A Million MIles of Celluloid

The sunshowers that fall on my troubles are over you my baby
these sunshowers I'll be aiming at you cuz I'm watching you my baby
- M.I.A. -Sunshowers

Freaking hell, there you are. There has to be like a thousand people here at this show. From up on the balcony they all look the same anyways. Bobbing heads, swaying shoulders, arms waving. The regular lights are down and the colored ones up, throwing reds and yellows and blues. Everyone's mixing together like a living Matisse. Of course, you're the one who sticks out by not moving at all. That's probably what drew my eye right to you like a quarter shining on the street. At first I turned away. I was the one who got mad and told you what I felt about the whole situation. My disappointment has been wrapped around me like a scarf since then. I didn't want you to see me looking at you and think I was pining away like a stupid teenager. But goddamit here I am still catching glances at you.

"It can't come quickly enough and now you spend your life
waiting for this moment and when you find it's already come and passed you by it left you so defeated" - Scissor Sisters - It Can't Come Quickly Enough

I literally felt better after telling you what was on my mind. I'd been waking up with the most horrible lower back pain ever since you were last at my place. I passed it off as too much time spent at work, tossing film cans around with no regard to my body, staying up till 4 in the morning...doing absolutely nothing. But the morning after we talked, after I left the party because you seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to my feelings, after I finally shed a tear for never standing up for myself, after I wrote that letter because I knew that you still didn't get it, well I woke up the next morning feeling better than I ever have. But seeing you again, just looking at you from across a room, I have no idea why I still have a question in my head. Ever since that night that you finally looked me in the eye, a free man, and your attention was on me, not the wall behind me or some other distraction in your gaze, I felt like I had won the lottery. Hours later when I kissed you I meant it, and though I know better than to let my guard down I did, and believed every word you said. I've been in plenty of ingenuous situations and that night wasn't like that. Your body language was excited, your lips were sweet, your hands slow. After all of that, things changed. I disappeared in a vacuum of your own design. It was as if that night had never existed and when you came over again a few weeks later, there was no trace of what there was before. There were a few odd placed sentences that pointed to some struggle in your own mind. A direction you wanted to go with me but couldn't, or wouldn't, and it bothered me to no end.

"I don't know where I am but I know I don't like it/ I open my mouth and out pops something spiteful/ Words are cheap but they can turn out expensive/ words like conviction can turn into a sentence" General Public - Tenderness

Now here I stand, looking at you again. All of your actions have caused me to see that you are hardly a candidate for a healthy connection. Yet I always look ahead at the future, one exemplified by the movies, but a future nonetheless. In the movies these things usually go in two directions.
One, the reaction causes an epiphany in the confused party and after a few nights of drinking, a musical montage to awkward sightings of the other person and then a climactic "bottom of the barrel" moment, that person's eyes light up and they race across town, broken car be damned, to tell the other, in the rain, that they're sorry and that they've never been so clear about anything in their whole stupid life. Pull back shot as they kiss over a yet to be picked future hit song.
Two, the rift causes the two to veer wildly away from each other, across the country even, and years go by. The two bump into each other in a bizarre fit of circumstance having to do with something teasingly pointed to between them in the first reel. Chit chat leads to the inevitable "Have you met my husband ___?" Awkward congrats as the knowledge seeps in that that person was better off not messing with the fool and that the fool missed his chance years before.
It's no use continuing that explanation as it's always the way a bummer movie ends and I don't like those ones. But I feel like I'm in a bummer movie but the less interesting part that never gets shown in the actual film. The part where the non-fool tries to quit the other person like smoking. Where they still ask "I wonder what ___ is doing tonight?" when they have so many other things to do. When I walk down Broadway late at night, my ears filled with a playlist of comforting songs, I enjoy the cool air, the music, my feet stepping on the sidewalk. But in the back of my head I always expect to run into you. I don't know what I'd say anymore if I did. Part of me is hoping that you're okay and aware of how much you complicated things, and just on the verge of an official "I'm sorry" for your actions. The other part is wishing that you had always remained that person of mystery who I would never in a million years be entagled with. You weren't careless and confused in that version of the story.
I hate any missed opportunity where things could turn out like I've always imagined them to. Only the problem is I have to imagine it. After the show that night, after I saw you move to another area, after I walked by acting unaware that you were even there, after I stood 20 feet closer to you in the lobby and the people you and I both know interacted with the both of us but we never acknowledged the other, I stood alone and imagined that second ending of the movie I've seen a thousand times. And it's still a bummer.

"But the thoughts we try to deny take a toll upon our lives
We struggle on in depths of pride tangled up in single minds"
Portishead - It Could Be Sweet