What did you do tonight? Oh, that’s cool. What did I do? Oh, not much. Sat around a lot, mostly. Went to a movie screening. It was a free early showing of It’s Kind of A Funny Story. And it was. Kind of a funny story, I mean. Actually, a really funny story. Despite the presence of Emma Roberts of whom I remain reservedly unappreciative for the most part. I’m not entirely positive why, though I have a few ideas. Anywhere, I was there. The money I didn’t spend on admission went to a small popcorn (i.e. dinner). It was good, and salty, and probably cancerous. Highly satisfying.
What then? I decided to take a drive, make a little adventure out of the drive home. This proved wise as just where my adventure turn-off was a clog of traffic began (they’re fixing the freeway every night between now and March… joy). Anyway, a drive just felt right. I actually took a little one early today in the foothills of the mountains on my way back from escuela, but for night… for a night like tonight… it was the ocean. And the ocean it was.
You see, sometimes I feel (and this could totally be coincidence if you’d prefer to see it as a recurring coincidence) that we see movies we’re meant to. Or ones that are especially relevant to our particular situation. True, we can relate to movies at any time as we take from them what we want, subjectively. That’s always true, with everything. But sometimes I think there’s a bit more. I saw two movies once, when I was in a rather unfulfilling relationship, that told me to get out. The first said “He’s not for you” and the second said “Get out”. I did. Not exclusively due to those films, but they were cornerstones in the epiphanies that led to the action. That’s kind of a weak example unless I expand on the details, which I won’t because that’s not the point of this piece, but it happens at other times too from time to time. Take tonight. The film is about a boy who is suicidal (this is not the part I related to, fret not) and goes to a mental hospital for five days and learns that his life is actually not so bad. And he falls in love with Emma Roberts. In five days. As if it could be done in fifty or five hundred? Sorry, whatever, to each his own. At any rate, it struck a nerve. That nerve, the little depressed one, that’s usually nowhere to be found but has of late tied itself around my neck in light of the recent return to school and busy work and institutional structure and vapid responsibility. After the film that cord was a-ringing, and I thought I’d take a drive and sit down with it at a beautiful little cliff on the sea and we could resolve our differences or at least hear them out.
So I take off down the road into the dark, cool (but not too cold, it’s Santa Barbara) nocturnal abyss. I take a road through a very expensive neighbourhood of estates through a little valley and a canyon that lets out onto the sea… winding roads and trees lining the whole of them. I was listening to a song off this album, a very long electro-opera from a Scandinavian band with very avant-garde aesthetics. Here is a similar song that came on after the actual one to which I was listening.
Macabre but profound choice, and quite in turn with the tone and caliber of my sentiments at the time. Suddenly, from far beyond the end of the road at the end of the canyon, a flash. There is nothing out there, beyond the lines of the sloped V hills and their multi-million dollar adornments, save the sea. Another flash. Lightning at sea! My little heart went a-flutter at the thought, for merely a few hours before I’d thought how exciting lighting in Santa Barbara could be. I drove onward, towards my teasing electrically luminous quarry. When I reached my cliffside pullover several cars had already beat me to it, and that little voice of safety in my head I call “Oprah” (or “Mom”, they are, in this instance, interchangeable) said “Cheyanne, if you park here you will be kidnapped and raped”. Doubtful, but possible, and there was a motorcycle close behind me creeping me out, so I decided to avoid the crowds and, well, drive to bigger crowds. At the bottom of the hill on which my cliff spot lies is a little canyon where a stream lets out to the sea and a (delicious—try the cioppino) restaurant perches on the sand to one side. I decided this was 1. A safer locale and 2. An admittedly less epic one, but if I got hungry there was clam chowder.
So I went to this place, parked, and found a perch on a boulder on the edge of the sand between the stream and the eatery. There were a dozen people milling variously on the sand or outside the restaurant, and inside it was buzzing with life. Clanking glasses and affluent bourgeois laughter wafted to me from the patio, accompanied by the timeless smell of decay and life, the sea.
As I assumed my rocky position there was another flash. Aha! Thar it be. Soon thereafter, there was another. A clear, jagged, spindly spike shattering the sky and piercing the sea. Now, this could have been dangerous, and maybe it was, as lightning has been known to prove hazardous to one’s health when, er, ingested. However, there were so many other people doing the same as I (and standing far taller!) that I felt my chances were pretty good, and most of all the storm was far, far, out there. The sky above was a vault of stars clearly punctuated by patchy swirls of white and cornflower shades of cloud. In front of me, however, the sea, where the torment lay, was indefinable across the horizon from the inky ebony sky that spread across it, like a languid blanket or the lid of a coffin.
I do not know if I believe in God. I believe part of life is not adhering to the notion that we know anything. That is just me, but there I am. However, I have this hunch that there is, whether it’s God or something we haven’t thought of yet and maybe never will, something going on. It feels like magic. Maybe that’s because I don’t have the answer. I don’t need the answer: I see the tricks. Sorry, it’s getting late as I write this and my coherency declines with my energy levels, but maybe you see what I’m getting at. Sitting there and looking out as I did for those fifteen minutes or so I felt pure and powerless and connected and empowered because of it. If that doesn’t make sense, that’s OK, because I’m not sure it’s explainable. Email me, and we can talk. I haven’t felt so peaceful and pure since the time, last November or December I believe but can’t remember which, as I sat high on a hill looking out over a pure perfect vault of gossamer English sky speckled with countless flecks of divine light, spread out over the Gothic spires of Canterbury cathedral. That time I had just seen the film An Education. Another film (about a girl who becomes a woman while a student in England, and goes to Paris, and generally does a lot of things I did, except I didn’t ‘become a woman’ and she only gets that assignation because she learned the hard way that dating an older man means sometimes you’re dating a liar who’s taking advantage of you, which is the other part of that film that didn’t happen to me) that struck the right oddly specific and aptly timed chord at the right time.
Anyway, what I felt then, as I felt just now, is something that is very hard to describe, and I would try it again, but it’s tough and involved, so I recommend you go read the entry I wrote on my English blog about it (anglous.blogspot.com, I don’t know which date, but it probably has a related title). It hasn’t hit in almost a year, though, that inspiration. That trust that all is well and if anything isn’t, it’s not always in my power or my place to fix it, and there’s beauty in the imperfection. These are things I know but sometimes forget to remember. I would say I need to make it to the beach, or the forest, or someplace I realize it more often, but honestly I don’t think epiphanies can be forced. They come at the right time of their own accord, kind of like strangle applicable and relevant films. I’m not saying I’m now at peace with the drudgery that is worksheets on the term “ziggurat” I could have done in fifth grade, or that I am even particularly happy right now. I’m not, I’m tired, and stressed, and vaguely irritated. But that’s OK. It will pass, and perhaps even one day I will look back and wish for this time again. Maybe. I just don’t know. Now I’m sounding like Oprah myself, but there’s some things that are cliché because they’re just true. Now I’m getting off topic.
Suddenly, and I kid you not dear friends, a streak across the sky, not down it. A shooting star! A long, bright, thick, fiery trail and fizzled out above me into oblivion. I could not have planned anything more oddly perfect. Especially as I was sitting there, at that moment, wondering if the timing of this existential awareness and philosophical venture was somehow a ‘sign’. Maybe it was, because if so, whoever is trying to tell me something sent two fliers to my doorstep tonight. Maybe class tomorrow will be awesome and I won’t be lonely anymore? (Sounds sad, but it’s kind of true, as lately most everyone I care about the most is far away in other parts of the state, country, world, and instead of telling them about all of this, I tell you, darling Internet, who may reach them all). Or maybe I’ll get more worksheets and still be too lazy to socialize on a Friday night. I don’t think signs pertain to anything specific or necessarily immediate like that. But you just never know.
Another flash, this one larger, wider, and lighting the distant sky like fire with orange and gold. It did look like fire, but I assume the clouds were just adding color to the show, because before I could get it a good look it was gone, back to pitch black infinity.
I knew I could have sat there in the perfection of life itself for eternity, which sounds obscenely melodramatic, but it’s true. However, I have a perilously tedious class in the morning and if I’m going to survive I ought to rally my strength with as much sleep as possible. So I arose and left behind the glowing warmth and oblivious society of the cozy people on the patio, and the objective celestial truth and flame that lay beyond in the darkness, overshadowing all the trivial affairs of men and reminding us of our inevitable mortality and the precious joy that is our existence, and got back in my Corolla and drove home.
