You Can’t Go Back Part 3: Write You A Letter Tomorrow

I’ve been spending a lot of nights alone lately. Why is that? I’ve been unexplainably sad. I’m afraid to reach out to my friends because I’m afraid I’d be a bother. Do not worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ve been down this road a million times.

The problem with depression and anxiety is that it fills your head with thoughts that deep down you know aren’t true. You become concerned that you’re bothering your friends. When that happens, you feel like you only have two options: obsessively message them until you actually ARE bothering them, or shut yourself in.

Yesterday I randomly started watching videos of Mr. Rogers at work and sat crying quietly to myself for 20 minutes. What can I say… depression is a real bitch sometimes. After days like that, the only thing I can do is go home, put on pajamas, crawl into bed and watch one of my comfort movies.

You know how people have comfort foods? I think that’s a thing. I see people use the term all the time so it must be somewhat real right? In any case, I have comfort movies.

There are five of them. They are the movies that put me in a good head-space. They have very little credibility by film-standards but that doesn’t change the comforting nature they have.

When I was in Junior High/Freshmen year of High School, I felt alone a lot. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have friends (because I did) nor did it mean I was depressed all the time (although at times I certainly was),  I just felt alone.

Most of my life I have been single. I’m 31 years old and I’ve spent just barely a year in a relationship. This is not to say I’ve avoided relationships. In fact more than any other thing in this world, I want to fall madly in love. I blame it on movies. It makes sense that movies would also be the thing that calms me down when I feel like I’m never going to find someone.

The comfort movies for me all deal with love in one way or another. Most of them it’s a main plot point (one it’s just a subplot). I can recall multiple Saturdays between 1998 and 2002 where I was alone in my parents house. I would get hungry and order a cheese steak from the pizzeria behind my house (Tom’s), walk over to pick up the Cheesesteak and then watch Empire Records, The Wedding Singer or Can’t Hardly Wait until the fears subsided.

I can never truly pin down what it was I saw in these movies that made me calm but I definitely have my guesses. In The Wedding Singer you have Adam Sandler playing Robbie Hart. Robbie desperately wants to get married and has ever since his parents died. When his bride no-shows their wedding he falls into a depression and is only saved by Julia (Drew Barrymore). Julia is a sweet girl who has a shitty boyfriend. Julia believes in Robbie’s ability to succeed, she believes he’ll find love but also sees something in him that all the women in past didn’t. While others saw him as a dude wasting his life singing cover songs at weddings she saw a genuinely good hearted guy who loved people and music but was talented enough to make it as a songwriter.

Wedding Singer was also the movie that gave me one of my first genuine celebrity crushes in Drew Barrymore. I loved her in this movie so much. I wanted someone that would believe I would succeed in all my dreams.

Empire Records. Well, that gave me hope of a dream job. Not necessarily working at record store (although I always wanted to), but a job where I was with my friends. We’d have fun. We’d talk pop culture and music. I lucked out. I found my Empire Records twice in my life. That would make 14 year old Matt Kelly really happy actually.

I’ll come back to Can’t Hardly Wait shortly. That movie is far too important to my life to summarize in a few sentences in the middle of this.

In the Summertime it would get incredible hot in my house, but the basement managed to always be freezing cold. I would sleep in the basement most Summers on the couch. Those summers I would watch the same two movies over and over again. American Pie and Loser. Both star Jason Biggs. This means really nothing, just that I have probably watched Jason Biggs act more than his own family.

Both movies filled the same purpose as Wedding Singer in the hopeless romanticism but it ran deeper than that. In American Pie, I saw hope of a sex life in High School. I wanted to believe someone would go to Prom with me, that I would get invited to the big party after Prom, that I’d have that high school memory. Meanwhile Loser gave me hope that I’d fall in love in college. That I’d meet that quirky, punk-rawk girl of my dreams and live happily ever after. I could hardly wait for those days.

June 12, 1998 the movie Can’t Hardly Wait was released into theaters. It was the last day of 6th grade. My friend Adam and I went to the mall and he made plans to see a movie with his girlfriend at the time. We were 13. There was nowhere for me to go. I couldn’t just drive home. So I sat by myself a few seats away. Adam and his girlfriend made out. I was captivated by the movie that played out before my eyes.

I had no desire to see this movie but midway through the film I knew I was watching something special. I knew these characters. I’ve heard people a few years my senior say that about when they watched John Hughes movies. This was my Breakfast Club, this was my Pretty in Pink. I KNEW these characters, and I was undeniably Preston Myer.

I had the ability to fall in love with a total stranger. I was able to build the fantasy of a future. It’s one of the toughest things about being a writer. You see someone that you like and within a few minutes you have written your entire life together. Vacations, dates, long drives, dinners, holidays… all of it has been written inside of your head. Preston’s letter… I understood everything that it represented.

Practically a year later I shared my first kiss at an end of the year party at Adam’s house. It was with my friend Claudia. Much like me, Claudia lived life by her own rules; we did it in different ways, but it lead to us both being outcasts. Despite our many differences, we were still friends. We respected each other’s uniqueness.

At the party everyone was drinking but myself. A crowd of kids went into the shed to play a game of spin the bottle. Claudia and I, ever the outcasts, went swimming in the pool instead. We were talking when suddenly she kissed me. It was a random beautiful moment and then it was over. We never dated, we always remained friends, we just shared one beautiful and special moment together in a pool and then went on with our lives.

Last year Claudia died. It was sudden and unexpected. At first I was shocked by the news, so I drove to the local diner and had a cup of tea and just sat there. Suddenly years of memories and regrets for years of silence all flowed into me at once. I couldn’t stop crying. I paid for my tea and went home and I watched Can’t Hardly Wait.

That movie is like a high school reunion with fictional representations of people I know. Claudia was there, so was Adam and there was I with a love letter. I’m still carrying the love letter with me, every day of my life. I eagerly await the day I can give it to someone who will appreciate it.