when you were younger, you were often told off for being too sensitive. as if you could control it. as if you, taking your own pain seriously, as if that was the problem. it didn't matter that you were being bullied - and it never mattered if the bully was your parent. it just mattered that you reacted to it.
the other day someone asked why you always seem to take things in stride. you don't know how to say - i don't, i am just not allowed to be a human where others could see it happen.
you watch other people have emotions in public and are often stunned by them. you are always walking carefully around your own, knowing that at some point you could slip and start weeping through your sunday evening apropos of nothing. you're not allowed to feel big things. when you feel big things, you're a messy, annoying person. it's ugly when you cry. it's uncomfortable for everyone.
the other day, you were relating another story to your therapist. you paused for a moment and then let out that little bark of laughter - it shouldn't have hurt, but i guess it did!
you promise that you're not upset about it. you're never upset about anything. you just pass through this world - ghostlike. numb. promising others - oh! i've changed a lot since i was a kid.
6K notes
·
View notes
What I think is particularly heart breaking about this episode, is that Esteban is immortalizing a memory that Cecil doesn’t get to experience. Esteban knows about his grandfather, because he has heard the story several times before according to Abby, in fact they all just heard it. Cecil is experiencing, second hand, remnants of a memory that slides off of him. It refuses to stick.
There is something so poetic to me about Cecil being a reporter, a journalist, an observer, and doing everything to piece together a story from literal scraps of his own life, only to find its already been written for him. The story has already been told. Cecil doesn’t listen to stories, he tells them. I can think of nothing more infuriating than a story being told and not having a satisfying ending, or an ending that makes sense. Nothing within the story justified the ending. And yet we have seen it before throughout the show.
I am reminded of the episode It Doesn’t Hold Up, where Cecil watches the last few minutes of his comfort film Cat Ballou, changed and different. He has seen the same movie over and over and over again, and now the ending is different. In the drawing Esteban drew in 245, there is a shovel stuck into the dirt, and there is a boy climbing into a tree. In the ending of Cat Ballou, there is a man digging into the base of the tree. Just like in the episode It Sticks With You, when Abby, Cecil and their mother journey into the woods, and Cecil climbs into a tree over and over and over again until he can no longer remember the outing with his husband and son. Just like in Cassettes, when a young Cecil’s story is cut short, in an ending that Cecil refuses to listen to, immortalized on tape.
Just like in Liminal Spaces, when Cecil enters a space that is neither here nor there and is haunted by someone who tells him that he wants Cecil to remember. The very face that Cecil saw in Cat Ballou in It Doesn’t Hold Up. In fact, he tells Cecil he has no choice, before once again, he is pulled from the story.
Cecil’s whole life is one long interrupted narrative. It’s as if he is an old cassette that isn’t rewound all the way before pulled out of the slot and put back on a shelf. The next person to listen to the tape, unknowing, doesn’t realize where they’re starting off is not the beginning. There are things missing. Cecil has gotten so good at forgetting (and justifiably so) — has forgotten how to stop. He’s recording over the same tape over and over again until the tape inside is no longer coherent. I’m thinking, of the sound of a cassette being rewound, and how it could sound very much like how Cecil is often describing owl sounds.
So, how disquieting, to have your own family stare back at you, privy to information about yourself that you do not get to have. Cecil is there, quite literally, to construct a story for his town, but who is there to construct a story for him? A man you used to hate? A sister you aren’t sure you even like? A husband who you have forgotten before? Children who see and hear more than you realize? The listener?
No. Instead he will sit until dawn comes, and be made a fool out of trying to create a story, maybe even a better one, out of scraps of memories.
209 notes
·
View notes