everything looks nicer when film stars do it

Have you noticed this? Sadness and loneliness and heartbreak and madness are all pretty attractive in movies. Like Audrey Hepburn leaving Gregory Peck at the end of Roman Holiday, because she knows she has to be a princess and he has to be a newspaper person so at the end of the press conference she just looks at him and her eyes tear up and she turns around and walks away, and he watches her go for awhile and then he turns and walks away too. And that's the end. I always forget when I watch that movie that they don't end up together. And if you think about it, the movie's over, but for those characters if they were real at all things wouldn't be over in the least. They'd keep on doing whatever they do but they'd miss each other and be unhappy. But usually you don't think about this- the lives of them as characters end at the credits, it isn't real.

But whoever you are watching the movie, see, you actually are going to keep on doing whatever you do. And whatever you're feeling doesn't end when you turn off the television. It keeps on going and going until somehow it breaks on its own, and there isn't really any way to stop this. And no matter how glamourous something looks when Audrey Hepburn is doing it, in real life it might just be that hot itch of wanting what you can't have, or that empty, bridge-less space of what to do next. Movies are pleasant until they end, and then I kind of want to hit everyone in them.

I wish I was at Oberlin. Home is confusing and I don't know what to fix or how to do it. I miss everyone and the thought of going back is almost as unthinkable as the thought of staying here. I want to just keep the end of Roman Holiday playing on repeat, with them looking at each other and then walking away, over and over again, and everything they're thinking staying on the screen and not ending.