My mom once told me there were four parts of a movie.
I asked her, is it the beginning, the body, the ******, and then the conclusion?
She shakes her head, no she said. It's the play, the pause, the rewind
That's only three I thought. I leaned closer as she explains to my eight year old brain what it meant.
The play is when the excitement first builds. It's the thickness of air around you, but still you run out of breath. She says. It's the beginning of the adventure, the beginning of everything.
She takes a breath. She presses the cigarette **** against her lips. She takes a sip from her wine glass.
The pause is where you reevaluate things a little. She begins. It's where something takes you away from your track, and it leaves you baffled, so you stop a little, digesting what went wrong.
She takes another drag from the cigarette.
The third one is the rewind. Her eyes turn a little glassy. It's deciding that the movie was good enough, that it's worth rewatching. That somehow, you can overlook the bad parts and rewind again, replay again, because to you it was that good.
Mom and I stayed silent for a long time. She kept sipping from her wine glass.
I swallow. You said there were four parts, I say.
She looks at me, and her eyes were filled with sorrow, pain. Anger.
The last part, she spits out, is the stop. It's deciding halfway through the replay that it simply won't work anymore. That it needs to end. That the bad things will always be present and cant be overlooked. That the excitement isn't worth it anymore.
She takes a deep breath. She stands and ruffles my hair. She kisses me goodnight. I close my eyes and listen to her heavy breathing fade through the lonely halls of our home.
Later that night, while I was in bed, I get the distinct notion that she wasn't talking about movies and their parts at all.