22nd December 2000

I just watched "Sleepless in Seattle" on the dinky little TV screen in front of me - for the first time - and I'm going to admit, for all to see and none to care - that I loved it.

I'm a sucker for romantic movies, and this one felt so real, in such a surreal way. Oh sure it scared me that "Annie" hunted "Sam" down the way she did - pyscho stalker! you think - then she got swayed by reality and --almost - made the mistake that she'd have regretted for the rest of her life - settling for someone she didn't *quite* love... and then you knew she was for real. It worries me that I'm such a sucker for these movies... maybe I'm not doing this whole Guy business right. The other guys don't fall for movies like this. It's positively geeky behaviour. I'm a SNAG! God save me.

There's a multitude of things I want to say now, vanishing one word at a time, and they're slipping faster the more desperately I try to pen them down. So I'm just going to sit back and let my pen do the talking.

Fine. I know they're just movies - drafted, scripted and vetted by canny crafstmen who know what'll sell to the unthinking mobs. I know "Sleapless in Seattle" never happened, and the possibilities of a guy getting that "deja vu" thingie when a stranger walks by - convinced that she's The One for him, if only she knew who he was - are slim, to say the least. I know that everyday life isn't like that, and you've got to settle for the mundane, for someone you either love apathetically - like Annie did her "man", or someone you lust after and dedicate a lifetime to learning to fall in love with, maybe for real, if you're lucky. Certainly not anything idealistic like in the movies.

But I like that Annie fell for him, just listening to his voice, his mind over the radio. I know it's soppy romantic hogwash. And I like that he fell for her the second he saw her, although he just manifested it by goggling at her. And I like that, right at the end, distance didn't matter (personally, it does to me. I have a 5 minute rule - if she ain't within 5 minutes walking distance from where I'm at - forget it. So call me cynical, but I laughed at the end) And I know that all this doesn't happen in Real Life.

Except that it did, once, a long time ago. I know just how Sam felt, standing there, just staring. And having her stare back. I know that deja-vu feeling, that - have I met you before, just because of that tilt of your head? Are you staring back at me, or am I imagining it? feeling.

Truth be told, until that moment I was the antithesis of anything vaguely surreal, or sentimental. I hated soppy movies and ballads, I hated them for the money-grubbing capitalist spirit they embodied... thin, impractical unrealistic plots that gave people impracticable fantasies about how, in a different world and time their lives might be. Moments of madness before returning to the brain-numbingness of ordinary life, and your everyday, not-so-perfect relationships complete with squabbles, arguments and unpleasantries. I thought I saw through it all.

Then it happened - I met Her. I won't go into details here, and just to reassure that Her if she ever reads this page - it's all ancient history now. People change with time, and cease to exist as they were. That Her now, is probably just another her. If I met her on the street now, for the first time, it'd just be ordinary, everyday un-magical life.

The important thing, to me, was that it changed me. How specifically, I won't ever be able to explain. But it shook my cynicism to the core. It set me opening naive eyes and daring to hope in some Goodness in the world, hidden beneath the chaff that pervades ordinary life all around us. In really wanting to make a difference, and have a difference made to your life. It made me realise that Everyday-life people around me were doing it wrong - Just because nobody else dares to believe doesn't mean you shouldn't, either. Or that anyone who does is a nutcase. In a way, it broke through prejudices, and a certain jaded, know-it-all mindset - both of which pervade the society I grew up in, to the core. And apparently, much of the world as well. And I'm glad that it happened. I treasure the moments when I do bring myself to recall them, when idealism and surrealism first permeated my life, from the most unlikely of sources. How can you go back, once you've started down the path? Why would you even want to? (Well, that's not entirely true. You might wonder, now and then, but actually setting your feet down on the path Back makes you realise you don't want to.)

Every now and again someone else expresses the views I trust and hold dear to me, that True love is worth waiting for - and the people around her - so often it's a her, rather than a him - vociferously bring her down, and jeer that "that's why you're still not married yet, at 28..." Then I get up and defend him or her, and tell the rest of the world, as I'm doing you now - it really doesn't matter that much to us. If I spend the rest of my life waiting for that moment of magic, that first touch, or that first mutual stunned silence.. or that first mutual insanity - and it never happens - if I never meet someone that brings magic into my life again - at least I would have waited, and been true to me. It takes more courage to wait, then to go with the flow. And I know - and I'm certainly not saying it to comfort myself; more out of an almost-empathy - that the bringers-down are the ones trying to comfort themselves, by deriding someone else who hasn't given up on the dream they too held once, and that the noises they make are bitter, jealous ones - that ironically hurt only themselvess, at the end of the day.

So now, at 25, I love sentimental movies and believe in true love, and write with my little light on, in an airplane cloaked uniformly throughout by darkness. I'm waiting for a moment of magic to enter my life, that may never come again, and I'm empathising with characters scripted to fit a feel-good movie. I loved that Sam subconsciously reached out to The One by going on air, and that someone actually heard him, and gave a damn - and that she *was* The One, and not just one of the other psycho-stalker desperado premenopausal nutters out there. And just when the words "it's just a movie" try to slip out of my mouth and into my mind, I catch myself, and say instead, do I really want to forget what I knew once to be true? I did slip for a while - about 2 years - and I did try to forget. But I never really could - and I know now that you mustn't. Because if you forget, you'll forget who you are as well.

You musn't.