Remorse

How could I ever say I hate you? You showed me parts of myself I never would have discovered on my own. Despite our differences over the last year, the fact you want my friendship (unless I fucked it up that bad this time) means there’s something you see in me, something worth all the pain we sometimes cause each other.

I guess part of it is a fear for you, and the frustration that fear causes. The fact I know so much is going on beneath your surface, things I know you have yet to conquer. You want things to be simple, but how can this ever be simple for me, knowing what I know? Especially since in one of your rare moments of openness, you admitted to reflexively hiding things away?

I must have idealized the way you hid because I felt warmth in knowing I was one you found worthy of seeing the inner you. I was shown your interior, became a confidant of sorts. A person to turn to when troubled.

I can recover from a lack of physicality, or even real closeness. But what I’m struggling with is your performance. The fact I know everything you do is an act; the veil has been lifted. I can expect no sincerity from you, now that I’m no longer of romantic interest.

It is forbidden knowledge: once you know, you can’t unknow. You taught me to question your surface behavior, and I do; but now you leave me in the dark.

It’s not that I can’t accept reducing us to a simple friendship. It’s that a simple friendship is functionally impossible with what you’ve given me. You demand I play along, that I behave as if I never saw into your dark side.

But I don’t know how to play this game. I’ve never been good at hiding myself away.

But I can’t hate you, because I know enough to know where this behavior stems from. The walls you put up to survive with yourself. I pray I can learn to accept that you’re giving me what you can.

Indifference

A mutual friend of ours insists that the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference, as to allow yourself to hate someone is to put them on a certain pedestal. They consume a part of your energy.

And, god, sometimes I wish I could indifference you. To wake up someday and simply not think of you, not unless you pop into my twitter feed or some other outside force. For you to stop inhabiting my space and become like the first ex, a shadow I can reflect on for think pieces and little more.

The energy I devote to the memory of us could be better used in so many other spaces. We want to be friends but friends don’t cause this kind of pain to each other. But I guess some people can work it out; but that requires, you know, working it out.

Sometimes I wish I could make like Jim Carrey and wipe myself clean of you; but I’ve been shaped too much by your presence. And the truth is that you’re not the one making me like this; I know the answers you don’t share. But I still care in a way you don’t, and that sometimes makes this idea of friendship seem impossible. You wound more than you soothe at times; every slight is amplified.

I rather quickly became bored of my first ex; why can’t you bore me? Why do I have to see you and have this faint hope that you’ll want to just chill sometime? That I could be your video game buddy you promised I would be in the months after the breakup. I can’t comprehend why simply chatting like we used to about movies seems so impossible. Why keep up this pretense of wanting to remain friends when you show no interest in what made us friends in the first place?

I made you angry a bit ago and it gave me this nauseating sense of pleasure; not that I hurt your feelings but that I mattered enough that what I said could still hurt you. I tried to apologize, but you instead went silent for several days. Once you got back to me, I realized I didn’t want to speak to you – perhaps the first time I felt that way since we met.

But of course I responded to you; not there, but here. To this feeling. God, I wish this feeling could last; that I could convince myself I never want to speak to you again, cut this all away and move on. To accept how much easier it would be to lock you away as a memory and nothing more. Or even just have the power to turn away when you speak.

But this is my angry place. In a week I’ll have turned. We’ll get back on track, whatever that track really is these days. Whatever wounds we have yet again inflicted upon each other will be swept beneath the rug until we again choose to do harm. With us, it’s so easy.

But right now, I’m allowing myself to hate you. To detest you with every fiber of my being. I want to watch you suffer, suffer until I again allow myself to feel pity, feel pity until I seek to comfort you, seek until you pull back again, feel you pull away until I want to watch you suffer. I want us trapped in this tormentous cycle eternally, reminding ourselves we could be around anyone else. You’re my personal hell right now, but maybe I can have the pleasure of being yours, too.

Because then I’d at least be something to you.

Spite

I was sitting at your kitchen table when you asked what I wanted to be when I was older. By that point, I had abandoned my dream of becoming a roller coaster designer, largely due to realizing my fear of heights meant I would never be able to enjoy my own creations. I had instead decided to settle on something I considered more reasonable.

“A writer,” I said.

“A writer? What are you going to write about?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“All you do is sit around and play video games all day. What could you possible write about?”

It wasn’t just the way you tried to shoot down my wider dream. What really hurt was that revelation that you saw me as nothing more than a lazy child living in a world of fantasy, never engaging with the reality around me.

Did you ever really see me as a person? I didn’t know what I wanted to write about at that moment, but I knew I had to. If only to prove you wrong, I had to.

It’s never been some dream to become a famous author, no, I just have always felt the need to express something inside me. Even as a child I had already gone through so much; if you couldn’t see that, who would? I had to learn how to put into words what other people wouldn’t notice on the surface. How else would anyone see me as anything beyond some bored video game player?

So I guess that’s the true draw of this writing project for me. To write so much about solely myself, to prove to you that I am someone. That I have gone through so much that my life is an endless source of material, and you can never deny my personhood again.

And I wish you were still alive so I could shove this project into your stupid face.

Review: Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Mary Poppins Returns is one of several recent Disney nostalgia pieces; but instead of being an unnecessary live action remake of a classic animated film, it at least exists as a proper (if a bit too familiar) sequel.

So I guess I should be upfront about the fact that I honestly don’t care all that much about the original Mary Poppins. It’s a pleasant and charming experience, but it works like candy. Enjoyable in the moment, but little hangs around outside of a few classic musical numbers and Julie Andrews’ wonderful performance.

Mary Poppins Returns is a lot like that, but with less charm and artistry. It captures the general feeling of the original, but Disney seems all too aware that it didn’t have to do much to get an audience. Its pleasantness is purely mechanical; more than anything, this is the product of a mega-corporation that can’t be bothered to take risks. They know how to make a film work; but art should do more than just ‘work.’

How does Emily Blunt compare to Julie Andrews? That’s an unfair question to ask of most actresses; Blunt is going up against one of the all-time great performances. And, unfortunately, the film really doesn’t give her any moments to really shine. She does well enough, but there’s nothing particularly magical.

Which I feel is the perfect summary of the film itself; nothing particularly magical. The musical numbers are just fine; there’s no “Spoonful of Sugar” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to get stuck in your head for the rest of time, nor any dance numbers as mesmerizing as “Step in Time.” In fact, just a day later, I can’t remember the sound of any of the musical numbers in this sequel. The scenes are pretty in their moment, but that’s all they really have to offer; momentary pleasure.

Mary Poppins Returns is a film with a key and necessary sense of visual design; but a lot of it is lost through rudimentary cinematic technique. The cinematography and editing are as simplistic as they come. So many of the scenes are simple waist-up shots of whoever is currently speaking, the film cutting back and forth between frantic conversations. There never seems to be any effort in framing the scenes; it’s a simple string of shot-reverse shot for many sequences, and a lot of slight adjustments that could have been avoided. Instead of guiding us, the camera and editing seems to be in a perpetual state of trying to keep up. These issues tend to (but don’t entirely) fade away during the musical numbers, which suggests that even the filmmakers don’t particularly care for the bits between.

There are moments where I’m not sure what Mary Poppins Returns is trying to say. The narrative relies too much on conveniences, and when nothing else comes along to solve the problem, it has a magical nanny who can step in and fix everything. An entire sequence at the end is almost completely negated by Mary’s intervention.

As pleasant and charming as it can be, Mary Poppins Returns never escapes from feeling like a product designed to be as safe and accessible as possible. Admittedly, in a world where family films can tend toward the grating and stale, it can be nice to have a work that is at least all around pleasant, and Mary Poppins Returns delivers there. But this film allows itself to be overshadowed by the original in pretty much every way. And in the same year as Paddington 2 and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, we know family films can do so much more than be pleasant.

3 Stars Out of 5

Review: Escape Room (2019)

Escape Room is an early January, PG-13 horror movie about a group of strangers trapped in a series of killer escape rooms; as such, you can’t go in with too many expectations, but it does a fair job of reaching those minimal hopes of at least being fun.

First things first, if you truly are itching for a good story about deadly escape rooms, go play the Zero Escape video game trilogy; though this may seem like a dumb premise, this is one that has actually been done incredibly well in a different medium – and considering the protagonist of this film starts off in a quantum physics class, I feel the writers have to be aware of this series. There’s no way to watch this movie and not compare the two.

As Zero Escape proves, the concept of Escape Room has room for excellence, but it requires a certain bit of cleverness the creators never strive to achieve. Actual escape rooms are full of twisted logic, and many times devolve into a room full of people yelling at each other in a panic as they become overwhelmed by puzzles. The most obvious way to translate this into horror is to make the solutions themselves dangerous; trying the wrong thing means risking death.

But here, the deaths are largely incidental. Of course the rooms themselves need to be dangerous to set the threat, but their true purpose should be to push the protagonists into doing something even more dangerous to escape. But there’s rarely a moment where anyone chooses to take a risk to proceed. There’s no satisfying ironies or conundrums here, just the basic struggle for survival.

The characters and dialogue are likewise shallow. Zoey is blandly quiet, Ben is a classical failure, Danny’s too oblivious to function, and on and on. A central premise is that these characters have all survived disasters in the past, but that seems to largely serve the purpose of trying to force our sympathies.

Escape Room also has a simply atrocious beginning and end. It opens with a character alone in a room, desperately trying to escape. It’s something we have come to expect from films like this, an earlier victim being shown meeting their gruesome fate – but this is no earlier victim. This is one of the main protagonists. They literally start the movie by showing that this particular character is going to be alone in one of the rooms, essentially spoiling the fates of everyone else. Additionally, the film introduces three of the characters before the game begins; it’s not hard to figure out why they get introductions and the others do not.

The last ten minutes exist purely to set up a sequel. There’s no satisfying conclusion here, just the bold promise for more. Due to this, Escape Room feels like part one of two.

While the story is flawed in numerous ways, I don’t find Escape Room entirely worthless. It’s tense where it needs to be, and the visual design of the rooms largely works. The upside-down room is an especially satisfying sequence. The technical and stylistic aspects are competent enough.

Escape Room works if you’re looking for some mindless entertainment; I never found myself bored outside of the overlong sequel setup. But it never aspires to anything more, and poor writing drags everything else down. It feels as if the creators thought the premise was clever enough on its own, without realizing the setups of the individual rooms would be the driving force of that cleverness; there’s no sense of effort. Instead, it’s Saw-lite, and who wants to be that?

1.5 Stars Out of 5

Exclusive Membership

You met your parents for lunch at McAlister’s soon after telling them of the divorce. You wish they could have treated it as a more solemn moment, but your mother instead dropped the idea of you paying for your own car insurance, because that’s what you needed to think about in the middle of mentally processing a divorce.

You helped catch them up on a few things. Since moving to the new house a few months earlier, you still hadn’t gotten around to replacing the garbage can your ex-husband accidentally thought you were leaving behind. The two of you made due with a smaller can for way too long. They offered to swing by a couple stores, see if you could find a new one. You remembered a Wal-Mart gift card your mother had given you around Christmas the year before, not as a gift but simply because she had it on hand and figured you could use it.

While fishing out the gift card, you decided to see what else might have been forgotten in the dark corners of your wallet. There was this strange blue card tucked away, solely marked with an “SW” on the front and a vague description of membership on the back. You pulled it out in confusion, having no recollection of what it could be. Your parents noticed your confusion and asked to see.

You handed it over, figuring it might not even be yours. SW? Sam’s Wub? What could it possibly be?

And then it hit you. Oh golly, did it hit you.

You ever so subtly asked for the card back. “I’ll figure it out,” you assured your parents as you swiftly hid it away. “Don’t even think about it.”

As you finished your meal, you couldn’t even make eye contact without having to hold back laughter. It was one of the most distinctly embarrassing moments of your life, despite the fact no one else was aware what had happened. Yet the more visibly embarrassed you got, the clearer it would become that something happened.

Thank god you managed to keep a relatively straight face.

As soon as lunch was over, you dashed outside. Looking back and catching your parents lagging behind, you tossed the card into the trash. You were straight blushing by the time your step-father was outside, but you wrote it off as remembering something funny. By that point, the membership card had likely been long forgotten on their part. You were free.

Next time, please don’t show off the membership card of the gay bathhouse you visited the previous summer during lunch with family. You’re lucky you got out of there with no one knowing what happened. It’s rare something so embarrassing can simply be walked off. Count yourself blessed that no one knows.

No one knows, right?

You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

Thanks to you, I’ve always been kind of afraid to tell someone I love them.

We were cuddling in your bed one day, and I shifted to lay on top of you. “I love the boyfriend,” you seemed to say, which was a weird way to say that for the first time, but I took it. I returned the words back to you, but in proper English and everything. I don’t think I really knew what love was back then, but it didn’t feel wrong to say.

A few weeks later you came to my house and immediately broke up with me. I was, of course, devastated. You had only just told me you loved me, and now you’re leaving. How could you go through such a change so suddenly, with no explanation?

We met up a few weeks later to talk about everything. You said you never loved me. I pointed out that you had said it first, and you said no. “All of the boyfriend.” Some stupid rage comic meme language, because that’s what you brought to the bedroom.

This is one of those things I wish I could look back on and laugh, because it really is quite dumb. But it just kind of hurts. I dunno, maybe it would sit with me better if we didn’t have sex between the confusion and the breakup. I could say it was all one big miscommunication and you realized this relationship didn’t mean as much to you, but I can’t. I felt used.

Even seven years later, having gone through a marriage and everything, I still doubt myself when someone says they love me. Maybe I’m mishearing, or maybe they realize they can get something from me if they say it. My first experience with being loved was a lie; not one you meant to say, but one you let me believe for far too long.

Despite their issues, I look back on my other two relationships with fondness. I had many more good times than bad with them. They ended, but a good relationship doesn’t have to be this eternal thing. I’m happy I had them in my life. I wish I could recall anything about our time together that I look at in a positive light, but this is the only thing I really remember. You made me feel weaker than I am.

Late Night Highway Sequence

I’ve always loved these kind of quiet memories, that type that really can’t have much meaning to anyone else.

One night, must have been back during winter break at the beginning of 2012, I had left your house after dark to drive back home to Decatur. I put on a mix CD of songs from the last year, songs I had discovered through a website that compiled critical music lists into one big master list. All of these songs were familiar to me to some degree, hence their appearance on my own burned disc, and they were intended as a simple comfort for those hour-long drives home.

But music has the tendency to evolve with certain experiences. On the dark of the highway, in a car with a proper bass system, “The Wilhelm Scream” by James Blake kicked on, and it’s like I had never truly experienced music before.

It’s a song I appreciated but felt I was missing something on – it was dense, ominous, something I had never heard before. It stood out, but I never knew what it meant. But that night, it came alive. It’s a song that works best while alone in the near dark.

“The Wilhelm Scream” is a solemn song, despite its title referencing a comedic bit of film lore. In the darkness of that night, it was like being lost in a sea of despair. The cascading energy of the ever-building music, matched by Blake’s anguished and soulful voice; the lyrics offered little beyond a short phrase with slight modifications, but Blake says so much purely through the atmosphere of the piece. It suggested a man losing sense of himself, increasingly overwhelmed, the music eventually drowning him out.

It was like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. Until that point, most of my music listening occurred through shoddy laptop speakers. Music was a new hobby of mine, and one I hadn’t yet realized could require a certain element, especially for certain bass-heavy songs like this one.

Ever since that day, I’ve always questioned my initial opinions on works. I’m not flawless; I could always miss something important. Of course I already appreciated “The Wilhelm Scream” enough to put it on a mix CD – but that night, it morphed into an all-time favorite.

Despite being a critical person, I rarely see the value in writing something off, especially if others seem to like it. I’d rather seek out understanding than dismiss something due to my own tastes. I’ve had countless Wilhelm moments since that night; clicking with Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” after years of barely tolerating his voice, finally recognizing the value of Bruce Springsteen’s optimism in the face of despair, finding beauty in Joni Mitchell’s quiet works. I knew there had to be something there in all of these artists, and I was driven to understand.

In the end, I view art as a form of communication. While some can fail at getting across what they intend, there’s always the chance I’m not yet fluent in the same language – and I’ve always believed there’s something beautiful in putting in work to try and understand others.

Killer Whales

To be honest, I don’t remember much about you at all. You were the mother of my first boyfriend, and you were always rather accepting of my presence. It was a nice change of pace in those early days of being out, to know there were parents who actually did embrace who their children were, when my own had such struggles in accepting me.

Of course, that relationship lasted only a few months, and you were soon a non-entity in my life. I have little reason to think about him these days, let alone you. Because sometimes the relationships that were once important become lost with time, and it’s ultimately easier to forget people than any of us would like to admit.

But it’s the fact I let myself forget you that makes me feel so guilty, and it’s again another New Year’s Day and I find myself thinking of the horror of your death. Not only were you killed by a drunk driver as soon as the New Year had begun, but the person who killed you was released from the hospital and, based on a little research, apparently never seen again.

I watched in silence as someone I once held dear had to cope with a true nightmare. What can anyone say in this situation? After not speaking in years, was there anything to say? So I didn’t speak. I said nothing, yet here I am now, still thinking about it. And there’s still so many questions left to answer, and I know every New Year’s is going to be another reminder that you were stolen so suddenly.

I’ve been lucky so far in my life, having lost few close people, and those I have at least had ‘expected’ deaths that allowed me to come to some sort of terms beforehand. We were able to say goodbye in hospital rooms – though I ultimately wasn’t there for either in their final moments, too afraid to confront their deaths and not seeing purpose when one was largely unconscious by the end and the other was lost to dementia. I didn’t want to remember either like that – but at least I had a choice.

How does anyone cope with something so sudden, so violent and without justice? Even from this distance, there’s this overwhelming sense of hopelessness when I think about your death.

But I know you are missed, because in that brief time we existed in each other’s lives, it was so very clear how loved you were. Because, despite how little I remember, I was always in awe of how close you were with your son. That kind of a parental bond, it seemed unfathomable to me at the time. There was so much love there, and though you are gone, I know that love you gave carries on.

Narcissus

A few days ago, I told you that the narcissist in me wanted to say I was worth taking a chance on. That, despite your concerns, I could be good enough to ease your doubts.

You, of course, rebuked my advances, but not without calling me out for my so-called narcissism. “You have self-worth. You call it narcissism, but it isn’t that. It’s you feeling your own value.”

Could it be that I have trained myself to believe that any sort of positive opinion of my own being is unearned, that to feel some semblance of happiness with who I am is a sign I’m a harmful, self-indulgent person?

2018 has taken a toll on me in a way I still haven’t fully managed to wrap my head around. The previous year had felt like the best of my life, and then everything slipped out of my hands. I got married to a wonderful person, and fell in love with someone else – and despite that sounding questionable, it was my husband who wanted a polyamorous relationship and I decided to try it out.

And now they’re both gone. They’re present in my life, but the relationships could no longer function. And I miss them in a way that makes me feel a deep sense of shame.

You were the person I turned to in the dark depths of this year, when no one else was really listening, and I found safety in your presence. You spoke to me in a way no one really had before, and it felt wrong, because you were the person my ex-boyfriend essentially replaced me with. He wouldn’t speak to me after the breakup, instead transmitting his thoughts through you, and not giving me much of anything. Even six months later, as I try to maintain my friendship with our mutual ex, I find myself breaking down at times, convinced he doesn’t want to actually keep this up, but I’m too oblivious to notice and he’s too meek to speak his mind.

It didn’t help that you let me know he mentioned feeling pressured into being my boyfriend. That what I thought was one of the great loves in my life was simply because the person I loved was too weak to deny my desires, despite him having 17 years on me. He apparently went along with my fantasies, letting me believe we had this beautiful relationship, consistently giving me exactly what I wanted out of a partner until I started questioning whether my husband and I were ever as close as I had felt.

I still don’t know what I am to him, and even after six months, he hasn’t given me the dignity to sit down and talk any of this over. You’ve mentioned that he’s never referred to me as a former romantic partner, that you didn’t even know the two of us were dating him at the same during the first month and a half of your relationship. He told me just before you two started dating that, while we weren’t having sex, it was because he had no desire to have sex with anyone at the moment. It wasn’t until I saw you tweet a comic about a night you spent together that I realized he was lying to me; cheating on me, really. I’m not even sure he comprehends that what he did was cheating – but it was.

Just like my husband. Because, despite both of these being polyamorous relationships, there are still rules to follow, and neither of them could keep to their word. I called my boyfriend out the day after I read your comic, and he broke up with me. Three months later, I had to have a similar conversation with my husband; that despite how much I tried after several years, I realized I could never trust him again, not the way I needed to trust a lifelong partner.

Through all of this, you were the person who was there. And soon after you and my ex-boyfriend also broke up (or, to be honest, during that last week where your relationship had clearly already fallen apart), I realized I was falling for you. Not just because you were there, but god, you really seemed to get me, despite our differences.

But I’m not who you want. You love me, and at this point we’ve explored quite a bit with each other, but that’s not enough. It’s a painful cycle. We get close, and then you begin to feel guilty because you’re still not over our mutual ex. Like you’d be betraying him if anything happened between us, despite the two of you having broken up over three months ago.

Which, god. No one’s shown that much respect for my boundaries even while dating. What did he do to be so lucky, despite having a history of actually cheating himself?

So that’s why I’m a narcissist. No matter how close I get to someone, I’m never enough. Because I loved these two people so much, more than I loved myself, so I don’t want to blame them for hurting me. It’s always my fault. I overestimate my importance to other people. I thought they loved me enough to respect me, to at least give me the dignity to say goodbye before moving on to someone else, or to wait for me to catch up before cheating on me as a way to force me into accepting an open relationship. I’m a narcissist because it’s clear I’m a person who has earned no one’s true respect; how can I believe I’m anything other than the lowest person? There must be something broken inside me that I can’t fix.

I’m happy you’ve never taken advantage of my love – I just wish that didn’t make me trust you more, and therefore love you more. I want to be the friend you want me to be, and I’m sorry my feelings can get in the way of that at times.

And I know that whole negative thought process is nonsense. No, despite how much I loved them, my ex-partners really, truly did hurt me. They’re the ones in the wrong for what they did, no matter how they try to justify it. Instead of speaking their concerns to me, they betrayed my trust, delivering me into this low. It’s always twisted into my fault. You once told me how our mutual ex complained how long it was taking me to get over our relationship – only four days after he broke up with me. He expected me to just move on within a week – and here he is, over three months since your breakup, still not even trying to get over you. I’m expected to hide my problems away while he gives himself permission to sulk as long as he sees fit.

Likewise, I’m sure my ex-husband is letting everyone believe I’m the cause for the divorce because I’m the one who asked for it. Because how can I possibly explain to either of our families that he cheated on me and then forced me to choose between having an open relationship or losing him, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to someone I truly thought was the love of my life until that point? That, sure, it might have taken me years to finally decide when we could have avoided a whole lot of mess if I realized it wasn’t working before the wedding, but he was the one who shoved me into that ultimatum in the first place.

I’m not wired to direct my anger toward others. I inflicted all the wounds they gave me back upon myself. I’m not a narcissist at all, but almost directly the opposite. If I’m not hating myself, something must be wrong and I course correct.

But that’s what is wrong with me. I believe my self-hatred but not my self-love. I deserve better than all of this; because if I saw this happening to anyone I cared about, I would tell them so. So why don’t I say that to myself?

I just hope being aware of the problem can help me change it. 2019 is a new year, and the only person who I can reasonably expect to love me going into it is myself. So I better get started.