Wait. I Wasn’t Finished Yet.

(Palms on Big Island, from The Untitled Landscapes, 2007)

But then it was too late, I had concluded things back on the ferry, when we kissed, and how the headlights of a car behind us illuminated us as if it was the climactic moment in a movie where the two young actors, heart-throbs at that too, kiss for the first time, they had survived this whole adventure, all two hours of it, and now as I thought in my head as my mental eyes panned back, I knew the camera would dolly out of the tight shot of us together, face to face, into the surrounding cars, then it would go out farther until the ferry was seen in the sea, and then the camera would go back farther than that as it showed the sea and how tiny the ferry was in it, and the moon-lit sky, and the audience is instantly hit with a feel-good one hit wonder, maybe that New Radicals song, You Get What You Give.
I wanted to believe, the voice over would go.
That this moment will last forever… We will remain even when this night turns to day, when things are supposed to return to normal. They will never as long as you’re here. And that is how it will be, for the rest of our lives.
The credits begin to roll, and the audience leaves feeling great, there are a fair amount of couples in the crowd and they feel great, and will probably go out to get a late snack and decide the itinerary for the rest of their evening on the warmth glowing from within. There is a lonely man in the audience, he goes to romantic movies alone because they make him feel like he is no longer lonely, that the protagonist is him, that when the young heart-throb goes through pain, he feels it himself, as his heart fills with sorrow for the first time in a long time, and when the People’s Hottest New Actors This Year number 4 feels love in a complicated way in the third act of the film, he feels a sharp pain in his heart too. He goes home and writes in his journal. We are one in the same, we live these complicated lives and the only thing we want is the one thing that we struggle for the most. Love.
The movie theater is left sticky and thrashed from a weekend premiere as the teenage theater clerk cleans up the mess of lovers, lonely men, and the stray movie-goer. He thinks of his first date, how it was in a movie theater not too different from this one, how the movie was exactly like this one, and then he realizes that he still feels warmth in his heart when he thinks of that girl he shared that memory with. He wonders where she is right now, and then he thinks what if she is thinking the same exact thing he is. Maybe even she is a teenage theater clerk and she is cleaning a movie theater from a long weekend, and is holding her broom ever so close as she feels a forgotten warmth in her heart generate for the first time in years. And for just a moment, maybe they are both thinking of each other, and just for a moment they can talk to each other, through their hearts in a telepathic connection between past lovers, and they hold each other, even if it is for the last time before they forget each other again until the next big movie premiere where they are left cleaning up after what appears to be zoo animals.