What is the difference between aloneness and loneliness? What does it mean to make an authentic choice? How do you untangle the bitter from the sweet?
It’s Thursday night and I’m sitting in the passenger side of the car as we drive down tree-lined backroads, splashes of yellow whizzing past the window. Earlier in the workday, I peeked my head around the corner of my spouse Janyce’s basement office.
“You busy?” I said.
“No, I’m between meetings right now, what’s up?” she said.
“The Dedham Community Theater is open again and there is a 7:00 movie showing,” I said.
“Yeah? You want to go? To a movie for real?” she said.
“I think so? We’re vaccinated. Let’s give it a try,” I say.
“Okay, let’s do it,” she says.
Of all the things I’ve missed doing this past year, going to the actual movies is top on my list. Especially an art house small theater like this one. I missed carrying my carton of popcorn, covered with real butter poured out from a soup ladle, and my plastic cup of cold beer frothed at the top, into a dark room. I missed choosing our seats in the middle but also towards the back and nodding to the local people in twos and fours as they walked past.
“We’ve got about 10 minutes,” I say, as we’re driving up to the curb in front.
“I’ll drop you off and park, you get us started,” says Janyce.
Inside the shabby lobby area, I notice that the popcorn machine is less than a quarter full and the owner is standing behind the counter wearing his mask but making very earnest eye contact with me.
I’m the only one in the place.
I order the popcorn, the beers, and hand him my credit card. He thanks me profusely for coming out. More than once. I’m glad to be back, but as we enter theater number one and take our seats, I look around. This is never a packed place even in the best of times, but we’re basically it. Save for an old man sitting alone way up front. Five women friends enter in just before the previews begin and take up half a row. They are talking to each other softly and a few of them hug each other as they squeeze by and take their seats.
I sit in the dark munching on my popcorn and think about the ivy that is growing on all of the trees in the back yard at our Cape Cod house. I called a tree specialist to come and take a look and he got back to me in email today. Last time I was there, I took a picture of those vines thinking how beautiful I thought they were, but that was before I realized they were very possibly choking the life out of the trees.
Janyce nudges my arm and offers me some of her popcorn because I’ve finished mine already. We watch the movie huddled against each other. The theater is cold.
I think it’s really difficult to make a good comedy/drama and not fall into serious cliches and tired tropes and Together, Together, a movie about a single man having a baby with his own sperm, a purchased egg, and a surrogate baby mama, all while navigating the dos and dont’s of friendship and boundaries, is falling into a few for sure, but the themes of the movie are provocative. What is the difference between aloneness and loneliness? What does it mean to make an authentic choice? How do you untangle the bitter from the sweet?
I had a therapist once talk to me about a concept called “the dark night of the soul.” That morning, I sat on the velour couch in her tiny Cambridge office by the open window, bird song and the scent of flowering trees wafting in on the breeze, and I looked back at her while smiling and nodding. “What in the hell was she even talking about?” I wiped my eyes with another clump of tissues from the box by my lap, ended the session and walked back to the redline to take me back to my office at work. We eventually stopped all our sessions and I felt better, although to this day I still couldn’t tell you why. Maybe that’s the reason this melancholy of mine seems to be back again, like an insidious vine that starts to grow and twist its way back up the tree, even after you have cleared it away for a time.
As we walk back to the car, I’m thinking about a single line of dialogue. It was when the main female character said something like, “I think that the only way they were going to be happy with me is if I was wildly unhappy.” The line has something to do with expectations and preconceived ideas and it’s something I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. It’s similar to what my nutritionist would call “habits of thought.” These are thoughts that we think over and over again until they become our personal dogma. Sometimes they are imposed on you from the outside, like the societal narrative you may be bucking against, but more often they are imposed from the inside. Those habits of your mind that hold you back and keep you off kilter and out of sync with your own life.
“Did coming tonight make you feel any better,” says Janyce.
“Yeah a little bit, I think maybe it did,” I say. “It’s good to be back at the movies.”