blue valentine

Saturday night . . . by myself.

The decision of what to do is heavy for a gal like me who usually skips through social events and dinners by deferring to someone--usually my husband--or anyone who will choose.

On mother's day when my mother-in-law just couldn't pick a restaurant, I laughed, but shuffled my feet glad I didn't have to choose. Tonight it's just me, so I muster guts and ask myself, "Just what is it that YOU want to do with this evening?"

I could waffle, but I force movement instead. I grab the Wendy's Baja salad I've been wondering about and snuggle into my quilt to rent Blue Valentine, feeling only slightly guilty at the rental charge for just two eyes instead of the usual four, but justifying it knowing the other two eyes would veto this selection.

To write about this film is to come up terribly short, but it chronicles the unwinding of a marriage--so real that I see glimpses of my failed high school relationship and hard times my husband and I have moved through. With scenes this real, the film sits seductive, and only after the slowness of the final scene--him walking away from her with fire crackers exploding in the backlight--do I realize what it's shaken. Two days later I'm still puzzling over it--the mark of a good film--but the puzzling veers my thinking about marriage into thoughts I will not think.

In so many ways this film looms with truth. And yet it's gravity is feelings. Perhaps it's a comment on our generation--everyman and everywoman somehow running after the elusive stay-quality of love butterflies and all that gush. I'm mad at this art statement. I'm mad it makes me wonder if marriage can work. I'm mad that the truth for me--the working at it probably wouldn't make a very good movie.

But the working at it makes good life, and this morning as I groggily force my eyes to open up to twin toothbrushes blue and pink, and I see how the story ends differently. . . for us.