Wide Eyed. Sitting Down.

Have you ever wondered what it must have felt like to be James Dean sitting in the driver’s seat of his Porsche 550 Spyder, pushing it to the ragged edge, feeling completely alive? Body racked with adrenaline, every synapse firing. It’s a pretty romantic image of the seconds before a fatal car accident.

There is no romance in a morgue in reality, it’s just cold and lifeless. It’s funny what your mind does once you become single. The memories you choose to live with or forget, the phrases you picked up, the ones you stopped using in whatever period of time you were with that person. The even stranger part is what your brain and heart choose to romanticize from this period of time. You remember the smallest gesture and create this romantic wonderland around it that may have never in fact been a part of your relationship. Some pretty serious silliness. I have never understood why this takes place; is it that you miss the feeling of having a companion and you seek refuge in those memories in some attempt at catharsis and mourning your loss?

A statement that I feel rings true in many cases for relationships, which strangely enough comes from the travesty of a movie “The Happening,” is that in a relationship we are always chasing one another—one half of the equation is always in pursuit of the other and it constantly switches back and forth between who is chasing and who is running. It’s not until both parties stop running and just sit and enjoy some beer and waffles that the magic truly happens. I feel as though this romantic desire to relive the memories that bring along with them such sadness is a continuation of this running after your partner. You chase these memories in some attempt to get those old feelings of happiness back. But really it’s just a sad circle jerk with a party of one.

I write this while doing exactly what confuses me so much. I feel as though it’s always important to remember the cold hard facts of a relationship that ends. It ended for a reason, and since it ended it clearly was not working in some way. In the end, the only way to be happy is to take solace in having a fresh start and being able to weigh a relationship for what it truly was and see why it ended. After that, you can either try to understand what happened and improve yourself for the future or realize the other person was fucking batshit crazy. Always a grenade free zone.

On a lighter note, I once heard an NFL commentator doing one of those in-game ads talking about the movie “Devil” pronounce the director’s name “M. Night Sham-a-lamin.” Just sayin’. True Story.