cinematic bovarism

rather than doing the usual rambling about why i don't update often and then just say not much before stopping that for another undefined length of not updating, here i go really talking.

high school was a really rough time for me. hell, even now, 5 years later, i still shiver when i think about it. but what got me through that was movies. movies and imagination. i would watch a lot of various movies but fall in love with a particular one. i would watch the beloved movie often, very often, sometimes as much as three, four times a week, for months. always feeling the same things at the same places. sometimes the feelings increased through the watchings. so i basically lived my teenage emotional life through cinema. and then even after high school and after my trip to the other side of the country, i still did that bovarist thing for a bit. to avoid people, to live life in predictable kind of way. but that behaviour dried out (working in a videostore pretty much killed my interest for living-in-movies).

last summer, i was introduced (by a former professor of mine) to a lad. i fell in love. he didn't, but kept leading me on, thinking that "he could, given time" fall for me. i once went to a movie with him and a couple of his friends. i was sitting right next to the lad, his friends were a couple of rows below us. the lad hated the movie, i liked it a lot. but as things got rougher (because i really was much in love with him), i went to the cinema to watch the movie i saw with him. and i did that, a lot, during the two months of that non-affair. then, the movie stopped being shown in most theaters. so i stopped seeing it. and delt with my grief some other way.

that movie came out on video today. i was really expecting it. not because of the connection it has with my lost non-love, but just because it was salvation during a rough time (and because it's a good movie). so after work today i went to the store to buy the DVD, and watched it. it was really eerie. during some scenes, i re-felt the things i was feeling last summer; from other scenes, i remembered smells and atmospheres, feelings and longings.

for about the past 3 weeks, i've been seeing and hearing things that reminded me of the lad. songs we sung together coming back from the wedding, authors he liked and kept on talking about when we had those huge literary chats over coffee, words he said, stuff he told me that i didn't understand at the time but that i do now. and all those pointers make me want to call him, to talk to him, to see what he's up to. yet, somehow, i know i shouldn't. part of me thinks that all those pointers i'm noticing only appear because i'm being receptive to them, because i need to feel something for someone but there's no one, so i go back to the last strong felt feeling. the other part thinks that i should indeed get in touch, that i have nothing to lose.

for now though, i'll keep on believing that i'm only seeing those pointers because i'm being receptive to them, because i feel the need for love.