Passing
Passing“Someone shouldn’t really tell me what I want to know”
The first time I tried to watch Magnolia was with Andy. The first year, a sweltering box topping paint-scabbed Frewin, settling onto his bed as the room filled with those who’d turned on me. We fell asleep ten minutes in. The instant it stopped, they flicked on the lights and scurried out in twos. He’d taken my hand and put it to his heart; the next time we camped out, declared a love we both knew wasn’t real. The childlike aura was gone, and we never slept over again. I felt more uncomfortable than ever.
He’s avoiding me, and I think of him as I watch. Excepting Tom Cruise, I’m disappointed. Ludicrous, clichéd. And, like Punch Drunk Love, supremely irritating. But: when Jason Robards is dying, in indescribable pain, pain of which I can’t even conceive, and Julianne Moore gasps, barely audibly, uselessly, “I love you” – does it really make any difference?
Robards remembers the love of his life, her “child-bearing hips”, and Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a rueful smile, recognising the figure he, like all men, has located in women many times before. Suddenly I feel integrated into something greater than me, differently, definitively, defiantly feminine. Unusually, a liberated, sexual woman, not an individual who happens to be a girl.
He rants about people who don’t “use their regrets”, babbles, then dies. I’m relieved. I don’t want reasons to change the past.
“I want to make the most of what it seems like”
Idlewild, ‘A Modern Way Of Letting Go’
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004