Just Me and the Vacuum of Space

October twenty-ninth.

I bought one ticket. Middle of the row, a little left of center, the way my dad always insisted was the correct seat. I went by myself on a Tuesday night to a midnight showing of Gravity, and I am going to be honest with you: I did not know what I was walking into. I knew it was about space. I knew Sandra Bullock was in it. I knew people had been saying things about it in that way where you can't tell if they mean it's good or if they mean it broke something in them temporarily. Both turned out to be true.

The lobby was almost empty by the time I got there, which is part of why I like midnight shows. There's a specific quality to a nearly empty theater lobby at eleven-forty-five PM on a weeknight that I find genuinely calming, everyone who is still awake at this hour has made a deliberate choice to be here, and that levels something out. I got a medium popcorn and found my seat and sat there in the pre-show dark feeling quietly pleased with myself, which is also something I like about going alone. Nobody to manage. Just the screen.

saving myself a whole row if I need it

Afterward I stood in the parking lot for probably four minutes doing nothing. Just standing. The sky was clear and the lot was mostly empty and I was still up there, somewhere in low Earth orbit, unable to fully land. There is a specific kind of movie that does that, doesn't send you out talking, just sends you out still, and I think those are the ones worth going to see alone, actually, because you don't have to immediately hand the feeling over to someone else's reaction. You just get to keep it for a minute. The drive home was quiet. The apartment was quiet. Gerald was on the windowsill where I left him.

still up there, somewhere

It's Halloween week and I went to see a movie about the terrifying impossible beauty of surviving. That feels right, somehow. I've been in a quieter register lately, after a few months of things landing one after another, some of it heavy, some of it good, all of it real. The lobby, the popcorn, the parking lot, the sky. Some nights you just need a reason to look up.