--{ i loved }------
Remember the final scene in The Opposite of Sex? The one where all these prior scenes flashed through DeDee's head at the end? The movie was just okay movie overall, but those flashbacks really got to me for some reason. They were warm flashbacks, I'd thought, even though they were flashbacks about characters that, by the end of the film, were rendered "bad." I was impressed by the warmth.
I think it was because the warmth seemed close to forgiveness. It seemed close to . . . to accepting that even though you don't love someone now, at one point in time you did. I don't know why I think that's so important. Maybe it's because I have (we all probably have) a tendency towards the opposite--after a breakup, I try to do what I can to forget all the good times, just to forget forget forget. Maybe it's relationship sour-grapes. Maybe it's . . . I don't know what it is.
As Christina Ricci, in her interview about the movie, put it: "But that's life. Life is experiencing all the joy, and the pain, and the loss. Ultimately we all die, and the struggle of life is to keep that in perspective, and not let the ultimate outcome discount any of what lies between." Hokey, but yes.
So, although I try to forget them, sometimes they break through, those memories of love. Even though I love them no longer. Even though we might have lost touch. Even though I might despise them now, or at least dislike them.
I remember R, and how funny she was, and how I loved her voice, and how I'd sit on the Pegram bench just waiting for her to meet me for breakfast or lunch or dinner, I was such a hanger-on. I remember D and his silly little stuffed animals and his haircut that was really a mullet but I didn't think of it as a mullet at the time because it was so thick and nice and sweet-smelling. I remember J and rolling around on his futon on some lazy morning, nudging at him to get up but really just being happy happy happy at being able to be there with him and his nubbly cheeks and his scratchy chin.
Yeah, sometimes I remember. And now, now I'm finally becoming comfortable with those memories.
a later addition: It turns out this weeks's Slate breakfast table discussion touches upon this theme as well. In it, Melinda Henneberger, a former NYT reporter, says, "But in the end I liked what [Atonement, by Ian McEwan] had to say about the gift that the act of writing is to writers, the power that the process has to help us forgive ourselves and others, and how we are all essentially cruising along writing our own little memoirs in our heads, accounts that all depend on what we edit out."
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