The Ending We Did Not Ask For

March third. We were both already tired before Simone texted. It was a Friday, end of a week that had not been particularly long but had felt it, and she said she had the night free and did I want company. I said yes because company and the alternative was sitting alone with nothing to watch and too much leftover pasta.

We ended up on La La Land. I had seen clips, heard the songs, absorbed enough secondhand opinion about the ending to know the ending was A Thing. Simone had not seen it either. We made tea. I put out crackers. We pressed play with the reasonable confidence of two people who had done their due diligence on not having expectations.

The ending happened. We sat with it for a while. Not a long while, we were too tired for a long while, but long enough that neither of us said anything immediately, which for Simone is genuinely unusual. What she eventually said was not a full sentence. What I eventually said was also not a full sentence. We sat in the specific exhausted silence of people who have opinions but cannot locate the energy to perform them, and then she put on her shoes and I walked her to the door.

two people trying to have feelings about an ending

The mugs were still on the table when I got back.

the evidence

I stood there for a second looking at them. The movie was fine. The movie was more than fine. I think I was just too tired to feel the thing it wanted me to feel, and that is a different problem entirely. I wrote this down partly so I remember that I did see it, and partly because the crackers and the mug ring on the coffee table felt more real than anything that happened on screen that night, which is probably the wrong thing to say, but it is the accurate thing to say.