Guilty Secrets
By Keiti | December 11, 2007
I love holiday movies.
The guilty in my secret lies not in such classics as It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas but rather in my addiction to the ultra-cheesy, made-for-tv holiday movies. You know the ones that always involve a girl and a boy, sometimes a significant other who is, as we with guilty secrets know, is all wrong for the hero / heroine or a hate-at-first-sight turned love-you-forever-how-stupid-we-were-to-waste-so-much-time.
Completely unrealistic, all things told, but they play into the dreamy part of me I try to hide more often than not.
Not having to work at the moment, this afternoon I fell prey to a re-airing of a movie I watched last Christmas. I can’t remember the name of it, but I loved it as much this time as I did the first time I watched it. And it made me think of my trip to England when I was fifteen.
My parents, brother and I caught the ferry at Ostende, Belgium, and landed in Dover, England. I don’t remember how long the trip took – it was at least a couple of hours. It was a cold, blustery night crossing the channel. I passed most of the time roaming the ferry and looking for a place to smoke without getting busted by my parents. It was during one of these excursions that I met Jian Fairhurst, a Brit who was on leave from the military. He was out smoking, too, so we passed the time hanging out, talking. At the end of the trip, we exchanged addresses (this was, obviously, well before the internet became commonplace) and managed to stay in touch via snail mail for two or three years after that. I still have all the letters from him tucked away somewhere.
For a fifteen-year-old girl not yet jaded by relationship drama, this was, well, high drama. I fell for him hard and by the time I turned sixteen I was certain I wanted to marry him. No one believed me, of course, and marriage didn’t happen, of course, but I have to ask myself why I’ve lost touch with that part of myself; the part that still believes in the goodness and honesty of other people. The part of me that still believes genuine emotional connectedness between two people is still possible.
I miss that part of me and I watch the ultra-cheesy, made-for-tv holiday movies because somehow, despite their seeming lack of anything that resembles value, they allow me to reconnect with the soft, jelly-like center of my soul.
And I still hope.
Topics: Human Behavior, Life in General, Movies |