As I sit here in a winter of my life (not THE winter of my life), I take pause to ask myself a question and it is this: Why do I love The Hours so much? I'm in the middle of watching it on Netflix. The last time I saw it was when it came out like ten years ago or something. And then I read the book and loved that, which I also haven't read in about as long. All i really remember is I came away feeling like I could have underlined every single phrase and how it isn't often that I walk away from a book like that.
So here I am, in an empty house and a just-played piano, having hammered out my residual feelings from the bit of the movie that i'm watching in fragments, holed up in my tiny house in the middle of winter, and I ask myself again, really, why do I love The Hours so much?
Is it because I identify with depressed women who aren't sure why they're feeling what they're feeling but, as "Mrs Dalloway" said, are "unraveling"? Do I feel like I'm unraveling? I don't know, maybe a little, in moments. Not in any big, alarming way, just in a winter way, i'm pretty sure. Where you get to a point, things having layered upon themselves and sit there until they stagnate and harden and all of a sudden you flip open some catharsis and find yourself able to unleash in a way that's been quite overdue. And it's so utterly refreshing that you have to decide that even if you identify with a movie full of depressed women--if that's what it is-- and relish in Virginia Woolf's despondency during conversation and mind-wandering and detachedness, to look at that and say, well that's pretty good!
And it's not a case where much needs to be read into. It's nothing more than a moment of breaking through the hardened frozen surface in a winter of your life. It's a happy thing, a joyous thing, and a reminder that life is there, underneath, and that one day, all of this business will thaw and things will become pretty again and you won't have to take so many vitamins.
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