thensepia

A gut wrenching sort of night, in a good way if you know what I mean.

Really it was just Movie, Bar, Waffle House, but when you have friends that challenge you, that meet your arguments with new points, that love you and yet will be brutal to you, nothing's ever as simple as a laundry list.

A group of us went to see CLoser tonight, and after the last scene faded and the credits started to roll, I just sat there, stunned by everything I'd just seen. Will asks, 'What did you think?'

'I feel like I just got hit in the face with a fist by somebody I don't like very much.'

'You didn't like it?' Desiree asks.

'No...I really, really did.'

After, at the bar that's in a greenhouse, we sat on benches with drinks and talked it over. I think we were all still a little stunned. We talked about the brutal lines, the accuracy of some of it. Of how often we'd each been in love, and how much we'd meant it.

And I'm telling Des about my twice-maybe-three-times, about Jonathan and how I hated myself more for loving him and for letting him treat me the way I let him because I loved him. I told her about Todd, who was the maybe, but who I suspect I loved rather than was in love with, and that I only realized it after it was over anyway. And then I told her about the other one, the One, and she already knew about that one without me having to tell her.

'Do you ever catch yourself in that moment when you're falling, and you feel it there, happening, and wonder if you should think better of it?' she asks me.

I think about this, hard. 'No,' I answer, 'with Jonathan it just sort of happened and was caught up in so much self loathing. With Todd everything was always so fucked up anyway I never knew anything. And with [Him]...well, it was like I woke up one day and it just was, and had been there all along, and it was the most gentle and easiest thing in the world to admit.'

More drinking. More discussing. Will talks about how he would sometimes find himself in a relationship where he maybe wasn't in love, but that it was so comfortable and easy that it was just safer, simpler to stay. 'You mean you stay with someone because you're used to them, rather than genuinely in love?' I ask. 'Yeah,' he answers.

'That's the saddest thing I think I've ever heard,' I say.

The major question we asked: does love always have to end in disappointment?

I called Rachel. I'd had a couple of drinks, and she seems to always have stunning things to say, so I thought some were in order. She sort of said maybe, but that the disappointment can open you to good things that come after. It's not exactly what she said, but it's what I heard at any rate.

But--

Does love always have to end in disappointment?

Later, Des & I are on our way across town to Waffle House. 'You okay?' she asks.

'No. That movie...it really got to me, which I know is a sign of a good movie but...fuck.'

And we start talking. I tell her how when you go stumbling around and then suddenly find the One, that fabled one that people refer to and talk about and long for, that one person who gets you and excites you at the same time as feeling like home to you...how when you find him but you can't be with him, when you find him but somebody else has found him first, that you then have to scramble to rearrange your worldview, to fit the pieces back into some semblance of order. 'I mean...it's something I can't even put words to. It's him. The one I want to go to sleep beside and wake up beside. The one I want to share coffee with and cook for and make his bed with hospital corners. The one I could see a life with, maybe even kids, it's that insane. And here we are, a world apart, and me, I just wonder what a fool I am for even letting myself live with hope in my heart. Because if it were going to be, if I were enough, if I were worthy, he'd be here. And I know I'm a fool, because I can't concieve of a world in which I wouldn't uproot my entire existence to be with him.'

And Desiree starts talking. She tells me about a paper she wrote once, about the difference between the things we love and the things we are responsible to, and how, in the end, the things we are responsible to most often win out because choosing passion over obligation is a kind of insanity most people can't bring themselves to muster.

I don't know if what she's saying is true or not, but it's got me thinking. The I realize I don't even know if everything I've said by now is true. Everything is muddled inside me, tumbling around like thoughts in a dryer.

We pull into the parking lot. Van Morrison is on the radio. Valerie is already inside, waiting. Desiree turns to me.

'I know it doesn't seem like it now, but if you let yourself, he won't be the last person you love. And he won't be the last person to ever love you, or get you, or see through you. Unless you put this on that pedestal, where nothing else will ever measure up.'

I feel like I've just been punched in the gut.

She's right.

I remember earlier in the evening, when I said that, as complicated people, we required complications in our life, because simple is boring to us.

I wonder if I am the maker of my own drama.

We get out of the car. Our breath is visible on the night air, and I look at her, at this beautiful woman who is my friend, and who pushes me, and challenges me, and amuses me and laughs with me, who points out all the things I miss, who says things that have such gravity to them that I am quite often stunned.

And I'm grateful.