sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky

We watched this movie, you and I. We drove out of our way, several towns out, closer to New York, but not quite. Back then, I was always coaxing you, anyone, to seek out such things. The same five movies were playing at every local multiplex. But I was stubborn back then, unwilling to submit to the suburbs.

The phone rang right before the movie started. I had just started using a cell phone; you had yet to own one. You laughed at the way I fumbled to silence the high-pitched shriek. I’d shut the phone off finally; I couldn’t talk to the other end of that line, didn’t want to, not yet, prolonging the inevitable.

We settled into the seats and it felt like we were kids sneaking into a Rated R movie. We’d stolen into this town, stolen into a movie that wasn’t meant to be shown to us. We didn’t deserve it, hadn’t earned it, but there we sat nonetheless, letting the film transfix us.

It did, too. We sat in wide-eyed wonder, aware that we were watching something unique, aware that we could barely absorb a fraction of the thoughts contained and discussed in the dialogue. Like the movie, we were floating, uncomfortably drifting, cutting loose from the constraints of gravity. We, too, didn’t know if we had been sleeping, if we were still sleeping.

The strings, the strange, mesmerizing, nearly dissonant strings closed the movie and we floated further. Soon, we would be floating higher, teetering precariously above this town, above this turnpike, above the Holland Tunnel, above all of Manhattan. Soon, we would find ourselves not weightless but winged. Soon, we would wake up. I would stop whining and move to San Francisco; you would go back to the place you most belonged. But that night we drove home, unsettled and unsure of why we were drawn to the little theater in the first place- and whether we were only dreaming.