Movies

I love going to the movies. It's an experience of escapism that is still unparalleled, even today when you don't have to do much at all to feel alone. I'll even go alone. Just me, the black room, and a bucket of popcorn. In a time when I find myself with the world on a smartphone in my pocket, it's nice to feel like I'm in the pocket of the world. The big screen makes me feel small. It reminds me that I am small. But at the same time, it reminds me how big people can get. For two hours, I watch a world unfold that once was simply a few neurons sparking around in someone's head. And that person turned that weird late-night-sushi dream, or scribble on a napkin, into a immortal story, that could influence millions of people.



Those conflicting feelings combine with the sight of a giant, towering, encompassing screen that makes you feel tiny, suddenly filling with one word. One name. For two hours their idea is at the helm of my mind; inspiring it, turning it, guiding it through scenarios and possibilities that have never existed except in my mind and theirs.

Something I loathe to do during the movies was unavoidable one day. I had to go to the bathroom. At a moment when the screen was the most unchanging, the scenery calm, the characters silent, or redundant, I shuffle through the aisle, feeling the velvet chairs against the back of my jeans, and someone else's knees brush past mine. I jog down the stairs in a crouch, enforcing my boots to slam the sticky floor quietly and swiftly, acutely aware of the eyes on my back, glaring at the distraction. As I emerge into the well lit, barely decorated hall, I straiten. It is empty.

The booms of the bombs that exploded and did no one any harm in my small world fade into the background. I am in some liminal space, surrounded by worlds of creation, but in none of them. The bathroom door creaks open as I step inside. The walls seem whiter, the floor seems dirtier with no line of ten impatient girls and women checking their hair as they hold their bladders.

Here the acoustics resound. The tiles reflect the sound of actors' lines and the swish of ball gowns on distant screens as well as the mirror reflects my face; pale and flat in comparison to the actors I had just left the company of. Worlds collide here. I am at the center of the universe. I thought my movie, my world, was the only one, but here I recall that my individual theater is only one component of a diverse universe: Regal Cinemas.