I don’t like food.

I love M. Night Shyamalan and almost all of his movies.

I’m not a fan of comedy in almost any form.

I believe in God.

Okay, this last one is kind of cheating, because I guess it doesn’t set me apart from everyone. But the way people have been talking about it lately, I’m almost surprised that it doesn’t. I almost am coming to expect that whatever I think or believe is on the fringe of humanity, the outside looking in, huddled in the snow as the window frosts from my fading breath as I cup my hands against the glass. Breathe in, cold solace. Breathe out, the visage before me vanishes in a pale cloud of obfuscation.

I saw a movie tonight, Saturday night, the result primarily of my new landlord’s inability to get an inspection in time for the scheduled weekend move. My Dad flew out to help me move and wound up helping me pack, to much relief of mine, before heading back today. I skipped the William & Mary tournament, a relief only to potential endless driving, but it turns out Dave & Kyle made semifinals in the best showing for a full Rutgers team since the spring of 2006. So another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody but M. Night and his new movie that they kept him from writing since anything he touches turns to critical disaster these days. His idea, his mood, his setting, but a few extra names to offset the presumed poison.

It wasn’t the best thing he’s worked on, but it was good. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an M. Night movie in theaters (I admittedly skipped “Airbender”) and I was struck by how the Philadelphia setting affected me in my new context as someone who spends a lot of time in Philly. Of course, I was further struck by the core themes of the film. Not just faith, which is in there, but the personal responsibility of the people who willfully or wantonly do damage to others. The question looms as to whether “the devil made them do it,” but ultimately the answer comes that only they themselves can UNdo it, whatever it may be. Or not undo it, I should say, but undo the destiny of their own demise in light of their mistakes and the lies they choose to believe from themselves. Suffice it to say that I found this message compelling tonight.

The rest of the time, of course, it was a movie at Market Fair on a Saturday night in Princeton. I’ve been feeling old for a while, but nothing quite feels so old as this context, especially an 8:00 show. All around me were the young, the hip, the trendy. Pockets full of money and minds empty of cares. Shrieks and giggles and hands aflutter. Even the pimpled loners sprung with a kind of exuberance I can barely remember feeling myself. The dingy carpet of the lobby felt like my lawn; the disgruntled upwellings in the back of my mind the plaintive yells for the youth to vacate. It would not have been so bad, of course, had not so many of these vibrant teens been all over each other. Not in any inappropriate or unexpected way, mind, but merely in the playful, shy, and devastatingly cute ways of couples old and new.

Here a patient but underconfident young woman, standing by her man even after a crippling leg injury forced them into the penalty box front and center generally reserved for those accompanying the elderly wheelchaired infirm. They crawled out toward the parking lot after, her unconcerned for time or space as he pitched himself slowly on a bound leg and two metal frames. There a blushing new couple, perhaps a third or fourth date, stealing glances from each other in an effort to break the awkwardness of staring straight ahead, yet hoping all too much not to get caught.

They know how the game is played and what the stakes are. I don’t anymore. I am unmoored. My whole life, since I was maybe four or five and first had crushes on girls, all I’ve wanted out of life is to be married to the love of my life. Now that experience is behind me and I don’t know what to want anymore. For the first time in a quarter-century, marriage is not the pinnacle. It’s not something I’m even sure I ever want again. I don’t know how to date or even think about dating without wanting that. I don’t know how to be, how to act, how to treat other people. Sure, I have my friends, I have the debate team, I have contexts I still understand. But outside of that, it’s a long lonely world of foreign feelings. What is the larger purpose of life? How does one find something that’s not sustainable love to be sustaining?

I get the feeling this might be another one of those differences. That most other people are muddling through weird feelings for people without knowing what they want or how or why, hoping to figure out by the time they’re my age or even older what it is they were really trying to do. If I didn’t know better and she hadn’t testified otherwise so strenuously for so long, I’d even say I married such a person. Maybe I did anyway. So it’s weird to go in this direction, to look at high school kids and see people who have it all figured out as I come unglued at the seams and disintegrate at the advent of my fourth decade. This is not the direction life is supposed to go. This is not how things are supposed to evolve. Or perhaps it’s inevitable for the people who think most seriously. I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.

What do you want when you’ve lost everything you ever wanted and can’t have it back? And why?

Pulling into the movie theater, before M. Night and the teens had their way with my emotions, Garrison Keillor got his shot to prime the pump in the parking lot. He was talking about people flipping out and changing, people turning their life on a dime so suddenly at what should have been the height of their maturity. But even his story had a logic, an explanation, a predictability – the inevitable mid-life mayhem of, as he put it, getting an AARP card in the mail. Retirement, obsolescence, a meaningful loss of youth. It’s classic and obvious and sensible. No one is prepared for the torments and regrets of realizing one is too old for the life they imagined.

I’m not ready to be put out to pasture. But I am going in the wrong direction. Somewhere between here and my AARP card, I’ve gotta find the faith or hope or the Philadelphia elevator or even Minnesota small town that puts me back on a course toward something that makes sense. And all I can think about are the memories.

Maybe I just need to move out of Tiny House already.