2010-10-25 - 2:43 p.m.
I struggle, a lot, to find a mix of living intensely and living lightly. Living lightly means: only small problems, some TV, office work, a little of the other kind of work, a few chapters of a novel. Mostly, living lightly is there because you can't live intensely all the time. You need breaks.
Is is possible to live intensely while only sitting in a movie theater? I think so. There were just three of us. Later, a man sat behind us and we knew because he ate his popcorn loudly. Later still, another man sat in front of us. But, mostly, it was just us three. We sat in the exact middle of the theater. It was two pretty girls, me, the sound of voices loud in my ears, the giant screen filling up my eyes. It was Never Let Me Go and I think what we really mean when we say that something is very, very sad is that we are very, very sad that some kind of possibilty got taken away, or, worse, was only a mirage. It's a story about getting just a taste of what's good and then having it taken away, forever. And I'd read the book a few times, and so I knew about the sadness already, but I wasn't ready for the crying, the looks on the actors's faces, the awful whispers that say: it's all gone and it won't ever come back.
We left that theater, the guy behind us still watching the solemn credits, the guy in front of us checking his cell phone, and when we got to the light of the lobby I could see the girls' faces. Their eyes were red, and they held wrinkled, wet paper napkins in their tightly clenched fists, and all that did was break my heart again, for the third, or fourth, or fifth time that night. We compared book to movie for a while but what really needed to happen was a hug and so we did a three-person hug, and it was warm. We untangled ourselves and went our separate ways, smiling and waving for almost the whole block. On the walk home, the gloom got lighter and lighter. I wondered why. I was with good company, and that helped, but there was something else. Hanging the keys on the post by the front door, I realized what it was: taking in that subtraction had done something to me. I'd been added to.
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