Life is always the most bizarre when I come home.
Here I was, at Four thirty in the afternoon, on the side of a mountain covered in ice. Before I left, I was dealing with the prospect of friendship in need of some work, an overbearing mother and a father angrily clinging to an issue we had over a sock. I was told it was too late to go hiking and that it would get dark too soon for it to be safe.
But I’m 21, and these worries just make the trip that much sweeter. Dressed in whatever snow clothes I had decided not to bring to my apartment, I started climbing the icy slopes. With every step I take, my green boots slide a few inches in the other direction. All was snow and ski and trees, but the snow was deceptive. It would be solid and easy to walk on, then change to powdery and deep. Without warning, the snow would give way to ice underneath. I was wearing those gloves that are fingerless but have a mitten attachment that flips over to protect my fingers. I could feel the heat in my body rising, and couldn’t decided whether to take the gloves off to cool my body a little or to leave them on and protect them from snow when I fell. Every few steps I would have to stop to slow my breathing. My pulse was so strong it was causing my throat to jolt with each beat of my heart. There was a rhythmic wheezing in my throat, not attached to my breathing but to my pulse. Every time I stopped I turned back to see the sky as it attempted to hold its head up above the black fingers of the clouds below it. As I climbed and took breaks, I watched the whole struggle unfold. Unfortunately, the sun finally gave in and fell to grey clouds; wolves that they are. I reached the summit just in time to see the last breath this day would take.
But all this struggle wasn’t enough. Things continued to compound. My dad continued his sock fueled vendetta against his oldest son. Even after my mother found his other pair of missing socks in the laundry, he decided we should have a talk, lest and sock related incidents should happen again.
I’m even more worried about life and my place in it at this point. None of these thoughts even come to me when I’m at school. So I get away to my girlfriends for the night. We decide to go watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My friend that saw it said it was alright, but really just another Forrest Gump. I think he missed it.
With all the things going on in my life when I entered that theater, I was in a high state of anxiety. There were far too many important decisions to be made about my life. But the the movie opens, and begins to talk about life and death. The theme is simply that; we all die. This plummets my mood infinetly, to the point of almost breaking down into tears in the theater. And then the mood changes. Benjamin quickly accepts his situation and learns to love it. He enjoys everything that love has to offer him, and goes round the world seeing everything that he can see. He loves many women, drinks, and just enjoys life. He never does any of this to escape life; he does it to find it.
This was the idea that hit me hardest. I was brought up in a really sheltered household in which violence was common and love and fun were not. Conversation was given away to the television set. Sex was something you did when you were married and miserable. Alcohol was for people that had lost their way. To see this alternate view of life in which life is found in the things I had been told to avoid was amazing. When Benjamin found out the girl he loved was with another man, he was happy for her to have found someone. When she found out he was with another woman, she was happy he found someone to keep him warm. The movie was happiness. The kind I hope to have. It’s realistic in the thought that nothing ever works out perfectly. We don’t always get what we want, but we need to be able to just pick ourselves up and try again. We need to remember that there is a bigger world around us, and it is OK to join it.
I left the theater free from anxiety and with a healthy sense of possibility.
