Dear Diane,
I have these scenes playing through my head like movie stills of memories I have never had --
camping out on a beach, complete darkness but the stars, lying on the sand
and fireflies blinking; or sitting on top of a car wrapped in blankets, watching
the sunset. Or hitchhiking on the highway and riding with strangers, wandering
from town to town. I imagine conversations I have never had, people I have
fallen in love with. On the flight home from Malaysia, I fell in love with a
graduate student reading Socrates in the dim reading light two seats in front
of me, dressed in a kempt suit. He caught my suitcase from baggage claim, let
me ahead during security check. I jumped rooftops in Lin'An, China, drank cheap
fruity liqueur bought from the convenience store, laying out a blanket to sit
and play music from a boombox.
I become obsessed
with these almost manic pixie dream girls I could create myself into: buying
vinyls from old record stores and riding on a bike with a basket full of wild
flowers. Reading brainy books… developing obsessions with singular things, like
memorizing weird last words of dead people or collecting old bottle caps from
glass sodas. Quirky but singular and somewhat… useless beyond being
"interesting."
My life and my personality is elaborate
and crazy and unexpected… it cannot ever be simplified into movie tropes and
spontaneous whimsies. But when life does seem to imitate these 90's movie
tropes… it's as equally wonderful as I could ever imagine it. I'll never forget
when Ashley, you and I sat on that field right before sunset (my favorite time
of day) and read sonnets. Or the one time you came over and we literally sat in
your trunk talking for a hour or so. It was even more wonderful and oddly
hilarious when your car trunk's top kept coming down and we literally had to
hold it up.
We're allowed to
imitate art right? Is there anything wrong with that? I suppose only if this
art becomes a serious preoccupation, especially when men expect something of
women e.g. the manic pixie dream girl trope. I love the movie Ruby Sparks which is exactly
about that: when this one guy writes up this girl and she becomes alive but he
ends up developing this control over her when she begins to transform into a
real human girl with complicated problems. Somebody three-dimensional.
Zoe Kazan talks about this for Huffington Post: “I think defining a girl and making her lovable because of her music taste or because she wears cute clothes is a really superficial way of looking at women. I did want to address that. Everybody is setting out to write a full character. It's just that some people are limited in their imagination of a girl.”
The problem with
most movie tropes, from falling in love for the first time and going to school
dances where people are equidistantly apart and even losing your virginity, is
that art creates unrealistic expectations for reality. Expectations about the people
we fall in love with and the friends we make. These stills I was talking about,
we are bombarded by them, by chemically manipulated, filtered, beautiful images
of how life could potentially be. I love seeing these images because they do
give a sense of immense beauty and awe for the world we inhabit, but then I
feel like my life inadequately measures up to these landscapes.
 |
| from moonrise kingdom |
 |
| from perks of being a wallflower |
 |
| from submarine |
So I'm working on
making my life my interesting. I have no unrealistic expectations about who I
am and the life I live and I think my experience in high school can testify for
that. I was super focus-y in high school -- I spent most of my weekends cramming
for tests and completing poetry responses. The moments of reprieve I had were wondrous, although I didn't fall in love with a high school sweetheart I would
eventually marry but I made some incredible girlfriends and I am still
cultivating these friendships to this day. These moments are stills that
reappear regularly in my mind as well, from sitting in the rain at Town Creek
eating croissants and Nutella to buying ice cream at the gas station while
Ajitan and Alex took a smoke in the back of Amsterdam Café. But I have no
regrets for throwing my life into getting into college because I am at an
amazing college. I'm looking for greater adventures now, in Auburn and in
little Brunswick, ME… I wanna set off fireworks and ride my bike at 5am to see the sunrise tomorrow. And make breakfast with ice cream. Doing all three before I go to Maine.
xoxo,
Elina
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