Till Now I Always Got By On My Own, I Never Really Cared Until I Met You, And Now It Chills Me To The Bone, How Do I Get You Alone?

--"Alone", Heart

I was watching one of Sarah's bravest performances in Guinevere and was impressed by how well the film tackled the subject of how one deals with a relationship that isn't conventional. Rather than preach or glorify the decision Sarah's character, Harper, makes in the story to live with and learn from a man over twice her age, it presents its perks and pitfalls in equal light. It's not the most action-paced story and the themes are subtle, but, if you've seen the film as many times as I have, you can pick up a lot of nuances about the search for individuality and the search for love often coinciding with one another. I think that's what I appreciate most about the film is that it has this underlying quality about the gaining of independence being a manifestation of one's capacity to love someone fully--even if that someone, as Harper puts it, turns out to be the "best fuck-up" you've ever made.


but the secret is still my own
and my love for you is still unknown

When I was growing up, with my little crushes on girls in my class, with my infatuations with celebrities, I do not believe I was capable of comprehending the depth of maturity and selflessness one has to possess in order to love someone fully. I thought it was a matter of being attracted to somebody else and acting on these feelings. Rather than realizing that love isn't akin to the idea of romance fashioned in Victorian novels whereby people are compelled towards one another, I threw myself in fully. I proclaimed my intentions with the intensity of a man possessed. I acted foolishly and with no regard for common sense or decency. More importantly, I tended to follow in the shadow of young woman who never even knew I was there.

Then, as I got a little older, I started finding myself in the company of individuals who apparently enjoyed my company. However, rather than recognize the signs for what they were, I was blindsided by incomprehension or disbelief. I say incomprehension because there were a few young ladies who my inner circle swore to me were infatuated with me, but I failed to see the signs until after the fact. I was like that dorky guy you see in the films who is getting picked up on, but fails to recognize it for what it is. You see the actress attempt time and time again to give him her phone number, but he answers with "yeah, we should definitely talk" or "it's been fun talking with you. That was me to a tee. People I generally could have been attracted to I never even gave a chance because it was inconceivable to me that anyone could enjoy what I was and who I was back then. Chalk it up to a low self-image or chalk it up to blatant immaturity, but I had opportunities that were never taken.

I don't think I hit the point where I had the capacity to appreciate somebody else fully until I was around nineteen. And the only reason I knew that was that when it became vital to me to see who I wanted to see, damn the consequences. Rather than allow other people, like my family, like my friends, to dictate who or what I was going to like, that's the age where I hit my stride in asserting my self-will. I didn't care how old she might have been or how far away she lived or even how often we fought. All that mattered at the time was that that individual at the time was the person who seemed to bring out the best in me and that I would have done anything to continue to be that person. Rather than the ineffectual lovesick puppy who follows a pretty lady simply because she is so... shiny, it was around the age of nineteen that it honestly started to feel that I was making a choice. It was at that age that it really felt like I was taking control of my life by first taking control of my heart.

Yes, there were nights where I would spend wondering if I had some strange attraction to situations that were hopeless. Was I some kind of masochist who couldn't have a relationship that wasn't doomed from the start? I really started to look over my track record and I began to see that the longest relationships I had were the ones that had huge obstacles to them. I started to take it to heart that if it didn't feel like an ordeal, an ordeal the two of us could tackle together, my relationships would fall apart. It was as if I needed adversity to hold us together.

Then it happened. I met the one person where it didn't feel like the attraction was the adversity. It really seemed that she was perfect and that the universe had just conspired to keep us apart. She was the first person I knew I loved despite the setbacks rather than because of them. I stopped thinking how to make everything work for me and how I wanted things, and started to think of what would be best for both of us. I stopped thinking of getting what I want simply because people told me no and started thinking of making what I wanted come true and not letting anyone stop me. I stopped thinking of how best to get someone to like me and started thinking of how best to love someone else.

I stopped thinking of how not to be lonely and started thinking of how the two of us could be alone.

That's why I like Guinevere, because the more I watch it, the more I realize that it's a story about me. It goes from being a story about a relationship that seems doomed from the start because of preconceived notions of what's appropriate and what's beneficial to a story about a relationship that is doomed because of the innate fact that the two people don't belong together. That's kind of the story of my transformation, of taking it from what I thought I wanted because of what I thought love would be like to what I have come to need because of who I am when I am in love.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers