Waiting For The Ending

Chapter Four

"Do you like corn?" "Corn?" "Yeah. You know, with the masala on it." "Yeah, I like corn." "One of the vendors in the waiting room sells it. Would you like to get some?" I felt a bit of a choke in the back of my throat before I could summon a response but I was adamant to not let my vocal cords get the better of me again. "Cool." I said to Sarah, very coolly if I do say so myself. To be fair, there was no other way for us to spend the time. The projector without warning stopped working towards the beginning of the third act of Richard Hexley's third movie and the projectionist informed all of the people in the audience i.e. Sarah and I, that sorting out the problem would take a good twenty minutes at least. So, we had no choice but to rely on corn and masala to save us from boredom.

The two of us sat down on opposite ends of one of the benches in the waiting room while she devoured her snack and I ate mine as modestly as I possibly could. "I think this might be the greatest masala and corn I have ever eaten." Sarah said. I couldn't tell if she was joking or not. I thought it was just okay. "I agree." I said. "You think they'd tell me what their spice mix is?" She asked. "You could ask them." I replied. "They might let you take some home." "Really!?" She asked enthusiastically. "I mean who else is going to use it." I said referencing the fact that footfalls in the theatre were at an all-time low at the time. "In about six months from now, they might not even be here." I added. "Oh." Said Sarah looking visibly downbeat.

She was almost three-fourths of the way done with her serving of corn while I was barely at the halfway point as we let a severe bout of silence stew between us. I was fishing for things to talk about but hardly anything conversation-worthy came to mind and we diligently kept eating our corn. The silence somehow managed to make itself grow louder. In about two minutes her plastic spoon would have been scraping the bottom of her Styrofoam cup of corn. I had to act and I had to act quickly. "Did you see any good movies recently?" I asked, cringing within for presenting her with such a generic question.

"Not really. I haven't been watching a lot of movies lately." She replied. "Why not?" I asked. "They just don't feel real to me anymore." She started. "It just feels like a lot of characters in a lot of movies exist only until the credits roll. It doesn't feel like the movie cares about the life they have to keep living once the movie ends." She said. "But they don't have... lives. They're characters." I retorted. "And that's my point." Sarah said as she folded her legs on the bench and faced me. "Its just... the character at the beginning of the movie is flawed or uncertain or going through the worst period of their lives and ninety minutes later they figure things out and that's that."

I didn't completely understand the point she was trying to make. "You think it should take them longer to figure things out?" I ask. "No it's just... even though it's the end of the movie, it isn't the end for those characters, right? To them, things keep going. Their lives keep going. Don't you ever just think about what happens to them next?" "Not really." I replied sheepishly. "Well, I do. As much as I try not to, I always end up thinking about what happens next. And sometimes it scares me. Sometimes I imagine their lives taking a turn for the worse and I can't think of a way by how they get through it. The end of the movie is just one part of their lives. They're going to have more endings and they're going to have more struggles and there are going to be more moments where things go wrong and don't go their way and there are things that I'd like to know. Like did they do the right thing? Did they not do the right thing? Is it really so terrible if they didn't?" She paused and looked drained by the end of her rant. She then said, with a mere fraction of the energy and volume she'd just spoken with. "There's so much that's left unsaid. And sometimes that freaks me out."

"You're expecting too much." I said to her as I dug into the corn in the cup in my hand. "What?" She asks. "From the movie. You're expecting too much from it." "Maybe." She half-heartedly agreed. "Is it wrong to want to have the answers to everything right away?" She asked, not with a tone that would make her come off as snarky or witty, but in a tone that was genuine.

I stopped playing with my food, looked up and said to her. "No. But it keeps you from enjoying the movie."