TrainWrite

Delusion Angel: Reprise

by Laura Musselman

I watched as you poured two more glasses of wine, asked you about the craziest thing you’d ever done for a girl. I’d just finished telling you about the one and only threesome I ever had, searched your face for judgment, and maybe somehow disappointingly, found none. You hesitated, said, “Nothing.” I pressed. You said, “Well, I flew to Europe. I guess you could say she was my Before Sunrise girl.” This description held no context for me. Though I’d heard of the film, another Richard Linklater character study, I’d never watched it. I had no idea what this meant, or what this meant in terms of what she meant to you. But months later, I watched it, studied it, tried to get to the bottom of what you meant that night in your kitchen, as you described her somewhat wistfully, gently rolling the mouth of the wine bottle against our glasses to prevent the inevitable spillage.

I watched as Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy met on a train, shook their heads naively at an old German couple that no longer knew how to communicate. It was at this moment I realized I didn’t like the film. Maybe I hated it; maybe I hated them. I hated their theories about why older couples lose the ability to hear each other; I hated the way he spoke so blissfully about the time he thought he saw his grandmother’s ghost. I hated the way he looked at her, spoke to her; I hated the way she reveled in his attention. I hated the way they began to swear casually as they became more and more comfortable with one another. I imagined you and your girl in Paris having these same whimsical conversations—her reveling in the courtship of your wide, excited eyes—and I began to wonder what it would be like if we, too, were just strangers on a train.

I watched their quaint, convenient interactions with the natives of Vienna, particularly the manufactured moment when a street poet spotted them, begged them to let him write them a poem in exchange for a few schillings. It was a grating poem really, not the kind we appreciate now: both of us writers, able to be moved only by really superb verse, if moved by verse at all. Daydream delusion, limousine eyelash. This is how it begins—maybe meaningless. Maybe it’s all meaningless.

I’m watching you now, as you tell me about a moment weeks ago when I’d had too much to drink, curled up on your couch, and told you assuredly that one day, you would leave me. I didn’t think, then, that I would be the one to leave you. I thought mostly about how much I hated Before Sunrise—not only how much the film bothered me, but about how much my admittedly extreme animosity toward the film bothered me. I talked it over with my friends, asked them if they’d ever seen the film and its sequel, asked what they thought about it. A male friend of mine shook his head to untether the bangs sticking to his forehead on a sweaty, oppressive afternoon, the two of us sitting there over tuna melts and cigarettes. When he agreed with my impressions, I felt validated. But I still didn’t understand my aversion.

I grew bored thinking about it, and in this process, found myself bored with you. I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t the image of you and your girl in Paris wandering windy streets that bothered me; I wondered if perhaps instead I thought you were dull. That those conversations were dull, that they’d all been had before, and that clearly, you were the type of person who continually and mistakenly found them unimaginably brilliant, over and over and over again.

Laura Musselman is a master of many things, including fine arts, Mickey Mouse’s penmanship, and shufflin’. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Monkey Puzzle, Wufniks, and Connotation Press.