Journal Entry 4/7/2015

“I thought there would be more.”

The first time I watched Boyhood was last year at the Capitol Theater. The theater was dreadfully cold, the chairs seemed to actually hate me and would without provocation attack anyone who happened by (or at least it seems like it; they really are the most uncomfortable of chairs), and I managed to eat way too much candy and popcorn and a massive burrito from my work, but I found the movie to be entertaining and did not give it much thought beyond that.

With one enormous exception, the conversation that Patricia Arquette’s character has with Mason as he is finishing packing for college. He is in his room, she is sitting at the table and starts to cry. When Mason asks her about it she simply says, “I thought there would be more.” She mentions hitting all the milestones in her life, marriage, divorce, children going off to college, and now she believes that all she has left is death – she thought that there would be more.

I don’t know why exactly this statement hit me then. I watched the movie for a second time yesterday and again, found myself crying when she began to cry. I knew what she was going to say. I knew how it made me feel last year in that theater downtown. But here I was again, crying at the same spot, of the same movie, after the exact same phrase was uttered. I think it’s the fear that there won’t be anything more is what gets me. What if no matter how hard you work, how deeply vested you are in school, how much money and time you donate to charity, how often you call mom, floss your teeth, and are an all-around a swell person to everyone in your path, what if in the end you are still kicking yourself in the ass and asking ‘is that it’? I imagine it more of a shaking your fists at the sky, screaming to the clouds above, “is that really fucking it?” or some other expletive filled temper-tantrum.

Everything that I do now, every single day, is in hopes that when I find myself old and alone that not for one god damn second will I have think there would have been more. I want to be exhausted, ready to check out; I want to be so full of life that if I have any more I would simply explode.