The Movie Watcher

Here's something I wrote. (I do this a lot.)

You know when you're sitting on the couch late at night, and the only light in the room is that eerie blue thrown off by late-night tv, and you've been there for hours, you know, and the ergonomically-formed remote has become a part of your palm; the plastic is all warm and the buttons have all been worn smooth, to the point that there is no longer a conscious progression from the thought of changing the channel to the act of pressing the button, instead it seems that it's your mind flicking over the channels directly. You mind-flick past the half-star rated B horror movie, the infomercial with the guy cutting a piece of slate with a breadknife, and those random colour bars that are the stations way of telling you that you are the only person awake on the planet right now, and you land on a rerun of that show you don't really like, but meh, there's nothing else on, so you stay there. And the scenes are happening and you're not really paying attention, and your mind drifts so that you're no really looking at the actors anymore, but just staring blindly at the screen, and then you notice that in that screen, on a three-walled set some actors performed on god knows how long ago before this moment, when you sat on the couch watching what they did then for the umpteenth time, behind the actors, in that set, some anonymous set designer has gone to Ikea and bought a small, square, four-legged orange table to decorate that scene with, and it's the same one you have- look, it's right over there. And that's when it happens. You get this weird little shock of familiarity, and this impossible notion bores it's way into your brain, that at this moment, when a second ago you felt totally disconnected from everything, suddenly because of some crappy plastic table you bought because it was cheap, suddenly that has made you feel...connected.
You might go to bed a few minutes, hours, or days later, and you'll probably forget all about it. I wish that happened to me. Because it did- that familiarity thing, when you realize some part of you has made its way out of your life and into the wide, foreign world- even if it's just a table- and become something more than what you made it. It might have been momentarily neat when you recognized that table. It was pretty messed up when I saw my life up on the screen.
Yep, cause that's what happened. I guess it would be cliched to say that it happened on a night like any other, though it did. Frankly, all the nights in my life have become nights like any other, more or less. Some person whom I may have known well, or not, I don't remember and it doesn't matter, said something to the effect of 'what should we do tonight?', and one way or the other, with very little effort on my part I'm sure, we ended up at the movies, where some crimpy-haired teenager in a uniform she despised took my money from me, and granted me access past the all-powerful ticket-takers booth and let me into the sanctuary of new releases and old popcorn. Everything was normal, everything was fine. I paid more of my money for the aforementioned stale popcorn, and sank into the abused foam of the theatre seat, and waited distractedly as the lights dimmed and all the other faceless watchers in that theatre with me got their last-minute choughs in. The giant screen came groaningly to life, flashing shampoo commercials that were still new enough a phenomena to make other watchers whisper to each other about the inappropriateness of commercials in movies, then the ancient piece of tape with the dancing box of candies, ordering the troops to go to the lobby, though we all knew no one ever did follow that time-honoured command. Then the music came, and my mind perked up at the first strains of a recent, popular, and not-so-original song that I happened to like, as it started the real movie and subconsciously told all of us to shut up and pay attention, cause this is what we all paid for. The first shot was of- guess what- a familiar orange table. Cue that shock of recognition in my soporific thoughts. And a voiceover starts up about how once, the character, the focus of the movie and all of us who have pilgrimaged to this holy place to give reverence to, once saw that same cheap little table on the set of a television show once, and it gave them a brief little flash of connectedness, that they forgot that night when they went to sleep. That little line that appears between my brows when I lower them, as I'm doing now, appears on my face. The camera travels around the room of the movie's character, and that line of mine gets deeper, and darker, as the camera pans past a lamp, a poster, a stereo squatly capped by an untidy stack of cd's. You can't see the names of those cd's- they're lying on their side- but there, in that dark theatre, I'm the only one who can name them all, in order. They're my cd's. That was my lamp, and my poster, too. The bed on the screen that all the other watchers are watching, that's my bed. It was when the arm, the arm that reached out of my bed, to turn on my lamp, in the movie I was watching, was my arm...that was when I started to freak out. Quietly.