Sometimes In The Midst Of My Worries, I Feel The Need, But It's Painful To Me To Look, I Look Out The Back Window, And Watch You, I See You Disappear

--"About The Picture", Smoosh

Speaking of Little Manhattan, I was watching it again tonight. I'm telling you I feel like watching that movie every single time the McRib commercial comes on. My response is almost Pavlovian--it's that consistent.

I found myself watching the sequence in which Gabe and Rosemary go to visit the prospective apartment in the Village. Basically, they sneak out of their respective households during a summer day without telling their parent where they're going and what they'll be doing. They spend the day riding the subway farther than either have been by themselves to go visit a promising new apartment for Gabe's dad. After that they ride his scooter all the way along the Hudson till they get home. Not only is it a charming scene of a burgeoning couple just finding their feet, but it's a sequence that I've always appreciated for its simplicity. It isn't like they run away or the end up going somewhere impressively far. They manage to stay in the city and probably are only gone for six hours.

It's the idea of getting away that ties it altogether and makes it one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's the picture I have in my head of what first love is supposed to look like. Doing all these small things together that from the outside seem rather plain, but to the people involved end up being a lifetime memory. It's one of those moments that make you feel confused and wonderful and happy all at the same time. Indeed, I'd put the experience up as one of those moments that everyone should have the pleasure of going through.

----

As some of you may know, I never had one of those moments. I'm what some call a late bloomer. I never even started seriously going out with anyone until I was well into college. As a result I missed out on all the confusing, maddening experience of imbuing all those tiny moments with significance. For me, the first moments going out with Lucy or Tara were pre-planned moments where I was already driving and able to make reservations at places to eat. They certainly weren't the organic surprises of fate that childhood romances seem chock full of. They certainly weren't anything I would call a "you had to be there" moments in my life.

This isn't to say that my moment were any less significant to me, just that what should have been a phase I grew into was instead the phase I started with. Whereas everyone got to see this film we call love from the beginning, it's rather like I walked in somewhere in the middle.

And I would have to say that I've always felt the absence somewhat. Indeed, that's why Brandy thinks I'm so many of my favorite themes in music, movies, and plain stories revolve around the themes of coming of age and/or first love; because I feel the emptiness so thoroughly in my own life. She believes that every time I grow enamored with a movie like Little Manhattan it's because I'm trying to live vicariously through them to fill in the holes of my own lack of childhood flirtations and puppy love. For the most part I would have to agree with her.

Falling in love when you're already in your twenties just isn't the same as falling in love when you're ten or eleven or twelve. That's the age it's supposed to hit you like a freight train. That particular train just never came for me, I guess. When I write a story like The Carisa Meridian, with the eleven-year-old protagonist falling in love with the ten-year-old girl down the block it's because I want that life. A lot of my stories end up being like that--adolescent and young adult individuals all reminiscing Wonder Years style about growing up emotionally as well as physically.

It's also why Epcot believes I get so fixated on befriending people around the fourteen-fifteen mark because it's the age where I believe that I wanted to be in love so badly and it just never happened. I mean--the evidence speaks for itself. Going in order--I met Jina when she was twelve but I didn't start having feelings for her until I went to go meet her on her fifteen birthday. The same for Breanne--I met her when she was thirteen, but I didn't allow myself to feel anything for her until she was well fourteen. Tara--sixteen and I was madly in love with her right away. Even DeAnn, as the oldest, was only nineteen when I met her and we started going out.

And that's only the people I actually started liking. If you go through the list of friends I made in the last few years the same pattern emerges. Carly? I met her when she was fifteen. The same thing with Toby. There's something about that age that just draws me as well as appearances might draw something.

Somewhere along the way I just equated making a new connection with folks of that age. And since I can't go back to being fifteen, I do the next best thing and ostensibly only let new people into my life who are of that age.


to myself I know
it's all about the picture

I know it's a silly criteria to fixate on, but it's kind of my version of a mid-life crisis. However, instead of hitting me all at once once I got into my thirties it's a condition I've had most of my adult life. One part of my mind knows I missed my opportunity to fall in love that first time when I was that age, but another part of my brain keeps trying to get a second chance at it. That's why I keep flying out to all these places to "hang out" with girls half my age. That's why I keep trying to keep in touch with my friends here who fall into the demographic--not because I'm solely into them for them, but because I'm into what they represent. I want that second chance and that's the only manner in which I know how to get it.

Hell, the closest I ever came to having a whole day with a girl when I was the appropriate age was the day I got lost at Epcot with, ironically, Epcot. The day back in 2001 when Brandy and I scampered around that particular Disneyworld park is as close to having those tiny moments when I was fifteen with a female human being. The only problem was I wasn't in like, let alone love, with her. I'd only met her that day so, as special and as memorable as that day was, it hardly qualifies as one of those sweaty palms "I'm all confused" type of experiences everybody else can relate to.

Nope, I was robbed of that forever. My feeble attempts to get them back can do nothing substantial to change that. Having a Toby or a Carly in my life now, while good, just isn't a replacement for what I imagine the experience would have been if I had had it then.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers