There's a lot of skin showing in our building today, the weather outside is hitting the point where inanimate objects are glistening with sweat and the air-conditioning decided that it was going to take three days to fix, yesterday.
Not that I'm complaining, I'm wearing shorts and sandals and barely much else and I've got more clothes on than most of the women.
Wheeee...
Work, right, I was working on something, I'm sure of it...
Monday evening we (saying "we" seems so natural now and the habit is terrifying)rented "Dancer in the Dark", actually, David rented it, he left work before I did and did groceries and rented a movie -- my only criteria was "something from the international section" and we cooked his family-secret-recipe together and HOLYCRAPONASTICK but that's some fine spaghetti sauce. Four hours from chopping the first onion to gulping it down in generous and chin-staining forkfuls, but well, well, worth it.
Actually, David rented "Dancer in the Dark" on Sunday night to begin with. I was with princess, giggling and acting as silly as a light-hearted girl with crazy curls could be, trying to distract her from the somber atmoshpere of the veterinary hospital.
Her kitten swallowed a ribbon. They've been pulling it out of her bum ever since.
But there was a pretty girl at the vet's and I helped her carry things to her cab, all gentleman-like, encouraged by princess' grin and the grateful smile of a young woman.
David's credo had been that if I wasn't at his place by nine-thirty, then we were skipping the movie because he was planning to carry me bodily to the bedroom and never let me leave again.
I loved the way he'd put that, yet somehow managed to appear at his door at nine-twenty-nine and we popped in the movie and after an hour or so I couldn't take it any more.
We stopped the movie.
I crawled into bed shivering and apologizing and promised that we'd rent it again and finish watching it one day.
We finished watching it on Monday in betwixt spaghetti and Laundry and talk.
A lot of talk. Talk of what love means and talk of what scares us in each other and talk of why he doesn't voice his fears because he doesn't put enough credence in them, talk.
We finished the movie in tears, both of us, having rented it the first time to spend some time with Bjork and her voice and a story that I'd heard was moving, having rented it the scond time, in order to finish watching it, and from the same melodramatic sense of tragedy that had me thinking of it from the moment we'd stopped it the first time.
It was... tragic. Purely, honestly, the occasional musical interruptions where Bjork and whoever shared the scene with her burst into song were welcomed pauses between sincerely heart-rending stories.
Stories that so closely resembled my mother's, grandmother's, family's stories of their life in eastern Europe.
Stories of unfairness, of odds that hit you in the face and of the kind of people who have the strength to keep going, grinning at people who call them crazy, inspiring everyone else with the kind of honest laughter that comes of having nothing left to fear, because it's already happened.
Stories of unfairness, of odds that hit you in the face and of the kind of people who have the strength to keep going, grinning at people who call them crazy, inspiring everyone else with the kind of honest laughter that comes of having nothing left to fear, because it's already happened.
We talked again after the movie, we talked, and I cried unabashed tears, soaking his lap, the sheets, my hands, I cried and he kissed me and told me that it isn't too late, cf, you're wrong, we can still change the world a little...
I cried about the little deaths that are coming faster and faster each day, the realizations that there's no nobel-prize-quick-fix to utopia, there's no amount of change that can flow from my pockets or of skin that I can scrape from my knuckles that can turn the balance of things around.
I cried about how helpless he makes me feel, I cried about the liar that I am, never having told him about my dreams, the little girl inside me screaming for attention, never having told him the melodramatic things that pass through my skull and hide themselves in this diary.
I cried and told him that I'm not as strong, not as strong as anyone thinks, nowhere near as strong as Bjork or her character or anyone, even.
And he played the perfect boyfriend and told me that I was, and I kissed him full of tears and woke early to the sunrise filled with a stranger kind of peace. The kind that doesn't have the slight sting of alone-ness that quiet sunrise serenity does.
I've never shed tears so noisily and emphatically before, never in anyone's presence, and when I thanked him the following afternoon he looked confused.
~