Stealing Beauty

I've been watching a movie. Obsessively. More nights in a row than I can recall. Never fully, as I fall asleep...and wake to the credits each time. Oh, the music in the credits. ~sigh~

I can't seem to make it through this movie and I can't seem to sleep through that music.

This movie is so tactile. Lush. Creative. Sweltering. Sultry. Seductive. Melancholy. Secretive.

I make it through the introduction to the Italian countryside. Through the romance of arriving by train. Through reunions and meetings and hope, embraces and disappointment and noteworthy absences. I make it through the reminder of how relaxed attitudes can be surrounding age and art and bodies...how the edge of propriety and expectation blur into those steamy moonlit exotic nights where possibility blooms into something you can smell right through the screen. It smells like oil and lemons and jasmine and sex and smoke...it's intoxicating.

I make it to the mystery...and there, I am lost. There is a story...a backstory with a gut wrenching angsty secret...a secret that is tied up with years of effort to hide and protect. A secret each person acknowledges, displays the scars they bear as a result...and nonchalantly continue to keep hidden behind pursed lips, raised eyebrows and shrugs.

I don't know the secret. Still. Its deliciousness keeps me hungry. I envy how it weaves these people who love one another so desperately into a tapestry of the past embracing the present. I bask in their comfort with their choices...and consequences.

I hope to never learn the secret. It's better for me like this. Still mysterious. Untainted. Tendrils of my soul and hope woven into that tapestry with them as long as the secret stays just that. I stay hungry...and my hunger drives me to dream of dancing...barefoot on the grass on a humid summer night somewhere far from my own secrets...hips swaying, hands stretched toward the sky, head falling back and sure that anything is possible at that point.

The music...it promises all of that.