Williamsburg Cinemas

i've always told myself i don't miss people

I went to the movies last weekend. My vaccine is, as a friend of mine said, “fully baked,” which meant that I have the new Excelsior Pass, which makes me feel, like I said when I wrote about Medgar Evers Vaccine Pod, like we’re in some kind of dystopian movie, which is a feeling I keep having the more we keep living in the long 21st Century. 

It’s funny to do typical early dating stuff with someone that I’ve been with for almost a year, which I sort of alluded to last week, but basically we’d never been to a movie together, how could we have, and so we decided to see Godzilla vs Kong, which is absolutely my kind of movie. I am a very unsophisticated movie-watcher. I basically like loud noises and exciting CGI and hate whenever it gets into “intimate character development.” I want to go to the movies for the same reason I always look forward to surgery: it’s an anesthetic experience. 

We’d thought about going to Lincoln Center, which has giant screens and is where I last went to see Avengers: Endgame with my friend D, in what I keep thinking of now as the lost crying summer of 2019, but everything was sold out, which gave me the sense of so much hope and joy and possibility. I want the movies to be sold out for years. I want restaurants to have no free tables for years. I want everything to come back, even though I know nothing will ever come back. A friend is dealing with PTSD from the pandemic, and it reminds me of my own post-near-death-experience PTSD, where once I was safe I started feeling how unsafe I’d actually been. I haven’t yet felt any PTSD about the pandemic, but who knows, I might, later, in six months or a year. When I watch movies and people are close to each other without masks my brain starts alarming at me, and maybe that’s part of it. Lincoln Center was sold out so we bought tickets and reserved seats in Williamsburg and got there five minutes before the movie was scheduled to start. They tried to take my temperature six times but I guess I’d gotten cold outside so the thermometer kept registering that I was barely alive, which was funny the first four times and then actually kind of frustrating for all of us. There was a miscommunication between me and P about which kind of soda we were going to get and the server heard us and then gave him a large Sprite and me a small orange Fanta and didn’t charge me for it, and said, “welcome back to the movies,” and in that moment I realized that we’re all gonna have to bring ourselves back together. 

The movie was amazing, mostly in that it was a movie. I tried to remember the last movie I’d seen, and I think it was Harley Quinn, on Valentine’s Day last year with my very sweet then-boyfriend who introduced me to TikTok and also got me through the horrible divorce year, after which we went to Xian in Chinatown and I accidentally got hot oil in his eye. We broke up a few weeks later, which probably had nothing to do with what happened at Xian but I guess if for Valentine’s Day you’re wandering around Chinatown and end up at your old fave you’re either post-romance in the most amazing way or you just don’t care that much. Watching the previews before Godzilla vs Kong, I kept trying to remind myself how weird this was, because it didn’t feel weird at all. We had popcorn and Milk Duds and Sour Patch Kids and two kinds of soda and we were sitting in our reserved seats and there were other people around us, and I kept trying to tell myself, it’s been a year, it’s been a year, it’s been a year. But I’m sure there were other times in my life where I didn’t go to the movies for a year and didn’t think anything of it. 

I guess the personal pan pizza has brought so much into such high relief that normal pauses, normal breaks, feel horrible. I listened to a clip of some bad podcast in which someone was saying like, if you see your parents once a year you might only see them ten more times before they die, so make sure you see them more. Basically it was about how you frame things. Like, sure, “I visit my parents every Christmas” could feel like a lot, but “I’m only going to see my parents ten more times in my entire life,” well, that’s not enough. That’s if you have parents you like, which I do. I thought a lot about my dad while I was watching Godzilla just because I knew he would have loved it as much as I did, because he has the same overactive imagination and never-ending brain that I do, and needs the same anesthesias in the same ways. I thought I’d get to see him last week but then that didn’t work out. I want to see him more than ten times in my lifetime. I want to see everyone I love more than ten more times in my lifetime. One of the things I’ve always told myself is that I don’t miss people — but it turns out it’s the opposite. I miss people so much I can’t stand it. 

Soon things will be different, as they always are. Until then, I will keep missing people so much I almost can’t stand it. 

Williamsburg Cinemas are at 217 Grand Street Brooklyn.