Friday was a better day than today. Friday, I left work and went to see Midnight in Paris. By myself. Seeing movies by myself, as I’ve previously mentioned, is one of my creepily favorite things to do. The Husband makes fun of me, then plays all offended and hurt that I didn’t wait and see the movie with him. Even though, when The King’s Speech came out on DVD and I threatened to add it to our Netflix queue, he admitted he didn’t care about seeing it. And a flick about a guy who is transported to the 1920’s every night, where he meets the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eliot? Please. He would have been beside me in the theater, whispering the same things he said aloud when I summarized the plot later: “But that doesn’t even make sense. How did he get there?” Interestingly, he didn’t express that same aversion to disbelief-suspension this weekend when we watched mutants fly and read minds in X-Men: First Class. I had no problem getting lost in either movie, but Midnight in Paris was just…enchanting. Plus, in my ongoing and unintentional one-year-anniversary repeats, I saw it exactly twelve months after TH and I were walking along the Seine (read: drinking along the Seine) ourselves. I love it when mystery and magic show up in a story and don’t bring along heavy-handed explanation with them–amazing things are possible because they just are. Besides, the movie was much more believable than He’s Just Not That Into You. 

Cut to today, which was one of those days when it felt like everything around me turned to shit: garbage disposals, fillings, traffic lights, relationships. My thirty-minute drive home took an hour. The Niece did a face-plant on my watch (good thing she’s wearing a helmet). Days like these, that icky feeling of not being good at anything creeps up and threatens to undermine the truth that has been my life raft for years, except of course when I land in calm waters for awhile and forget I need it: the fact that the most important things about me are not just my accomplishments or the things I’ve done right; I’m made up of a story of strength and weakness, achievement and failure, flying and falling. And if I’m honest, the best parts of the story happened at or around the time of falling. Because that’s when I finally stopped flailing on my own (having lost sight of the shore) and spotted the life raft of grace and realized that perfection is not only unattainable; it’s not the goal. I don’t have to pretend to be that put-together person because (a) I’m clearly not;  and (b) what matters most about me is what’s been done on my behalf. My life raft is not constructed of perfect fillings and conflict-free relationships and green lights and functioning appliances. It is devoid of self-improvement projects. It is composed of forgiveness and grace and functions most readily in the realms of what I perceive to be uncertainty and mystery, those open seas where incidents beyond explanation are commonplace, where water becomes wine and death is a beginning. Where a perfect student becomes what she’s meant to be after utterly failing and finds home by leaving it.

And where an enchanting movie about unexplained time travel doesn’t begin to approach the kingdom of what’s possible. But it helps, doesn’t it, to be reminded (even if it’s by Woody Allen and he would shudder at my interpretation) of how much we really want to believe–in the possibility that there’s a purpose to our path, an end to our seeming lostness–in the hope of the more of mystery?