Regret has taught me some very important lessons. There are things I wish that I had done with people, things I had wish I had said to people at the time, things I wish I had said differently to people. And in moments alone, my mind will pick over these moments from past relationships, enact them differently, and wonder how things might have been.
I sat alone in a theater in Times Square this morning watching Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby. There was a couple sitting next to me, middle-aged straight Asian couple, that kept making out throughout the film. It was very distracting and I nursed a great deal of hatred toward them. Whether I would have nursed so much hatred toward them had I not been alone in the literal and figurative sense at this moment while watching this movie dealing with themes on my mind as of late, themes about romantic figures from your past, is an easy question to answer - I would not have. As it was, I wished great violence on them when I was not lost in these scenes between Daisy Buchanan and Gatsby, swooning at the idea of my own hoped for liaisons perhaps coming true.
The film closes by quoting those beautiful and depressing lines from the novel's ending, that, for now, is all I am going to say about what is going on in my life:
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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