Gravity Is There

Current Tunes: Opeth - In the Mist She Was Standing

These are the challenging posts, when film and music isn’t the foremost subject on my mind. Perhaps if I wanted a more exciting experience to share with you, my audience, I should have gone and actually done something today. Hindsight is 20/20 though, so no point looking back in regret. Tomorrow’s a new chance to do it right.

It’s always been a complete mystery to me how drama seems to spontaneously spring from wherever human beings happen to be. My life, I feel, has been decidedly absent of drama. When I say drama, I mean the stuff that soap operas and Oscar-winning movies are made out of. Or, at least the material that rests in the slower moments of a story, in between the explosions and the love-making and the heartless murders. There’s precious few of those moments I can recall.

This is a common perception for budding writers like myself; when I communicate this perception of my life, most often people say “everyone thinks that” or “your life is special,” some cliché like that. And that’s fine, I can understand why people say things like that, it’s human nature to console, but I have to say I have a much more concrete understanding of my history than anyone else. Because I’ve lived it and not anyone else. So you don’t know. The fact is, it doesn’t bother me as a general rule, that my life might be significantly short on meaning. And by that I mean hardships overcome.

I look around at other people and I see plenty of things that go on in their lives that are difficult, soul-crushing by no small consensus. I brush these moments off though; I see how individuals and their closest loved-ones react when moments of tragedy and drama strike and I almost always think in my head how they’re overreacting. But how can I know? I can’t. So, I’m being insensitive and judgmental, at least by common standards. I don’t have much use for those, to be honest. All these pretty words to just boil it down and say it simply: I can’t empathize with anyone because I have no idea what tragedy does to me. I’ve never met the guy.

It’s like dealing with disease, in a way. Spend your whole youth never being exposed to one kind of virus or another. Never knowing its touch until that one day, you catch it. Your body’s 40 years old by then, set in its biology with no idea how to create antibodies to fight this thing (say, call it smallpox). A simple, curable thing ends up killing you because you were completely unprepared and unaware of its potential. When all you had to do was summon a little courage, suck it up, and put yourself in harm’s way.