“i can’t tell you but i know that it’s mine”
at some point in my life, i noticed something about the way that movies and books make us fall in love with their main characters (or at least understand why other main or supporting characters fall in love with them). i had long understood, at least at a subconscious level, that i enjoy glimpsing people’s quirks, and watching people fall in love because of/in spite of them, because (like everyone, i would imagine) i like to think that my own quirks are equally lovable, and that other people would get a kick out of knowing about them, if they only had the chance. the thing i realized when i thought about it, though, was that the way that we most often get these glimpses when it comes to fictional characters is by being exposed to moments that don’t really have parallels in our own daily lives – we get to hear them thinking, watch them lecture themselves in the bathroom mirror, see the look on their face when they close the door behind them and breathe that sigh of release that means “ok, i’m alone.”
sometimes there is an added candid camera sort of plot twist, where the characters are caught by other characters in some of these same sorts of moments (and heartstring-yanking cuteness customarily ensues), but most of the time that’s not the case. most of the time it’s the things that other characters never get to see that makes us root for the heroes, that makes us know that something is going to work out, or, in some cases, that it’s really better in the end if it doesn’t. we sit, transfixed, yelling at the screen or throwing down the book in frustration because we don’t know how they just… don’t… get it! it’s so obvious! but it’s really just a grand trick of storytelling – many of the pieces that we are so expertly putting together from the safety of our external perch are completely invisible to the poor bastards whose happiness actually hinges upon them. even when they all live happily ever after they haven’t seen as much as we’ve seen. the experiences of individual characters often completely sidestep many of the key points of the story from the audience’s perspective. of all the things that make us love amelie – the hand in the beans, the walk with the blind man, the gnomes, the long lost love letter – the picture guy (it’s funny that i can’t remember his name, eh?… nino, sayeth the orb) only sees a sliver. sure, perhaps they will talk about them as they sip coffee together on the sunday afternoons of the rest of their lives, but at the point where he knocks on the door and steps inside and the happy ending begins to unfold, the context that makes the whole story make sense to us is almost all context to which he is totally oblivious.
but we’re sure glad he takes the leap anyway, right?!
amelie is probably a bad example because the story is meant to have a magical air, but that’s also kind of my point… the magic we want comes from the strengths of our imaginations, not our realities. there are many other examples, and when i first began to consciously notice them, it pissed me off. i felt cheated and somewhat prone to despair. if we come to associate a certain story arc with falling in love, but that story arc is basically impossible to attain from within the story of life itself, where does that leave us mere mortals?!
most of the time, i just cluck my tongue when i think these things and tell myself to go on a walk, or take a bath, or do something else that pushes me into the realm of that-which-most-stories-reach-for-but-do-not-quite-capture. i am not angry at life for not being a story, or at stories for not being life. stories are here to succor us, to resonate with us, to prod us to reflect on the bigger human picture. they show us the internal worlds of others so that we might come to feel more comfortable in our own internal worlds, and come to trust that they exist for everyone. Even if we can’t see all of the quirky things that the people in our lives do when they are alone, we can understand that, as fellow human beings, they do them, and we can love them all the more for it. the only reason that stories spend their energy casting formulaic webs in which to ensnare us is because the walls between which those webs are woven are the real emotional structures of our lives, and those structures can be appreciated directly as well, even if there’s a requisite loss of perspective that comes from being inside rather than perched above. even the most hauntingly beautiful of maps is still not the territory, and i would never trade a place i love for a beautiful map of it. i’m glad they both exist. each helps me to more deeply enjoy the other.
that said, i still sometimes feel frustrated at how hard it seems to be for me (and others, but i’ll just speak for myself here) to step back into that reflective, good-humored, trusting-that-there’s-more-to-each-other-than-meets-the-eye kind of space (i’m liking the hyphens today, eh?). i think that what we want to believe is that any love, romantic or platonic, is simply not worth writing home about if it’s not stronger than the walls that life throws up around the things that it’s hard to learn about each other. we want to believe in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, where even without knowledge (or memory) of the actions of those special others who are destined to be not-quite-as-“other”-as-other-others (teehee, now i’m getting carried away), we still feel inexplicably drawn to them. and i don’t think we’re crazy. i’m not trying to say that magic is any less real because it lives in our imaginations. our imaginations are real, and magic is what happens when our imaginational and physical realities seem to mingle, if only for a short time. i am just as drawn to that feeling as anyone, despite my apparent desire to talk it to death, and my frustration doesn’t come from longing for a life with cleaner edges.
i do, however, think that there’s a difference between wanting people to love me as i am and then doing all i can to be who i am, and wanting people to love me as i am and then sitting back to eat cheetos and watch buffy reruns. i was motivated to write this novella of a post because the last few weeks have brought me a few of those experiences where it’s more of a struggle than i want it to be to express myself to people that i care about, and those experiences often trigger this thought about the difference between life and story. i get in this mood where i picture the movie version of my life and imagine the voiceover that might make it all seem endearing in the midst of the awkwardness of the moment. i imagine how the people in the audience will know what is going to happen, and cheer me along, and somehow the whole idea makes it a bit easier for me to smile at myself and keep plodding through the stories of my life that will never be told.
this strategy is yet another potential quirky charm, i suppose, but i also think about it another way. i’m often just simply afraid of putting myself on the line, and sometimes i feel like this idea that we should wait around for people who bring out our best discourages us from taking a hard look at the things that keep us from bringing it out on our own. sure, i want magic, but one of the wands is mine.
so i’m trying to internalize that, and sure, it could be said that i’m sneakily offering the very sort of interior monologue that i claim doesn’t exist in reality, hoping that it will endear me to you lovely readers, and maybe that’s partly true
maybe that’s partly why i want to do more blogging
maybe i think there Should be more ways of getting those glimpses into other people’s brains, and blogging seems a great way to go about it since i can write all the wacky-ass stuff i want, and you can read it without feeling like i sent it to you personally and am therefore patiently waiting for some kind of a reply
there’s something to that, but who knows who will get far enough in this post to make it worth teasing out much right now…
and i don’t really care one way or the other…
did you read this far and not read the flippin title?!
;)