Such a thing has happened a few other times in my life.
1. When I was in high school, I was watching a Halloween episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander, the comedic relief, friendly guy, felt invisible, and this feeling became manifest by a fear demon. His friends eventually reached out to him and all was well. I cried after watching this, and for an hour, I could not figure out why the fuck I would feel that touched by that particular plot. And then it hit me, I felt invisible in my own life. But no one was reaching out to me.
I wanted more than anything to be able to find comfort in friends or family, but I felt so distanced from them that I could not connect. And watching someone else go through the same thing, but with friends who were strong and aware enough to reach out, it hit me like a pound of bricks. Because I wanted more than anything to be living that character's life.
2. When I was in undergrad, I experimented with lucid dreaming during my worst year ever, when I lived with crazy roommate #1 in my sophomore year. I would constantly push my dreams so that I was living different people's lives, being Xander or Wolverine or anyone but me. It was a weird time and I was really disconnected from everyone around me because I became a bit possessed of trying to escape my life. I learned pretty quickly that lucid dreaming is fun, but no replacement for a social life. Still, I spent many an evening sad and mopey because I felt more connected to fictional characters than to my friend and family. I got over that, thank gods.
3. When I was watching a series of TV shows on end during my first year of graduate school, I had a bad night where I was both sick, really hot (because I was feverish in the summertime), depressed (from a year of feeling pretty much useless) and really mopey (because I did not have any friends in town). I ended up having a series of feverish dreams where I chased Veronica Mars and the kids from Roswell the tv show around several places, until finally I caught up to Veronica and we tried to solve some mystery. I woke up and watching some tv, then got real sad because again, I felt more connected to fiction than reality. I decided to leave the house, despite being sick and on vacation, and spent a few hours sitting by a field of grass reading a book of poetry about nature. That helped, but I had to avoid watching TV for a while, to keep myself from feeling that void where people should be.
4. I am sure there are other times I'm not remembering. But last night, I felt that same sadness, where I could understand the character in this film better than the people in my life, and I could not quite understand why. Why this character? Why this movie? Why did I feel this emptiness here and now?
And I realized it was because I wanted to be sitting there, with my sister Sara, because we grew up reading comics together, because we both liked Wolverine and knew the story and would be able to talk for hours about it. Because we would have gotten ice cream and lottery tickets and Vernor's gingerale. Because there are only a few people on this planet who understand me quite well, and I wanted very much to be with them, for this, to hear this story and understand that it was much more than what was on the screen.
In that moment, I kinda understood that all the other times had been the same. That it wasn't the story exactly, that it was me feeling through these characters, touching some vast emptiness between myself and those around me. I could taste the distance between myself and my sister, between myself and my friends sitting beside me. I could hear the sound of that silence, and I almost wanted it to swallow me whole. That's what I'd felt before. Not the lack of friends, but the emptiness of not-quite-reaching the other person(s). Not quite knowing one another well.
So afterwards, when they didn't like the film, it kinda hurt. But it was a hurt I understood and covered up, tried to avoid. And I remembered that a specific song had been in my head all week. "I've lost my way; that's what she said, 'back to the 101." I think I got so caught up with having friends and being social this semester, that I never connected dot to dot, never let myself be fully myself around these people. I worry that we're all strangers and that it's a dance I'll never know the steps to, never get quite right. I suppose everyone wonders that.
So I connect the dots: I lost my way, I got too caught up in having people around to think about who I was around them. Back to the 101, start to start over: be myself because this other person, the one so surface-y that a film can cut right through him, he is not who I want to be. Time to be myself because there's no one else.
I am not thinking of you.
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