I was a coward. I was a coward. I never forgave her. I never forgave her for showing • me me. F Bidart
Back in December, I watched a 2011 film by Julia Loktev called The Loneliest Planet. The film I had intended to watch was her 2006 film Day Night Day Night, about a 19-year-old girl who prepares to be a suicide bomber in Times Square, but I hadn’t been able to find a good torrent for it and settled for the former.
I loved it. A beautiful tone poem about aftershocks and dynamics forever altered by one singular moment. I loved how it speaks to the cowardice of men, that specific and sometimes shocking ability to self-protect and regress, and how once you’ve witnessed it, it becomes incredibly difficult to forget, to shake. Through Loktev’s eyes, masculinity is fragile, sometimes pathetic, both ashamed of and sure of itself. It passively fumbles with tenderness and is, at times, simultaneously self-serving and self-effacing. What do we do in the face of cowardice? How do we begin to forgive it? Should we have to? Can a coward love? Self-preservation feels counterintuitive to love, to the glory of knowing and being known, of loving and being loved back. Such a beautiful thing does not come easily and requires the strength of vulnerability; I always say it. I guess the real question is: How can a coward love?
He went to war. He went to war, but he couldn’t face me. Sometimes this fact is deeply satisfying to me. Somedays, it empowers me and floods me with great confidence. Most days, though, it crushes me, fills me with a shame and confusion that floors me and kicks me in the ribs. I don’t think there’s any particular merit to “going to war.” It doesn’t impress me that a privileged, old-money shithead with a death wish signed up to serve an imperialist US interest (and got famous for it) Fuck that shit. Truly. I wonder, though, how talking to me, looking at me, and making eye contact with me could be more frightening than the sounds of war, death, and destruction. It’s not me, though. I’m not what he’s scared of. He’s what he’s scared of.
I never forgave her for showing • me me.
Recently I read something that resonated, a painful recognition. “He wakes in the morning and washes the mirror instead of his face” The most beloved and reviled object: the mirror. That’s what I was. I was a necessary object when I reflected what he wanted to be true - that he is desirable, interesting, compelling, and loveable. But as soon as I began to reflect back something more nuanced, a flawed man, it no longer mattered that I could love him. The mirror needed to be washed, thrown out, smashed to pieces, seven years of bad luck be damned. If he looks at me, he will see the coward I know him to be, that he chose to be. If he looks at me, he can never unsee himself.
The other morning I texted my sister that Bidard poem I opened with. I can’t believe some men can admit this. To be fair, she responded, it probably took that guy, like, a minimum of 10 years to get to that realization. When it comes to waiting on evidence of regret or self-awareness from the soldier, I think my only option is to hope he makes some deathbed confession.
The Loneliest Planet never tells us what happens to Love after cowardice shows its face. Instead, it leaves us to sit in our discomfort and ponder the weight of fear and its consequences on our intimacies. I know what happens, at least sometimes, in the worst cases, like a fucking hit and run. Happy Valentines day, baby.
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