Last Saturday when I was planning my self-date night
to go see Downton Abbey: A New Era, I knew there were plenty of movie
theaters with parking lots, with big cozy seats, with pretty good mojitos. But
I wanted to go to The Artsy Theater, my favorite.
It was the one where I sobbed a whole lifetime at the
end of Boyhood not long after one of my cats passed away. The one where
I saw Her and decided I should break up with the boyfriend who existed
only on Twitter, then put off doing that for a while longer. It was where I
took comfort in the absurd romance of The French Dispatch while I was
getting over The Good Boy.
(It was also where I was subjected to a Woody Allen trailer
while awaiting The French Dispatch—why does such a thing even still
exist? What the heck, Artsy Theater?!)
But! They keep the Junior Mints in the freezer there,
and they have so many flavors of hot chocolate, which I never try, because let’s
be honest I need coffee to stay up past 9:30, especially in the dark.
So I guess the main swoon in this story is for the
theater itself, but when I walked in a little early for my 9:20 movie there was
The Song Sender, looking exactly as he had in 2011 when he said goodbye.
“I’ve seen you on every dating app!” I blurted out,
because if I’m going to live in a romcom I’m going to bring the awkward.
I had though. The last time I’d seen him, on Feeld, he
was even in my “likes you” folder, with his girlfriend right there in the
profile with him. The Song Sender, who’d dumped me ostensibly about monogamy,
had been brought to the poly team, maybe by this nice lady I should’ve snooped
more about before I sent him to the left. I thought he would probably be too
rough for me these days, but the update and the “like” gave me a nonzero amount
of joy.
Anyway, back to the movies, I went over and sat down
next to him, and my body didn’t think he seemed too rough at all. I felt cozy
and oriented, both like no time had passed and like forever had. I caught a
little whiff of the smell of him and it gave me a sense of surety and happiness.
I sure wasn’t woozy or helpless the way I’d been back in my 2011-and-headed-towards-divorce
apartment with him.
It took me a few minutes of being fairly inappropriate
before he told me he was at work and therefore couldn’t tell me every detail of
his adventures like I’d asked. I still showed him my hidden photos folder with
some of my rope creations, and he unsurprisingly liked them.
As I was going into the movie, he snapped a selfie of
the two of us because his girlfriend wanted to know who this girl was who was showing
him pictures. I gave him my number, which felt both like a crazy thing to do
and the most natural thing in the world. Whether as a friend or as a…whatever,
he was missing from me and now he isn’t.
The movie was perfect, of course, and so was the rest
of my date with myself. I walked a dreamy few blocks through the historic
district to my favorite bus route, which I love even more than I love The Artsy
Theater. When I walked from my bus stop to home, the moon was almost full and
big in the sky. The flowering trees were giving off their late-night smells. I
saw my first lightning bug of the season.
That walk from the bus stop made me sure that whatever
happens with any character, past, present, or future, it’s within my power to
make this a Summer of Romance for myself. So in the name of the Dowager
Countess and the first firefly of the season, that’s exactly what I resolve to
do.
