If you haven’t seen this movie… you need to! It is excellent. Great direction, writing, and performances.
My favorite line, because I am a hopeless romantic, is, “It is the kiss by which you will judge all others, and they will be found wanting.”
Sigh.
I had one of those kisses. Wasn’t my first kiss, though. I dated this girl Cathy about a year or so before I moved to California. When we kissed, we both looked at each other and we knew… we both got butterflies in our stomach. It was crazy. Why am I writing this? Ah, I’m thinking about it, and I just write whatever I think sometimes.
Any way, that kiss messed me up for a long time. I understand exactly what Hopkins’ character meant when he said other kisses “will be found wanting.” Never was that mutual butterfly in the stomach experience repeated. Not that it needed to be, it’s just a little strange to me.
Romanticizing life is a problem I run into. How does one not seek for the best without romanticizing? How can you know when you are doing the right thing and not settling for less? Our memories are, I believe, a good part of what makes us human beings. They are blessings and curses we bear for all eternity.
Of course, now I’m getting into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind territory. I don’t know if I would erase some memories if I had the chance. I definitely would not erase entire persons from my memory, but some individual incidents… I just may if I could actually do that. Or not. I don’t know.
Since I opened up the door talking about that butterflies in the stomach kiss, I had another kiss mess me up emotionally once. I dated this girl in high school on and off for our junior and senior years. We would go out once every couple of months. Never anything serious. Then after graduation, a friend of mine threw a party. She was there with some friends. When she left, and we were saying our good-byes, we kissed good-bye. It was strange. We hadn’t been on a date for months, and I think we only kissed once in all the dates we went out on. We were more friends who considered our potential then two people seriously dating each other. I wondered for the next couple of years if I should have asked her about the kiss.
I talked to her a few years out of school, and she admitted that the kiss threw her for a loop, too. We’ll never know what would’ve happened had we talked about it.
I’m rambling on in this one, so you’ll just have to forgive me. Or stop reading 
Often I hear people say you should have no regrets. I think that’s a pretty stupid thing to say, personally. Okay, stupid is harsh, but come on… regret is natural if you wish you would’ve made a different decision. You shouldn’t dwell on the past, but that’s life. If you don’t live a life where you can have regrets, you are either completely self-absorbed and insensitive, or you play it so safe you can’t let the heart of life touch you. I don’t want to live either of those ways.
In fact, I was asked once what my biggest regret was. On a backpacking trip, we had a get to know you time where you’re allowed to ask whatever you want, and all the answers “stay on the mountain.” Since it was my answer, I’m free to share. This is going to go back to Cathy. Since I’d left Indiana, she’d gotten married, I’d been married and divorced, but the first thought that came to my mind, which is usually the honest answer in those situations, when asked what my biggest regret was… I answered that I didn’t tell Cathy how I felt before I moved.
She was engaged, and I had started seeing someone… so it didn’t feel right to say something. But in retrospect, my gut tells me things would’ve been very different had I spoken up. When I saw her again, almost serendipitously, I knew I still loved her. Sure it was young, crazy love that was probably birthed way too quickly… but it was still real. I wanted to tell her that, but I stifled my gut feeling and chose not to. As I said before, it just didn’t feel right given our situations.
I don’t know if things would’ve been better, but they definitely would have been different. At a minimum, I would’ve had to face my feelings for her and cut things off with the other girl. Regardless of how Cathy would’ve responded, I knew my heart wasn’t with the new girl. And it probably never could be, since any feelings I developed for her were very reboundish.
But I think the changes would’ve been even more drastic. When Cathy and I had broken up, I had told her we couldn’t be friends. It wasn’t a bitter thing, I just knew that whenever one of us began dating someone else, it wouldn’t be fair to that other person. Some people can stay friends with their ex’s, or at least they claim they can, but I just knew with her, I would never be a good friend. My bias could cause me to give bad advice, or worse, things could happen at emotionally vulnerable times. She didn’t understand then, and I think she was quite angry at me for it. But when she and I talked shortly before I moved to Cali, she understood. She left me a note saying good-bye and explaining that she understood, because seeing me again brought back some of the old feelings. That note left me wondering what would have happened had I spoken up. I never saw her again after that. I’ll never know the answer to my what if.
Seemingly small and insignificant choices shape the rest of our lives. And if I can tie this long rant back into the movie that started the post, it is that in Hearts in Atlantis there are countless tiny moments which if you remove any of them, things could have been very different. Had Ted not moved in above young Bobby and his mother, his life would’ve been so different. If they hadn’t gone to the bar where the dad Bobby never really got to know frequented, he wouldn’t have found out the truth about his dad. If, if, if… We can kill ourselves with ifs, but the truth is, that every moment does shape our lives. We can’t see how at the time, but little tiny choices and minor events happening even beyond our control shape our lives in ways we cannot fully comprehend. Such is life.
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