Last night I finally watched Chasing Amy, a movie I downloaded ages ago while I was still living on Rez. It’s starring Ben Affleck and has cameos by Matt Damon and Jay and Silent Bob (I love Jay and Silent Bob–Silent Bob cracks me up. He’s so…well, silent..but when he speaks it’s always so profound and impactful). It’s basically about Holden (Ben Affleck), a comic book artist who falls in love with another comic book artist, Alyssa, who is a lesbian. She eventually crosses back over to the hetero side for him as he is ‘everything she’s ever been searching for’, but things aren’t so rosy in LoverLand because Holden finds out that she has a lot of….experience.

Being semi conservative and somewhat straightlaced (not unlike yours truly here), Holden reacts with shock and disgust. He ends things with her and spends his days being miserable. One day in a cafe, over a drug-related transaction, Jay and Silent Bob (mostly Silent Bob, who breaks the silence) and tells him about his own experience Chasing Amy—the one girl he loved and lost, because he couldn’t deal with her past.

He told of how he felt intimidated and threatened by her past, colourful as it was, complete with a full-on sexual repertoire, and how inadequate he felt. What he saw, in retrospect, however, was that that life did not satiate her—she was looking for love, which was something she saw in him.

Doesn’t that sound like your run-of-the-mill love story? What I love about this movie though was how ‘real’ it was—full of cussing, drugs, sex, unconventional jobs (hello, comic book artists?)…and how real the subject matter was.

How often have we felt inadequate in comparison to our partners? When it was younger it was because he/she had kissed more people than we had, or held hands with more people…we felt inexperienced and hurt because we weren’t their only one. As we grow older, the issues get more complicated. It’s no longer just about kissing, but about sex, about falling in love, about things we’ve done…

But the issues at heart remain the same. The same feelings of inadequecies, the same hurt (amplified tenfold), the same reactions, possibly. Tears, resentment, fear, as well as the twisted kind of feeling that you’d been cheated on although it’s in the past.

While it may have been a stoner’s version of a romance flick, it struck a chord with me. I’m in love with a man who’s…well, been around the block. Me, I’m a romantic, a little too naive for my own good, a tad bit conservative. Only a few days ago were we discussing issues of The Past, and yeah, it brought up a lot of hurt.

Now I’m not normally a superstitious person, but I do believe in signs. Signs, or coincidences, if you want to call them that, that indicate to me the choices I’ve made or are to make. I believe in serendipity and the science of signs (semiotics! Ferdinand de Saussure! ZOMG), and this is why I think, yeah, to my own twisted mind, Chasing Amy, a stoner love-flick, a movie I knew nothing about but just downloaded because it had Jay and Silent Bob, is trying to tell me something.

The Past is, literally, in the past. As Alyssa said in the movie as she’s yelling at Holden outside an ice hockey stadium, she searched for love, and didn’t rule women out as having the potential to give her the love she needed, but then she found him, and he completed her. She wasn’t going to apologize for her past, because those were her mistakes to make, and being an experimental type of person, she had to try because it wasn’t all cut and dry for her.

Too often I think we apologize for our past. At that time, the choice may have seemed the most natural to make because of various reasons—love, sheer stupidity, etc. But we always have to live with our choices, but we don’t deserve to be punished by the person or people we love because of our choices. God knows the internal suffering is punishment enough.

We spend a lot of out lives chasing that one perfect person, real or imagined, in the hopes of completing our lives. And yet, we have these sometimes unrealistic expectations that like us, they’d be unsullied (at least, emotionally), and have been waiting too for that One to complete them. When we find them, all seems wonderful until the Past comes back. What then? Leave the person we love because of the past? A past they had to live out in order to become the person we love, standing before us?

I admit I do feel the hurt, knowing he’s been through and seen a lot more things than I have. But at the same time, maybe he’s the best thing to happen to me, to guide me as I make my way though life. The past, while is still part of the present, has been rendered irrelevant. What matters to me is the here and now, and the future. So long as I have a place in his, I think I am content

Some saying goes, it’s all right to look back into the past, as long as you remember to keep moving forward. I think that is so true.

While I can’t wait to see what the future holds, I am cherishing the present And that’s the way it should be, to me.