seeing Leonardo DiCaprio grace the covers of Tiger Beat and Bop when I was a pre-teen, thinking that he was not attractive at all.

What?

Unfortunately, I'm being serious.  Ashamedly, I would tell my friends he "just wasn't my type" and that I preferred the mugs of people like, say, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, or Jason Alexander.  I guess this was the unfortunate part, but what excuse can I possibly give to make those crushes okay?  Funny guys were my type.  Fat, bald, short, toothy, goofy, Jewish.  If you could make me laugh, I'd fall in love.

And Leo just wasn't funny.  Of course, my tastes have changed: I'd now prefer Leonardo DiCaprio's corpse over any of those men, but who am I to judge?

Even though I was bumping around on the dirt path a mile behind the bandwagon, attached by a string around my throat, Leo did look pretty good in Titanic.  My Mom took me to see it in theaters when I was in sixth grade as part of an attempt to support a healthy relationship as my parents were going through a separation, and while I was at the time not yet ready to understand why people split up, I was ready to understand why people painted naked portraits of each other and made antique Fords drip condensation.

Plus, that song!  I swear to you I must have listened to it on repeat hundreds of times after seeing it on the trailers and previews, finding that it fit so perfectly with the fuzzed images sprawling across my aunt's uncharacteristically large tube television.   Because we lived there during that somewhat transitional year, I even had ample access to the Internet-- and was able to download it for free before Napster became taboo.

Epic.  Intense.  Climactic.  Everything a theme song should be, "My Heart Will Go On" was. 

And then I saw the movie.  How in God's name can the very song that drew people in and put asses in the seats not be featured in the movie?  Until the end, that is.  It was NOT featured in the famous "flying" scene, it was NOT featured while Kate Winslet showed off her incredible nude body and her more incredible lip mole, and it was NOT featured when Jack and Rose clung to shards of ship-wood, cold-blooded, afloat in the Atlantic Ocean.  It WAS featured as the credits rolled, informing me that Billy Zane played Rose's asshole husband-to-be, and that Kathy Bates (though totally underappreciated in said role) shone as the steadfast and headstrong Molly Brown. 

I already knew those things.  What I had hoped to discover is where James Cameron would strategically place snippets of the song, especially the last intense, building chorus.  I didn't go to the movies to spend four hours with my mother; I went to finally put concrete images to the song that had played in my head for months (and to hopefully change my mind about Leo).  I left with a sour taste in my mouth and slept on the top bunk in my cousin's room that night, squished next to my little brother, wondering why I had wasted so much of my eleven-year-old precious time.

Last week, I ran a relay race from Madison, Wisconsin to Chicago with twelve other people.  Non-stop, we slept in nap increments in random locations-- there was a gym, a YMCA, and the car we were riding in if we were lucky.  Our seven-person Flex-o-Fun vehicle was blessed to run the deep overnight legs of the race, from about 1am to 5am.  Exhausted, we scarfed trail mix and quinoa salad with feta and red onion slices to pre-game before our miles. 

A fellow van member, the sister of my good friend, was the late-night DJ.  Yeah, we needed to pump up, but some people were trying to rest.  We settled on a mellow playlist, everything from Jack Johnson to Ray LaMontagne-- and then you came on.

Low rumblings, hints of a thunderstorm, sound-effecty noise fogged up the windows.  An epic, intense, and climactic song that Laura, my new stranger-friend and I could car-karaoke to.  Not the "theme" song of Titanic, but another heart-wrenching, explosive power ballad: "It's All Coming Back To Me Now."

This song, I knew, was NOT featured in a major motion picture starring two Hollywood diamonds.  It was NOT a recommended track in the "Hot Music!" section of Tiger Beat.  And it surely was not on any of my burned CD's amongst the other songs I illegally downloaded via my aunt's telephone connection.

It WAS echoing through our new "house"--trailer, rather--when I was twelve, playing through my Mom's black, 5-disc-changer Sony stereo on a Sunday night before my first day at my new school.  And it WAS on right then, at 2:13 am on a Saturday morning, while young women napped and ate and laughed about things they didn't yet understand.

Oddly enough, Jack and Rose streamed through my head (those bastards), but they looked a little different--more like the ghosts of sandbox playmates and faux-Santa Clauses.

I saw a balding man, nearly fifty, with a crooked nose and smiling eyes with no reality to match.  A dyed-blonde woman, not yet forty, with a daringly short haircut and a tender beauty mark on the tip of her nose.  No wood splinters, just sheets.  No Heart of the Ocean to grace an otherwise blank, milky canvas, but a trio of diamonds glinting in the light of an alarm clock radio.  And their shivering was not from freezing water settling into their veins, but from the realization that something had sunk, and no submarine or amount of children could stop cursive imprints on stacks of paper.

There would be no pictures of these people, now strangers, on the covers of Cosmopolitan or Glamour--the magazines I'd read when I'd grow older; however, I would later have to decide how attractive I found them, especially when I was in my early twenties.

In that moment, as four tires held the inevitable fatigue and weight of the hearts inside, I saw the same shapes I did when your voice clung to the tack of freshly applied wallpaper: faceless heads with desperately hopeless limbs clutching to the shadows on the walls of a mobile home bedroom.  This was before the credits rolled.

So, you see, Celine-- you've really got some powerful pipes.  Canadian or not, I'd put you on my soundtrack.