You fell asleep on the train ride from Rome to Venice.
When you awoke, we watched Insidious on your laptop. A few times, I let out a few mini shrieks and scared our fellow passengers. You always had movies to entertain us wherever we went. Sometimes we’d travel to distant places just to stay in and cozy up to a movie in our AirBnB or hotel.
You exposed me to many scary movies. You never explicitly said so, but I believe it’s so that I wouldn’t be as scared anymore. Well, it worked. But I still asked you to come with me to the bathroom in Florence every time I needed to go. Our hotel room had a creaky wardrobe that opened on its own, a lofted bed I refused to stay in alone, and a spooky metal staircase that felt icy against my bare feet. Even as I sat on the cold toilet seat, I made sure you were always within eyesight just in case the Italian boogeyman decided to pay us a visit. Is the Italian boogeyman different from the American one? Who do you think would win in a fight? I don’t think I’d want to stick around to find out. I always believed you’d fight off any boogeyman that intruded during the night.
I’d ask you about hypothetical scenarios like, “What would we do if someone tried to break in right now?” We would then assess the possible weapons at our disposal, and even after itemizing our meager arsenal of kitchen tools and boxing gloves, we still thought we could survive a zombie apocalypse.
The truth is, I think there was always this underlying sense of optimism when it came to what our relationship could endure. I felt like together, we could conquer it all. But in the end, it wasn’t the boogeyman that broke us. Rather, we allowed our inner demons to corrupt us. And just like any scary move, we, as protagonists, made questionable—if not just plain bad—decisions.
And now we are left to live with them. Or if we were in a scary movie, die from them.
In any horror film, there is often at least one protagonist that emerges as a better—albeit scarred—person. And he or she lives on to tell the story.
I hope you tell ours.