Been Dealing With This All Day...

500 Days Of Summer is a very good movie. Special movie. I remember going to see it in the theater and leaving with the feeling that a train had run through me. Then I saw it again a couple days later. Same feeling happened. It came on last night and all I remembered was that I loved it, that I thought it was maybe the best movie that came out during its year, I think 09. So I watched, among other things, computer in lap. Then this scene started and I stopped everything I was doing...

Sometimes, art speaks to you so perfectly. You can't always explain it to yourself, but you can try. I do. I used to leave at night in high school after I got my license, drive loops around the streets because I couldn't sit still in my home. This has never changed. There was a girl like no other, and I was in love with her beyond anything I would ever be in love with, 16 years old and convinced there was nothing worth seeing outside of my north shore Chicago town of 20,000. I had her and then lost her, because she scared the hell out of me, and was in the process of fighting with all of my might and life to get her back. We'd talk on the phone and see each other in the halls and in class and every minute to me was magic and to her...

Her house was just off McKinley. Sometimes I'd turn down her street and drive past just to feel it, the energy of something I couldn't and can't explain. I don't know exactly where we were in the world when the day came that I'm about to falsely describe, but I felt close to her, closer than ever, and to getting my chance again. I want to say there was snow on the streets, and ice, and cold, and snow falling from the sky, maybe even a fucking blizzard when I drove past her house to see his car, and parked, and felt myself shatter from the inside. I drove another lap, maybe 12 miles, maybe crying most of the way before I drove past again, then again, first to confirm, then to feel it over and over. In the following weeks, the laps remained the same. Many of the nights held the same outcome. Eventually, I stopped crying. Eventually, it only hurt morbidly.

There were others, a couple others, but I think this one is all hers. Only absolute truth can grab hold of something like that, and shake and straighten 12 years later, something so protected as my winters back there, in Lake Forest. Only truth.