Collecting Dust

There’s this feeling, when you watch your old favourite movie after a while.

This sense of familiarity, of comfort, of nostalgia.

It used to be your favourite.

You always have the option of going back and re-watching it, becoming wrapped up in it all over again.

It will never be the same, though. Because now you know.

You know what happens and you know who dies and you know who sleeps with who.

You can re-watch it all you want, act as if you don’t know,

Be oblivious by choice just to feel it all again,

But you still know, and it still isn’t the same.

Time after time of watching the same thing you will see some things you’d never noticed before, you look at things from different perspectives and you become less and less surprised by what you used to be.

I must have re-read Twilight a thousand times.

I used to count the times I watched the movies.

I don’t know why I did this,

As I knew the beginnings, and the endings, and practically every word in between.

Somehow the contents still intrigued me.

I still smiled when the good things happened and cried when the bad things did.

I still laughed at the jokes I’d read so many times before,

And I even dared to wish for different outcomes.

I never counted the times I went back to you.

I don’t know why I did this, but I imagine it was for the same reasons I re-read all of my favourite books and re-watched all of my favourite movies.

Familiarity, comfort, ease.

These were the made-up worlds I loved to live in.

Though you became less familiar, less comfortable, less easy

I re-read, re-watched, I went back.

When you watch the Titanic, though you have seen it before, and you know how it will end, you watch nonetheless, you route for them nonetheless, you hope the boat doesn’t sink, nonetheless.

Your mind forgets, but it still knows, but it forgets

Maybe purposefully

That you know this can only end with tragedy, heartbreak

And, inevitably, your own tears.

I don’t have the attention span to re-watch many old movies anymore, and I haven’t been reading much. I haven’t talked to you in ages and my Twilight books are collecting dust.