Say something, say something, anything
II. Say Anything
I’ve never seen Say Anything, released in 1989 when I was 13, fell into the gap of people who were too young to see it in real time, and not interested enough to see it as the cultural imperative it kind of became for the coming of age romantic allegory. Sometimes I feel like I should just see the movie and get it over with, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t love it as much as I do now, like the idea of what you think is inside something is better, more inviolate, than the actual thing. You know how actors ruin the characters in a book made into a movie? Or how the movie ruins the book? Or how the book’s execution ruins its conception? Art, really, is a bag of failure.
So I have not seen the scene where John Cusack holds the boom box for the girl, perhaps to play a song? I know it’s about a guy who likes a girl, and he plays a song for her because maybe he can’t play guitar and sing, or maybe the song was playing during an intimate moment. Yah that’s probably it. I know these things because I have lived in this world the same way you have, and together we understand these things — the kissing, the songs, the I love and hate yous, which brings us to dawn, after the 2:00 am text, having been up all night, somewhere in the middle of this world, a broken google map URL, a night gripped by tendrils of want, which felt, this middle, like the edge.