“An idea has to feel sad to be true,” she said. “Sometimes I think that the more sad an idea is, the more true it is.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Although I do feel that way about movies.” “That the more sad ones are truer?”

“Although there are some great comedies that feel true to me. I do think tragedy is ‘greater’ than comedy, though.”

“Like, ‘if there could be only one.’”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “because I think it sort of shades into this idea that the more negative some-thing is, the truer it is. Not just sadder, but more cynical, more punishing to all parties. And what if it was just the opposite?”

“What would the opposite be?” I said.

“The opposite idea would be that the most positive version of events is the truest version. What if I lived my life, even for a week, under that assumption? Instead I live believing that the most negative version of my life is the ‘real’ version.”

“But they’re all just real versions, side by side,” I said.

“I was about to say something like that.”

“I think the key thing,” I said, “isn’t which version you choose right now, but that you realize you can decide to choose a different version at any time. That you realize you can eject one CD and insert another, to completely change the ‘score’ of your life, as it were, and you have a huge library of CDs to choose from.”

“I like this idea,” she said. “It’s simple, but effective. I like this idea of scoring my own life. But it’s kind of like you’re playing a CD in a concert hall. The orchestra is there, and every so often they may let the cymbals crash together, or something like that. Drown you out.”

“That’s fate,” I said. “Exactly. That’s cancer. That’s a death in the family.”

“The CD you put on might not matter much at certain moments,” she said. “At other moments it might matter enormously. It might be the only thing you can hear.”