I am always hesitant to put that my interests involve going to the movies. It sounds so superficial. “Like, ok, so I totally love hanging out with my friends and listening to music…and going to the movies.” It’s tainted with high school naiveté. No offense to high schoolers. You’ll understand it when your older…I am sure that probably offends you even more. But you really will. And when you do, you’ll forgive me. Anyway, so, I don’t like just putting that I like going to the movies. Even though I do. I really really do.
A therapist told my brother that he should watch television or a movie before he goes to bed because it will quiet his mind…he has a hard time shutting it down and the therapists rationale was that he wouldn’t have to think, because all the thinking had already been done. His mind would just sort of go numb to the story unfolding in front of him. That doesn’t happen for me. If he was my therapist, I would not have shown up for my next session.
Movies make me feel more alive. They remind me that love exists, even if it comes in the form of a cheesy chick flick. Grant it, it’s not likely that my best friends boyfriends best friend who happens to be the best man in her wedding will be incredibly and insanely attractive and also happen to feel that way about me, and also be a medical professional…say a doctor…and be single and ready to fall in love except for the fact that he is helping raise his brother’s children since his brother’s accident and so he has a lot on his plate and then he falls in love with me and then screws up because he isn’t sure if he is ready and then he spends time alone when it’s raining outside and Damien Rice is playing in the background ever so softly and then in a rare moment of clarity, while watching his nieces play in said rain, he realizes that if he is going to hold onto the things he loves, the things that are most important in life, he will make room for me, amongst his career and his nieces and that it’s all worth the effort and flash forward to a scene where I am contemplating a job offer in Chicago and am actually on the phone with my new potential boss negotiating salary and my kitchen door flings open and there he is, breathing heavily because he had to run three blocks because the traffic was so thick and he opens his mouth and says, “don’t go,” and I tell my un-future boss that I will have to call her back, and he runs up to me and trips on the bag I have waiting next to the door, since my cab is outside, and we both laugh and I help him up and he kisses me and then we get married in someone’s beautiful backyard and so it doesn’t necessarily happen just like that, but love does happen. And sometimes it takes a movie where it does happen like that to remind me that it does actually happen.Movies wake me up, and the breathe life in to the dead parts of my veins. When I walk out of the theater, especially after seeing one alone, it is like all of my senses are on high alert. Life is going on around me while mine is standing still, and I get from place to place without even being aware that my legs are moving. The looks on the faces of the people I pass are more exaggerated, I wonder more about whom they are and what they are about, and why they are here on this night at this time and where they wish they could be.
After the movie I watched tonight, I went to Barnes and Noble, because it is always hard for me to just go home after my movie high. I needed somewhere to unwind, since movies don’t actually do that for me. I walked toward the bathroom because I wanted to freshen my make-up, as if that matters, and even though I had enough sense to encourage myself that this was necessary, the world around me was still more fresh and alive and out of body than ever. I walked past the section of coffee table books about Marilyn Monroe and Italy and classic cars, and there was a gentleman with high waist polyester pants and a pale yellow polo shirt tucked neatly in, and he had such a kind inquisitive look on his face, that told me he had both lived a full life, full of joy and loss, and that he is indeed still living it. It made me wonder how long he had had those pants and if they were his dress pants that he sat aside special for a night on the town. I found joy in his confidence, and hope in the fact that he had no idea that they were no longer in style, and that if he had had an idea, he probably wouldn’t have cared. I got the feeling that he was somewhat aware of the important things in life.
I kept moving and passed a somewhat overweight gentleman standing in front of the health section. He wasn’t obese, but looked like it wouldn’t hurt him to say no to a donut here or there. I related to that, and I felt with him. I know the, “ I don’t necessarily want to be this way anymore, but I don’t necessarily not want to be this way anymore, and I am thinking about change, but I just don’t know where to start…and is everyone looking at me here in the health section thinking this is exactly where I need to be?” You feel brave and naked simultaneously. I was hopeful for him and sad for him simultaneously.
I got to the bathroom and pulled out my lip gloss and concealer. The concealer has become one of my best friends lately. Anyway, I pulled them out and applied them, and instant confidence booster. Done and off to find a book. I pushed open the bathroom door and in front of me was a woman in a bright red t-shirt struggling to get out of her wheel chair. I wondered how she was going to get the door open, and then I realized she wasn’t...that I was going to hold it open for her. I felt pity. I felt sad for her. In these situations I try to consciously remind myself that we are all people and we all feel and mostly we feel the same. So I looked her in the eye and asked her if she was coming through and held the door open, priding myself on my good Samaritan ways. We greeted each other with a smile and I asked her how she was doing this evening as she struggled to grab hold of the bathroom wall so that she could get to the toilet to do that thing that all of us humans have to do when we have drank a lot. She replied with such sincerity that she was doing “really great actually” and that she and her “husband are out on a date.” I told her that was so great, feeling in my bones the response I gave her, and walked away in shame…as if she was a charity case I should spend my time pitying and helping. As I dodged her wheel chair that was still sitting in the hallway outside the bathroom, I had to dodge in the opposite direction another woman that was all put together with the jewelry and the hair and the smug demeanor, including a facial scowl. Then I felt pity for her, and I walked down the isle, toward the kid section, to a row of fantasy, and I cried. I cried because I was reminded of what is real, what is really real, and I felt convicted of the things in my life that I pursue that have no means. I cried because in that moment I was reminded more of the reality of love, by my friend that had to cling to the walls to make it to the bathroom, so that she could get back to her date with her husband, than any hour-and-a-half chick flick I had ever viewed, or will ever view for that matter…I cried because I acknowledged my need for artificial stimuli to remind me to live, when in reality, what should wake me up is all around me every moment in the faces that appear in my daily life. I cried because of the short but beautiful love story I had just encountered…And it isn’t that I was so impressed that someone could actually love her. It’s bigger than that. It hits at the core of it all, the birth place of whatever it is that enables us lowly humans to feel connected to another individual. That love really is bigger than that, than what we make it. It isn’t based in superficiality or flirtation, as fun as that is, or infatuation, as fun as that is. It’s more than I can put into words, especially since I have never actually been in love. But from what I have seen from the supposed love that has fallen apart to the unlikely relationships that have endured, to the labeled unlovable finding love, it’s just so much bigger than that, whatever that is.
I didn’t mean for this post to end up being about love. But Jack Johnson says something about that, about love being his answer to most of the bigger questions, so it shouldn’t be such a surprise to me that it turned out this way. I also didn’t mean to cry again in public. I didn’t stay at Barnes and Noble. I couldn’t. I had successfully been knocked from my movie high back into reality, and where I ended up was so much better. I walked to my car in tears, and wouldn’t you know, the couple in the car next to me were arguing. Talk about being knocked back into reality. She said something about him not starting it again, and he said something back to her about her not starting it again, and so I cried more for another reason, about how capable we humans are of hurting the ones we love. And then I started the car and a Bryan Adams song was playing, Everything thing I do, I do it for you, and then I laughed, because I really felt like my moment had almost come full circle, that I was now actually in a movie. And so I laughed some more and cried some more and ended my evening with Bryan Adams, feeling so full of life, more so than I have felt in a long while.
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