When life is a movie
"Take me now / We can spin the sun around / And the stars will all come out"
I spent last week in my hometown, visiting family and seeing some of my oldest friends.
Going back to Alberta has new dimensions since I started trying to write about the province, almost 20 years after I left. For one thing, I find it hard to write with a lack of sensory information. I don’t trust my memory of how things smell, of how unexpectedly soft the air feels. So I walked in the river valley and sniffed pinecones. I kicked myself for not making a trip to Burger Baron for their famous mushroom burger. I tried, and failed, to describe the thousand-watt brightness of Alberta light.
Writing fiction has also made me more aware of the moments in my life that have narrative weight. This is the part where he waves goodbye to his brother – that kind of thing. When you start seeing life as material, you notice the scenes. And without bringing you too far into my personal life, this was one of those trips. There’s a lot going on. The moments are momentous.
But what was interesting is that they didn’t feel that way from the inside. I could see, with a writer’s eye, that real life was happening to me. Things that in the right hands would make you choke up and maybe cry, and definitely call your parents when you left the theatre.
It was surprising. Not alarming, but interesting. And I don’t know what to make of it yet, except to think that maybe the writer’s eye gets in the way of honest emotion. Because you’re not really living your story, you’re taking notes.
Hell yeah, I remember Aurora
With that said, there was one evening when my life was a movie, and I knew it and felt it all at once.
It was last Friday night. We’d just watched the Oilers win Game 2 against Vancouver on a lucky own-goal. Then we spilled out into the street to watch the aurora borealis, and we found our way across to the park.
Picture the scene: you’re on the playing field of your old elementary school, with friends you met at that school. You’re drunk and you’re happy and the sky is an electric rainbow.
You lie on the grass. The spring night is soft and warm. Above your head, time dances.
Everybody has somebody on their mind. Someone they’ve lost or are losing. But for now, still, you have each other.
That’s already a movie to me. But then we noticed younger guys, across the field, playing basketball in the beam of a car’s headlights. And we sat and watched them from the darkness, separated by 200 yards of grass and at least 20 years of love and loss and nights like this. Truly, the older selves watching the younger, wondering if we should go and join them.
Wondering if you can go back again.
Wondering, and never deciding.
– Fin –
It’s tempting to say you couldn’t make it up. But of course you could. In fact, it’s exactly what you would make up. It’s almost too perfect. But the fact that it happened, and we could feel it happening, showed me something.
It showed me that fiction isn’t fake.
It isn’t pretend.
It’s only trying to sit you down and hold you still and show you how vivid life can be.
As alive with colour as a sky on fire.
