I'm a sucker for soundtracks. I am not a big
U2 fan, but this song is on the
Reality Bites. I'm also a sucker for finding metaphorical significance in movies that apply to my own life. The scene where this song is playing in the movie is toward the end, when Troy flies to
Chicago to watch his father die in his struggle with
prostrate cancer.
Lelayna sits at home and waits. She takes a drag from her cigarette, then he does, miles away in
sync. He dials her number from a hall phone in the hospital and she answers, but he hangs up. She must have known it was him.
There are so many times when that has happened, when something that was meant to be conveyed got misrouted, when the courage was stirred to say something fell short of its goal. I have been on the giving and receiving ends of that scenario and they are never pleasant, because everything in you screams out say it, just tell me, please for my sanity and yet you are silent. You are so scared to be wrong, that this or that wasn't what they were going to say and sometimes they ask you, "What did you think I was going to say?" which is the question of doom for me.
There are all those things you want to hear. I love you. I miss you. I think about you all the time. I want you back. Just get here, however you can. I need you. Where are you? Because they are the things that I am often thinking and it's the loneliest feeling to think that I am thinking them alone, that for whatever reasons, they cannot and will not be returned.
So I push people away. They either know that this is a defense mechanism and keep coming back to me or they do as I ask, never once wanting to fight with me on it. Even if something inside them wants to come back to me, they ignore it, they take me at my word, and compartmentalize whatever loss they've felt as a result. Such precise, concise people break my heart. But then, it is my fault because I was scared. Everything is my fault.
At the end of the movie, Troy and Lelayna reunite. I hope that we will too, someday. But for now, my life goes on.