movie night in suburbia

For CAM eyes, mostly....

I went to the movies tonight. Because Paul couldn't come and fix the car and I felt too shitty to go to the gym. And it seemed a little sacreligious to go for those reasons, but it was the only movie I ever remember really wanting to see my whole life, and I know we should have seen it together, but I'm not going to Baltimore, you're not coming here, and meeting in Colorado really isn't the middle, after all.
I wore pearl earrings, fake, left over from Friday's job interview, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap. Which is probably what I would have worn if it had been you and me going, and not me and him. It was warm out, unseasonably warm, and it was raining and smelled like spring even though the weatherpeople say that it will be below zero by tomorrow.

And I sit there in the old run-down place, very conscious that you are not next to me, and I am riveted, but not so much that I can't think. In my head I write a beautiful essay, all about the day you were born, which was the day I was born, and all of the April 1sts that I can remember. It makes me feel a little old to think that in two months it will be ten years since I spent your birthday snowed in in a shitty old motel room in Seligman, Arizona. I remember another time when it snowed and I took my new doll Molly over to my friend Lisa's house on your eleventh birthday, which was, of course, my eleventh birthday as well. Maybe someday I will write it for real, for your eyes only, or maybe just for mine. But I felt you there somehow, or maybe just felt you SOMEwhere, in a Baltimore hospital, maybe, or sleeping in your car.

I wonder if you saw the movie; I pictured you sitting in a theater like the old one I was in, in Maryland, or Boston, perhaps, Jasen beside you or maybe Jaime, too, or maybe just you alone. I watch those scenes on the big screen and think of the places we've been together, places that used to be ours, but are no longer, because I have been back to almost all of them with someone else. Except for Michigan, which will probably always be ours no matter who else I ever go there with, and I know I will. And you probably will, too, but I can't picture it and maybe I'll never believe it.

The movie ends and we walk outside, me carrying my coat. It's still warm. And he turns to me and I look away and we walk to the car and he follows me, of course, because this is how things are. And I'm glad, but I still make the conscious choice not to turn around. Sometimes life changes, or doesn't, because of a conscious choice not to turn around.

I try not to cry as we drive back to Saint Paul, through the suburbs and Minneapolis and Grand Avenue and along Lexington. And I am not sad because I regret any choices I've made, but just because sometimes the world is so beautiful and we have to leave some of it behind. And he understands and doesn't understand at the same time, and maybe that is why things have worked out the way they have.