< class="posttitle">Gathering Dust on the Shelf
Posted by: Steven Perez in movies, personal log, tags: loss, love, movies, pain, romance
“Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.”
I’ve never been a big fan of romantic cinema. So I guess that I am constantly amazed that my favorite film of all time is CASABLANCA, a movie generally averred to be the greatest romantic movie of all time.
(Yeah, right, some great romance there. Richard Blaine lets Ilsa Lund get on a plane without him and ends up running away from the Nazis with a two-faced Frenchman in tow. I don’t think that word means what you think it means, Julius and Phillip Epstein.)
Anyway. Never been a big fan of romances or their bastard little brothers, the rom-com. (Memo to self: find and exterminate the person who came up with that phrase, then wipe out their entire family as well. Also, while you’re at it, find and exterminate the person who makes up those ridiculous combo names like “Bennifer” and “Brangelina”.)
Still, there’s always been a special place in my heart for BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET. Generally each just 90 minutes of two pretty people walking around European cities, trying desperately not to fall in love and then trying desperately not to fall in love again, I loved these movies. I always wondered what it would be like to meet and fall in love with someone in a short period of time, lose track of them, and then find them all over again.
And then I met Rebecca.
(Yeah, it’s one of those posts again.)
I first met her when she was all of 18, just a slip of a girl, and I was a sage old man of 25. We met tangentially in the way that most people who accidentally fall in love with someone outside their sphere friends usually do: family. My younger brother dated her, and later on, her youngest sister fell for me. (Long story, and a painful one in its own right.)
Digression: I’ve never understood this dynamic with me, this ability that I have to attract either women who are older than me (remind me sometime to tell you the story of the older married woman, whose son was best friends with my brother, who came on a bit strong to me when I was just out of high school) or girls who are far too young for me (seriously, 17-year-old ingénue, I’m flattered, but I’m also more than twice your age). I mean, yeah, I see what I look like in the mirror every morning, and the thought that any woman would find me remotely attractive has always floored me. Still, I’ve often wondered why it is I can never seem to find someone my own age who thinks of me that way, at ANY stage of my life. Go figure.
Anyway, we spent quite a lot of time together for the better part of a year, and even though our relationship never moved beyond “just friends”, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel something for her, and she would later admit that she was head over heels for me.
And then, one day, we stopped seeing one another. Details are unimportant, but: family.
Fast forward about seven years. I found myself back in Albuquerque. Rebecca was married with two kids. I knew her husband vaguely from when I last lived here in Albuquerque. Didn’t much like the guy. Had a hard time believing that they got married.
Anyway, one day, I got word that she was in the hospital. She had given birth and there had been complications. Memory loss was involved. I went to see her anyway. She didn’t remember me.
That day wasn’t the first time my heart had ever been broken, but it sure did feel that way.
Three years later, her memory partially restored, she calls me out of the blue while I’m living in Southern California. We start talking to each other regularly. Things get heavy.
I make plans to ditch California, which I was growing tired of anyway, and move back to Albuquerque. Happiness for a time. Wine and roses, deep kisses and constant endearments. Two kids, all grown up, finally together at last.
One day, while we’re watching some ridiculous romantic movie, complete with my complaints about the impossibly moronic story, she turns to me and challenges me to find another movie.
I reach for BEFORE SUNRISE. It’s one of my favorite movies. Before I play it, I tell her that it’s our story.
We watch the movie. She cries. She gets mad at me, tells me that this can’t be the way the story ends.
I reach for BEFORE SUNSET. Yep, I own both of these movies.
We watch the second movie. She cries again. I nearly do so myself. Jesse and Celine’s story really was very much our own story.
A few months later, we broke up. We try and patch things up, but finally break for good as the summer approaches.
That was last year.
Tonight, bored with the internet, I flipped through my movies, looking for something I haven’t seen in a while. At the end of the shelf, there sit two movies I could have sworn I sold last year.
BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET.
I haven’t been brave enough to watch either movie since our breakup. These were our movies, and since our story was over, what was the point in watching them anymore.
I queued up the first movie. I almost made it to the end, but eventually, I had to turn off the movie. You really can’t pay attention to a movie through tears.
All the while, I can hear my inner voice saying over and over again, “It’s not fair. This was our story. It shouldn’t have ended on a bench in the heat with harsh words and in pain.”
So I put the movies back on the shelf. And then I moved them to a box in my closet.
Because, in the crazy mixed-up world that we live in, that story of love lost and found again wasn’t ever about us. That story of two lonely people finding each other after so many years apart, finding that they were in fact the missing part of each other’s lives – well, that’s good fiction. Because, in the real world, the person you were a decade ago was a different creature, and sadly, the same creature all over again, making the same mistakes in all new ways.
A tale of what should never be.
Some things should stay in the past. Some questions deserve no answer.
And some stories should end without ending.
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