Moulin Rouge!

I have always been a child with a particularly fragile heart. Maybe that is why I have always instinctively guarded it with a jealous zeal. Always making sure that I would never get hurt almost like an overprotective father who tries his best to shield his daughter. But also like the father who tries to shield his daughter, in the end she rebels and ends up making the very same mistakes he tried to prevent her from making. Some lessons cannot be learned any other way. 

I do not want to be accused of over romanticising certain things but in a way I now know and feel things in a way I never was able to before. What did I understand of love before this? I knew it was a concept. Nothing more! It was nothing; nothing compared to the knowledge now and the feelings they bring with them. It is like seeing a watercolour painting and then going to the scene and taking in the picturesque view yourself. There is so much difference. What did I feel before this when I saw examples and depictions of love? Nothing! I saw nothing! And I felt nothing. But now, I understand it in a way that I could not have a few years ago. And with the understanding comes the appreciation. And with that comes the tears when you watch a sad love movie. It feels so real now. When it used to feel like just a film. 

I've always been of the sappy sort. I've always been a hopeless romantic and a true believer in love. I've longed for it with every fibre of my being long before I even knew I did. And being like the overprotective father, I did my best to hide it. But there's no point in hiding it now is there. What is the point of further concealing who you are to the eyes of the world. I'd sooner just show my true self and be free. I do not want to overthink and overlook into these matters. But now with my newfound sensitivity to matters such as these, I wonder if he was here to teach me something. No doubt I have learned a lot from my time with him. All of them ground shattering, all of them painful. But a lot nonetheless. I can appreciate now all the lessons I learned from him whether advertently or inadvertently. He never meant to teach me anything. Indeed he couldn't care less about what is going on. This exists in my world you see, not in his. But of course learned from it I did. I wonder sometimes at what I have become. The overwhelming burgeoning of emotions that spill over and were never there before. It's like I've opened a whole new door to my existence and I didn't even know it was locked to begin with. Love can do many things to you. And the one thing it will most definitely do, is to make your heart bleed. Tears flowed mighty freely when I watched the Moulin Rouge. And it is all well and good and all too easy to imagine yourself in the place of Satine and Christian. We are all after all, the protagonists in our own stories. But a thought struck me as I was watching the movie and it did not please me but what if instead of them, I was in actuality the Duke? I could see many similarities in my own story to the Duke. How he insists on making something happen even when it's hopeless and he tries everything; everything to attain someone who never loved him and would never love him. How he goes about his efforts with a dogged determination like he was sure that they would work to make her love him but in the end we do see that it is all so futile. But he didn't think so. He genuinely thought that he could make it happen. And that resounds uncomfortably true with my own situation doesn't it. There is no point in trying and I should have given up and walked away a long time ago. But I kept on trying. To what avail? None whatsoever. And it is time that I realised that instead of sinking deeper and deeper into my desperate efforts like the Duke did and getting enmeshed in somebody else's love story. Yes it is somebody else's love story. And it doesn't matter that it is breaking my heart into a million different pieces. I am just in the way.