“I Need You to Watch the Movie 'Paddleton'”

We retreated to our separate rooms

This is a Part Two… A continuation of yesterday’s work.

Be sure to read in congruence with yesterday, pretty please if you can! I swear they flow so much better together (some of the callbacks won’t hit the same otherwise)

Thanks for being alive with me… and most of all, alive and reading.

Yours,

B

“I need you to watch the movie Paddleton.”

I told this to both [of my friends] Sam and Hepburn recently, without giving them any option otherwise.

“I haven’t seen a movie in SO long that actually captures purely platonic soul-mates. Friends that don’t have to be depicted as anything more. Where the depth of that sort of friendship can be ‘enough’ for the screen. Where they can show both death and dignity with… dignity.”

The first time I watched Paddleton… I don’t remember liking it all that much.

It was dry and dulcet- like a soft dusting of the topic instead of a Felix Van Groeningen or Edgar Wright hammer-home of the point that I tend to prefer. (Always one for suffering if I’m making things about suffering.)

“Why did you cut THAT verse?” My husband asked me, around that same time- for example- as he was playing some of the chords of Hallelujah in the style of Jeff Buckley… and I started prattling on about the time I choreographed a piece to Brandi Carlile’s version of the song.

It was an American Sign Language project with young Deaf and blind students and teenage dancers, and one of my prouder (est?) moments- written about then in Dance Teacher magazine.

“I had to keep the ‘She tied you to a kitchen chair, She broke your throne, and she cut your hair’ part”- I had just been explaining out loud to him, when noting that some of the ‘You know I used to live alone before I knew you’ part had been eradicated for time.

“Why did you cut that verse though?” he asked me.

“Because I liked the violence of it”- I said, quite simply, in return.

Some of my favorite classical music lately comes from a documentary about Alexander McQueen, where there was a quote about his love of both “beauty and violence”- in particular, his nightmarish Jack the Ripper era- and it made me think:

Is there anything that might summarize fading in faulted bodies better?

The first time I watched Our Friend, in fact, with two of the friends who have been sweater-salves to sickness in my life (not including Sam, who’s included conceptually), we possibly hated the movie too.

Yes, I got the ink to balance out the one for our Tiny Dancer on my opposite wrist in her mother’s handwriting- an OCD “balance fixation” that will haunt me for life- But it is not the type of movie that someone wants to watch more than once.

We were traumatized.

It was… violently beautiful.

We retreated to our separate rooms, dry and dulcet, and researched the true story as deeply as we could, apart- Discussing it the next day, but never fully recovering.

In a way, that’s exactly what a movie about a topic like that [cancer and loss] should be.

I mean, after all: Did they ever get to recover?

It wasn’t until I watched it a second time in the days right before Tiny Dancer took her final bow, that I realized how much the subtlety of the ending- The depth of that sort of friendship being ‘enough’…. The type of soul-mates that can exist and how rarely we depict them- Could mean everything to someone and absolutely nothing to most everyone else.

The hardest part about life is that we can mean the absolute most to someone in every single way, and then still have to part ways in someday, in one way or another.

I still haven’t made peace with that (even if being “more peaceful” is something we all hope for).

“I put on my goodbye sweater,” I want to say to everyone I’ve ever let down, or failed, or didn’t reply to fast enough. Anyone that I hoped to mean everything to, but always fell short. And, meanwhile… I’m deeply aware of the depth of love of my Paddleton pals, in and out and passing through life.

“Sorry about that,” they probably say like the end of movie script, if we are lucky enough for our lives to move along like soft dustings… Dreams and hallelujahs at once-

“I was just saying goodbye to a friend.”

End of Part One and Two.

Tomorrow is column day over on CF News Today!

Can’t wait to see you Thursday and Friday with new words, new rambles, and (hopefully) new ways to connect with my friends.

If you have any topics you’d like me to try to write about (I never want these syllables to get old, even though I also believe that sometimes writers have to loop around the same thoughts now and again- in new ways- to work through thing'; Just like choreography)-

BUT: If you have a prompt or a question or a truth you’d like me to tackle to add some texture here, pretty please drop below?

I read EVERY comment or word anyone is ever kind enough to share (both at @catchingbreaths, and DM, and email, etc)- but know that I am terrible at replying to Sub-friends a lot of the time and for that I’ll genuinely always be sorry.. Always guilty.

I never miss a word you drop and swear I don’t take them for granted- but sometimes I use them to fuel the Writing [almost) Everyday Promise here as best I can, despite the pain- even whilst failing at having the ‘pain tromp ability’ to write as often as I’d like to those I love.

But… a reply in a piece here is like a very long text response, perhaps?

Thank you for staying here… for catching your breath for a moment through the somewhat-dying-art of writing (and reading anything longer than a 2 sentence caption)… And for caring about the freelance weirdos of the world who sometimes need to survive, but who’s bodies sadly can’t yet fit into the 9 to 5. (That almost rhymed).

xo

PS: Kindly consider booming a supportive Word Nerd if you’re able (every little bit counts and helps keep this ongoing memoir going, or… Share with you someone you like?