Journal By Fire

The Reality of Fantasy

Silver Linings Playbook. Every time I watch that movie, I cry. Serendipity, The Notebook, likewise I cry. Sleepless in Seattle; I cried for two days after I first saw that movie. Yes, I'm a guy, and yeah I admit it.

I wonder if such a love story in any of these forms has ever happened in real life; the kind of love story that just completely turns you on your head and makes you believe in the power of fairy tales. The stories that pull so hard on your heartstrings that just the thought makes you smile from the soul outward. To have that moment where the most unexpected set of circumstance can lead to the most powerful love story to ever happen to you; all by happenstance.

I suppose I'm far from the only person to think such things seeing as they keep making these sappy love movies and songs. Otherwise I figure that particular type of genre would cease its existence.

I am now, and always have been, a serious sucker for the thought. To fall in love in such a way, with such fashion, swept completely, utterly off my feet by someone who feels the same way, it really is just magical.

But then, real life works on a much different playing field than that which is depicted on the set of a movie. The nice guys always finish last; being swept off your feet is but a fallacy conjured up by an overactive imagination; the situations where the planets and stars align in such a way that fate just falls into place, it just doesn't happen. Fairy tales don't just happen. Exacerbating this; flaws of character or appearance deemed unsuitable to society's standards ensure these types of love stories don't happen in real life.

My personal experience tells me that no matter how much or how hard I want to believe stories like this could happen, it won't; especially to me. Life won't let it. Not until some writer conjures up another storyboard for a movie.

Maybe that's the appeal to it all: wanting the type of thing you know will never happen. Perhaps the ideal of it is enough to keep the faith so alive you can feel it about to happen turning every corner on a walk down a street; every step into a store.

It's a nice fantasy. But as with all fantasies, they end the moment you wake up, the moment the movie ends, once that song finishes playing.

Mine do.