that was that

the conclusion

This post is a follow-up to “what was that?”. I strongly recommend checking it out for context if you haven’t already before reading this.

Just like that, the week is over. While I was writing the previous post I made about this, I was so scared of this day coming, and now here it is. The after inexorably arrived, and so…here I am. I’m not sure what to do with myself at the moment.

The week itself was wonderful. But also, it was absolute torture. Talking to her was incredible - we have a lot in common, and she’s a very interesting person, so it was great to hear what she had to say about cinema and other things. And the movies she recommended me were amazing, too. However, at the same time, they were all romance movies, and thus, watching each one felt like a potent blow to the chest, in a time when I was more vulnerable than usual to seeing other people doing things I wish could be happening to me. “When Harry Met Sally…” was particularly brutal for me. It blew through my heart and soul like a tornado through a grove of young trees - beautiful, but destructive, snapping every twig in its path. The famous monologue at the end cut me deeper than I could’ve ever expected, leaving me so inwardly broken that I had to shower and take a three-hour long walk. In connection to this, the song “A Concert Six Months From Now” by Finneas got stuck in my head right afterwards, due to it mentioning that movie, and, alongside “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” from La La Land and several others, has been a non-stop part of my day-to-day music rotation.

But, even despite the emotional turmoil, I still loved the idea itself. She was recommending movies to me, and I was watching them - and in return, I was sending her songs and even some of my playlists. The thought of her listening to music that I love, and enjoying it, and then potentially returning to the songs and thinking of me, warms my heart a great deal. Her music taste is generally really different to mine, but we do have certain things in common, like the notion that “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is a timeless masterpiece. That’s all that matters.

Our third in-person meeting, on Tuesday, went great, as you can see from this note:

She came to collect what she’d forgotten after a morning shoot for a different short, and then she and I sat on the suburban train together as she headed back home, and I headed to help with filming on the project that had introduced us to one another. It felt amazing - just the two of us there, sitting together on the mostly empty train, talking about matters of life and love, with her occasionally fiddling with the spinning part of one of my rings. However, by this point, I did start feeling like, even if she did have some kind of warmth towards me, it was far from the hellish inferno inexplicably consuming my naive, overly romantic soul. But I pushed that thought to the back of my mind, attempting to follow my dad’s advice and just focus on the moment.

Our last night was quite a strange one. It became pretty clear to me that things weren’t exactly going to work out according to the perfect romantic fantasies from the projections on my eyelids; I’m not sure if things could’ve been different had it been just the two of us, but there’s no point dwelling on that if I don’t want to lose my mind even more than I already have. But, whatever the case may be, most of the night passed by for me in a weird, half-conscious blur. I guess I’d deluded myself so much into believing in the ideas that I’d created, that, as the night was going on and they weren’t materializing, I started to drift away from time to time. Particularly towards the end, I don’t think I’ve ever dissociated harder in my life; nothing going on around me felt real, I felt nauseous, it was all awful.

It was all made worth it to me at the end, though. Don’t follow my mistakes from before that night and get your hopes up - it wasn’t what you think it was. But I digress.

The time was around 3:30 in the morning. The remainder of our group was splitting up. Two people were going into a night club, because one was chasing the thrill of partying, and the other needed to pass the time until his train home started running again at around six (he wasn’t initially planning to stay, but I offered to pay for half his entry fee so he could keep the other guy company); and the other three of us were going home - me, one of my roommates, and her. My roommate and I were waiting for her Uber to get there, since we were planning on going to our opposite side of town by bus. At this point, I was tired, sad, still a little dissociated, and all I could think of was that I wanted to be close to her for the remaining time until her car arrived. And, as we hugged again and again, I was weighing up two decisions in my head, one significantly heavier than the other.

My sentimental half was begging me to take the leap, flailing like a bird trying to escape a cage, flapping its little wings desperately. It wanted so badly for me to just tell her; to tell her that, despite the fact we’d only known each other for a limited amount of time, it was already enough for my soul to sing gleefully every time her name popped up in my notification bar; that, inexplicably, every time she laughed or smiled at something I said, my burdened, heavy heart felt like a mountain fell from it for a few moments; that, somehow, she had struck my life like an enchanted bolt of lightning and lit it up with a million different colors that I had forgotten the look of. But my sentimental half doesn’t always win. And, in this case, my rational half took hold, and filled me with fear of spoiling things. I couldn’t make this about me. Basically, this:

So I didn’t tell her about how I felt. I don’t know if I should’ve; but it’s really not worth thinking about now, because I’m only going to make myself feel worse.

The other decision was quite different, though. As it happens, I had an idea. The idea of giving her something. Something small, something that would hopefully make her think of me from time to time. The issue with this was that the notion came to me when I had already left the house on that same day. So I initially shelved this idea, dismissing it as a sad impossibility under the category of “if only I’d thought of that sooner!” But, just as we were standing there, waiting for her Uber, a new and improved version of the idea entered my head. And so, I debated it inwardly for a while. And this time, my sentimental side did win out.

I looked down at my hands. There, on my little finger, there was a ring with a part that spun. Just like the one she’d loved a few days earlier. The decision was made. I slid the ring off my finger, turned to her and said something to the effect of:

“Here, I want you to have this.”

She was very surprised, of course, and protested at first, but I insisted, and she eventually accepted it. She put it on, but kept asking me if I was absolutely sure; I wouldn’t be dissuaded, however. So, finally, she kept it. We made a couple of pinky promises - including seeing each other in the winter, seeing as she is apparently coming back for a little while in December - and those were sealed with kissing the interlocked fingers, which was already something I would’ve been more than happy with. I also gave her a goodbye kiss on the cheek, which I was more than happy with.

And that was that. I watched her Uber turn the corner, and then turned back to my roommate, and we trudged our way to the bus stop. One of the strangest weeks of my life had come to an end.

Well, not quite. After we switched to our second bus, the one that would actually take us home, I asked her if she’d gotten home safe. She said she had, and we talked for the rest of the journey, and then some. In that time, she sent me two different photos of herself with the ring on, which made my heart melt like a neglected ice cream on a day as hot as the ones we’ve been having here lately.

At the end of the day, on a certain level, I don’t care if I just imagined everything or not; I had an amazing time meeting an amazing person. Is it crazy that I borderline fell in love in the span of a week? Absolutely. Can I do anything about it? Not really.

As we both shared the sentiment that we wished we’d met each other earlier in the year, and she said she was going to send me a photo every time she remembered about the ring, I was laying in bed, putting off going to sleep just to get to talk to her for a little bit longer, and I started to feel even more comfortable with her than before. We’d already talked about some pretty personal stuff, so I thought I might as well.

I told her about how the short had come along for me in a time where I felt super out of place in my life as a whole, and that I had joined partially just because I had no idea what to do with myself. I told her about how much getting involved in that process and meeting new people had helped me, and I told her that she had been a big part of that. I thanked her for it too, for good measure.

She was, of course, very kind in response. She asked me if I felt better about my place in life, and reassured me that there were people who needed me to stay around, and specifically made sure to emphasize that those people included her. I hadn’t at any point been contemplating anything that serious, of course, but hearing the reassurance from her was still really nice. I had also mentioned hours earlier about how I had started writing a script for the first time; and I was also composing music for the short - something I hadn’t done in ages. She brought this up and congratulated me on it, and then sent me this:

And yeah, I do have letters to write. And songs. And a lot more. And most of it is related to her, but she doesn’t know that.

She promised that our short meeting was “only the beginning”, which I supported wholeheartedly. I said I’d miss her; she returned the sentiment, and then said something that almost made me cry from how directly into the bullseye that I for some reason conveniently have drawn right on the center of my heart it went:

“I’m gonna remember you every time I see our ring”.

Every part of that sentence was perfect - the sentiment itself, and the fact she’d said our ring. Moreover, she followed that up by saying that I should do the same with my cologne, since I knew she loved it. That is true, I did know that - she had a smell of the bottle when she was here on that shoot day last week, and said it smelled very good. I definitely didn’t wear a little too much every time we saw each other after that, no, why do you ask?

We exchanged a few more positive sentiments about how quickly the time would pass until we saw each other again; she re-emphasized to me one more time that I was very cool, and that there were a lot of people that loved me, including her. At that point, my heart almost stopped, but I chose to not let my overthinking win this time and just took it as the regular statement it most likely was. I did let an “ilysm” slip through the cracks in response, but that was the most I made of it.

It was well after five by this point. We said goodnight to one another, and I closed out by thanking her again for everything we’d already lived, and for what is definitely still ahead of us.

I really want to believe that. That there’s a lot ahead of us. That we’ll have so much fun seeing each other in the winter, and then we’ll have a lot of great moments after she comes back next summer, and who knows what else. Until that time, of course, what lies directly ahead of me is a tough period of yearning and sadness, but that was kind of inevitable in this situation. I’ll do my very best to not let it ruin the summer for me.

You know what? I won’t just try my best, I’m not going to let this ruin my summer. I’ll be sad for a while, sure, but I want to have a good time these next few months. I’m going to believe in the fact we have a lot to go yet. Even if things never end up following scripts like the ones I feverishly typed out in my head in the dead of night throughout the last week, even if we never cross that line into romantic involvement, I just want to have her in my life. Because she’s amazing. And, at least for now, I love her.