What’s the last movie that made you cry?
I watched Song Sung Blue on the flight home from Vietnam. My brother had recommended it, and I had never quite got around to seeing it at the movies.
There is one scene I found strangely moving. Mike and Claire are in the middle of an intense argument. He isn’t planning a proposal. There is no romantic setting, no carefully chosen words, no sense that he is trying to create a moment.
Instead, the argument seems to strip away his ability to manage things. Frustration, fear and emotional exhaustion pushed everything else aside, and what he has been thinking simply slips out. It is not really a romantic gesture. It is closer to a desperate, honest admission.
And then she says, “Yes, yes, yes.” That was the moment that got me.
Arguments usually make us defensive. We protect ourselves. We withdraw, counterattack, choose our words carefully. We put up a shield. She drops hers.
She could have lamented how badly this had all happened. This was not the proposal she had imagined. But she does not respond to the clumsy manner of what he said, she responds to the truth inside it. Her answer is immediate, unguarded, uncalculated.
Perhaps that is what makes the scene so moving. The argument stripped him of his ability to control how love is expressed, and in that same moment she gives up her right to control how love should arrive. Instead of protecting herself, she meets it with unguarded commitment.
~~~
I had imagined
there might be a moment.
Not this one.
Not anger
not voices frayed
from saying too much
and not enough.
No careful words.
No pause.
No reaching for courage
because there was no time
to arrange any of it.
The argument had stripped you bare.
You had lost your grip
on how this was supposed to sound,
and something true
fell out.
Clumsy.
Desperate.
Almost accidental.
But I heard it.
Beneath the frustration,
beneath the fear,
beneath all the things
we were trying to defend,
I heard you choose me.
And for once
I did not stop
to measure the moment
against the one
I had imagined.
I did not protect myself.
I did not ask
for better words.
I dropped the shield.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Not to the proposal.
To you.
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