Sometimes, laying in bed long into the night, my mind spins out across the city, moving Robert Altman tracking shot across the faces and thoughts and hearts of the people I love or wish I Iove or just plain can’t drive out of my head, for want of a higher purpose than laying bed long into the night.
The moon half full catches my mind illustrated out against the murky grey of the clouds, cut long through the branches of the tree outside, just beginning to bud with the first signs of yet another spring.
The first face then catches my mind’s eye, sad smile spaced out across. I see her sat at kitchen table, face lit up harsh with the top-down lighting of a romance picture. I pan around her in a slow circle, I’m so close but I’m not close enough. Never will be. She’s thinking of me- I know that, though I know that I can never show that I know, for that would be also to admit that I don’t love her, much as I want to. I should, I know I should, her humor darker than mine, her weird music taste the absolute apex of my wanna-be-philosophy of late nights of seeing beauty in the shit. We can talk for hours, days, without running out of things to say and my mind’s eye pans around her briefly, pulling itself back timewise, editor rewinding the film. Laying on her bed in the middle of some party already blown out of its sides by the booze and the chaos, just talking, talking about nothing, everything, love and sex and loneliness, so much loneliness. And back to the kitchen again, that sad smile, jump cut across the timeline. Drag and drop bits and pieces of a life together, false association through cross-cuts.
I know I should love her but I don’t. Maybe she suits me too much, we have too much in common and I read unto her the dark night of my own seething depression, chewing away at my soul just beneath the surface. But I know that’s not it, god do I know it. I wish that was it because if it was I could live with myself. My boots pound mad through mud of imagined trenches in the future war that my half asleep brain just wishes could be real. I know its not that she’s too perfect- because she’s not. In her I see a kind of beauty- of heart and mind, but god knows that ain’t the beauty I’m looking for. If all is said and done, and all honestly laid out long and wide across the page, then its not. I’m looking for tight ass and good tits, pretty face cut thin with porn star makeup. I’m looking for movie star fashion and sultry, Lana Del Rey voice. I’m looking for the sexed out fantasy ideal peddled to me constantly three sixty five in movies and books and music and video games and television and advertising and in the very shape of a wine glass or the curves of a beer bottle. So there my mind sits, her stuck in a half darkened kitchen late at night, wanting to love me, while some half-naked Margot Robbie wanna-be trips dream like through my head.
I pan out over the city high above the smoke stacks and arched roofs, neon lights of bars and clubs cutting harsh relief across the ancient facade of the Old Town. Rain drops stretch long out below me pouring through the sky towards all the people below, they that scream and laugh and yell and try their loudest that they’re having the kind of fun that the movie screen god says they should. From this higher plain I wish I could throw off the pretentious bullshit and just let myself become one of them, go out there one more time to show them what we’re really made of.
A year and a half ago I walk into a room already crowded, crackling with electric anticipation and anxiety, first years all meeting their new flatmates for the first time, telling themselves that this is it, this is when we show them what we’re made of, this is when we become we’ve always wanted to be, this is the first day of the best four years of our lives. That’s what they always told us anyway. I find myself a corner. Anchored between a wall and a support pillar. Back myself up. Eyes lock to the ground. Arms wrapped vice-like around self. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t think. If you stop thinking you exist they’ll forget you do. This wasn’t supposed to be how it went down. This wasn’t what you were looking for. What the hell was that summer for? All that fucking personal change and you’re stuck in the same damn corner, just praying they don’t notice you. All those beautiful women and handsome men, just go out there, talk, use your tongue, it’s there for a reason isn’t it? That one, she’s on her own, she’s pretty but she looks approa... but no, no, she doesn’t want to talk to you. Its not worth it. Its not worth the heart break. You don’t know the first thing about her, but you know she isn’t worth the pain. Tall, blonde, and way out of your league, just like the rest of them. You should go back to the room you just moved into, and slit your wrists.
That same image, same thought, a million cross-cuts shot across years and years and years and years, high school, middle school, first year, this year, last week, last year, last month, ten minutes ago, twenty years from now. You always talk yourself down because “it gets better,” as they always say. It hasn’t yet, but it has to, doesn’t it, some unspecified date, unspecified place and time, it has to be out there.
Those Robert Altman pans again- they apply even to me, lying in bed here, listening to a sad song by some forgotten Swedish post-rock group, panning top down across my body laid out long, across all the books and films on my shelves, the computer I’ve spent years building, all going to show how much I don’t have the life I’m told I’m supposed to.
She’s tall and blonde and blue eyed and impossibly fucking beautiful, the sort of beautiful only the non-specific explicit infinity symbol of fucking can begin to convey. The tracking shot watches her wander through some club with a girl almost as gorgeous by her side, as she playfully and firmly turns away every guy who finds his eyes drawn to her, which is to say every straight guy in the club. She wears the world’s biggest smile, her very presence a golden glow of energy and warmth, but it only goes to conceal that same fractured notion of humanity that kills the rest of us. Some guy in some far off country she knows she’s in love with, but separated from her by her own self-declared distance and ambition to do something incredible. The oldest story in the book- the true love held apart by ambitions pointed out headlights in the night aimed squarely at a hope that can only sell itself with that vague descriptor of “the top.”
Or that’s the image I need to sell myself, to explain it away, the long lost heartbreak of a love that never could’ve been for that pure circumstance of what I was and am. First time I met her, when I found myself talking with her, joking and laughing and just acting like a functional member of society, I thought to myself maybe this is it, this is the time it finally works out, that happy ending I’ve been praying/hoping/fighting/lusting after for all these years. It didn’t though, just like anything you care about too much. So many nights I found myself slipped long down bottles, blasting the same Lana Del Rey number on repeat, trying to force her out of my mind. But I couldn’t. And then she said
“Well, Jay, I’m sorry, but... I have a boyf...” and my life felt as though it was over, long before the sentence escaped her lips, and the rest of that night loses itself to an underexposed shot and the sort of crazy cuts a director uses when he doesn’t know what else to say about some defining third act tragedy.
It’s the moon again, now just a faint golden glow through the trees and fog.
Tonight is the night for truth, so now it’s time for that full disclosure, end of third act closing shock, accompanied by crash zoom, musical crescendo, and maybe a subtle tweak of the color palette, the sort that only the trained eye will notice but everyone will see. First the camera lingers long over my fingers, typing slowly at the keyboard, near constant typos a sign of a mind forcing itself towards an inevitable conclusion that no one really wants to acknowledge. Truth. Hard close up, Sergio Leone-style. I’m so far behind the love game I lost track of the starting line, instead wandering off to look for the snack bar.
Its not that I’ve never loved- that kind of love, at least. At my age, not having felt love is not so unusual. Its not even that I’ve never had sex, that’s not so far missed, beyond that aching, carnal level. Fact is, I can abide all that shit. What I can’t abide is that I’m still yet to have that awkward, sloppy, thirteen year old first kiss. What I can’t abide is that every time it seems like times are changing, they just snap back rigid to the same old chaotic depression that’s haunted me as far back as my memory will go. What I can’t abide is that I see myself dying old, the last firing of my neurons declaring that absolute regret at my failure to find love in youth. Go ahead, tell me again how young I am, how long I have to change things. Tell me the same thing year after year. Tell me just wait till I get to the next step in my life, then it’ll all change. Go ahead, tell me. Tell me and I’ll hold myself out another few years, then run away again, another continent, another group of friends left behind. Tell me, and, tonight, I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself.
Hard cut to black. Silence.
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