It is often that I find solace in films and music. They are afterall reflections of our society and they mirror our very real and heartfelt emotions. There's a song the lyrics of which are rather dramatic but remarkably fitting to my present circumstance.
"Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking but my smile still stays on...whatever happens, I'll leave it all to chance. Another heartache, another failed romance. Does anybody know what we are living for?"
See, dramatic, but a facade in the face of heartache is not a new concept. Often we put up fronts. Most of the time I hate it when people make good appearances for the sake of others but what if you are making them for your own sake. I've been through a relative shit storm in my personal life in the last few months/weeks, depending on what you consider shitty. I have now come to an impasse. There is little I can do, as an active, type A personality, to ameliorate my situation. As much as I hate to say this, it is what it is. If I lose love I'll have to deal and if I don't I'll get to rejoice. But the struggle to understand the role I play in directing my own destiny is one that doesn't seem to have a clear end in sight.
Bottom line and the most basic way to say it is that my heart hurts and to make it feel better I fake a smile. There is a story in the film Paris Je T'Aime where a man is going to a cafe to tell his wife he is leaving her for another woman. She preempts his news with devastating news of her own. She has cancer and will die soon. He forgets his news and his mistress and as he cares for his wife the narrator tells us, "By pretending to be a man in love, he became a man in love."
It is so often that I wish that this could be a reality, that you could pretend your way into your proper feelings. So, for me, today, by pretending to be a person without a broken heart, by pretending to be a person that is happy, maybe I shall become just that.
