We Are Not a Movie

I can so vividly remember laying in the grass with you in the middle of May. I was holding your hand and playing Frightened Rabbit on my iPod. We talked about how one day we’d move to New York City, how the fact that we were going to college at a university where the skyline was visible was clearly symbolism. We were almost there. I’d find a job working in TV, you’d work some gigs singing. Would we be ready for that? To move in after college? It didn’t matter. The semester was ending, summer was coming.

Three years later, I’m here. I’m in New York City and we no longer speak. I heard a song on the subway today, one that I made you listen to once. I was nostalgic because whenever I get a minute alone here I start to miss things I can no longer get back. I miss certain time periods and feelings. I want to tell you that I miss these things, but that I don’t miss you. I want to tell you that I did the things we talked about because I know you’d be proud. You knew me when I was scared. I’m still scared, all the time, but you knew me before I knew how to make that fear empower me. That’s all I really want to do, I want to remember. I want to remember and acknowledge how far I’ve come.

A small part of me wants it to make you feel bad. You’ve got a new apartment in that college town, an apartment I’ll never step in. You’re dating a guy you dated back then, when you weren’t dating me (although I know there was plenty of overlap). I want to make you question yourself for purely selfish reasons. I don’t just want you proud of me, I want to make you feel just a little insecure.

These feelings are so petty, they fit with the guy you used to know. I’m growing, but I’m not full grown. It seems especially silly after a day like today. When I wake up next to a girl who grew up across the country. She’s smart in a way that intimidates me, kind in a way that awes me and pretty in a way that stuns me. She holds back, doesn’t say much, at least not when it comes to how she feels about me. She’s a woman of action. She stops by after work, even though she’s tired. She helps me put together an Ikea bed, even though she would have rather left for the bar an hour before. She doesn’t need to tell me how she feels, she’s showing me. That’s ok, I talk enough for the both of us.

After we dragged ourselves out of bed we saw a movie. It was an independent film at a theater that almost exclusively shows the like. A young couple came together and fell apart, plagued by self doubt. Even though the ending was promising, there was something inherently tragic about their love story. When we walked out, we discussed it, what we liked, what we didn’t.

"It felt real," we agreed.

It was real, but we didn’t relate, because that isn’t our story. I haven’t sent her a song about the way that I ache for her, because I wake up next to her. I don’t catch her eye while standing on separate sides of a party, because we enter the party together. I haven’t cast her as the damsel in distress, the girl next door, the femme fatale, the vixen or the villain because she is not a character in my script. We don’t write our happily ever after while staring at a skyline, because we’re walking next to the skyscrapers. We don’t talk about "one day", we talk about tomorrow. 

I’m writing this while we’re still happily in the honeymoon stage. Making out on the subway, hand holding and an almost constant horniness making it impossible for us to stop touching. We stay up too late talking, eager to learn more. I know it won’t always be this way and I don’t know exactly where it will go, but I know I like where its going. I know that its real.