Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

Reflection on the film, Lean On Pete

I vacillate between isolation and the stirring love of a close one. The former is the dominant one. I remember the last time I was close with a loved one. It is a sad thing to wonder at the years since that last time. And the emptiness that has come to take over the in between. The memories become these flashes of of faded film of hurtful, smiling nostalgia of a time of promise. The better to endure what occurs now.

There is yet another, stunning rush that paradoxically stops me vividly in my collective tracks. I desire to wander but I cannot. I desire to move on but I am unable to. I want to shift easily through life, only passing by, never looking back. It is…a dreamland I wish for. I am too old, too buttoned down, too inexperienced to let it all fall away and just walk the earth. It is not a time for it either. I am tricked by the enfolded, dappled world of a film. Where the frames contain all that exists of that place and time and characters.

The only way it seems that my thoughts, fears, desires, wants, beliefs can be projected, articulated so. In the quiet inbetween. The ebb to the flow. It both gladdens and intimidates me. For I want to provide such a feeling for others. To be the one that gives voice/vision to what someone may feel or be going through. To hope that maybe one day it can give them a chance to feel….something other than emptiness.

We are drawn to illusions. We are caught shocked when that illusion is broken. Reflection within a reflection. Charlie and his horse, Lean on Pete. The belief that he can only understand it’s fate, it’s loneliness. Neglect, discarding, wandering, without a home. Each other only. But he cannot respond to Charlie, he can only be a projection, a sounding board. And yet…we feel, we understand, we connect, the shattering of the illusion proving even more damaging when it does occur. We’ve all wanted it at some point in our lives. To feel that in the presence of another soul, whichever soul it may be, we have found someone that simple and utterly gets us. The world moves around and becomes alien, but they remain the constant and understanding. And in return we understand them.

It breaks my heart. Fate twists and pulls. Maybe the bottom is still further down. Complete fragmentation to begin the healing. Charlie’s odyssey reminded me of Don Draper’s journey across America. Shedding all that he was, from one coast to the next, to reinvent and be reborn. Moments of crisis stretched out across a continent. Haunting and teetering on hopelessness. It also recalls more recently Leave No Trace. The young and the veteran, daughter and father slipping through the moral wasteland of America. An echo of a reckoning at hand for the soul of the country and the reflection that each must confront. Of ignore. For we do not truly know what we’re searching for. A sliver of a destination just to make us feel that we’re actually going somewhere. Circles. What if the tracks separated? Find home, despair cast into the pit of the night. It can be attained. I know home is not where I am still. Be it by foot or by mind, I remain wandering.