500 Days of Summer
For a few weeks now, my brother had been bugging me to see (500) Days of Summer. He was pretty insistent that I watch it, starting from my first big awkward talk with her, when I mentioned to him all the ways I felt confused and stupid and hurt in my relationship, and how I couldn’t ever seem to see eye to eye with her or understand her motives or feelings. “You have to watch this,” he’d tell me.
Is this going to make me want to break up with her? I asked. “No,” he assured me. “Well, maybe. Probably no, though. It’s a good movie. You should watch it.”
Later, I came to find that after seeing it, his girlfriend of two years broke up with him, rather out of the blue. He found it ironic that seeing this movie, which he had sent me as a hedge against things going south in my tentative, difficult relationship, such that I would be okay if it ended, might have have precipitated the end of his own, long-term, stable one. Suddenly, things instantly were flipped, and my problems seemed trite and stupid compared to his.
After a particularly shitty argument last night, the first truly cold day of the year, I stayed home in bed all day, feeling depressed and sorry for myself and worried at what would happen next. I watched this movie from beginning to end, and then in a burst of energy, wrote the post that immediately predates this one. Then my own relationship ended, later that night. Strangely enough, however, though I am absolutely crushed and sad and depressed and haven’t eaten or slept in a very long time, I’m not angry or bitter. Those aren’t feelings I’ve ever had for her, or about her.
And Nick was right: the movie did help. It helped a lot.
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