Category Archives: Colloquies

Movies in Vermont

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNj1Ugz8Y9U

Olivia: I lie in bed every night and play our relationship over and over in my head like a movie. We meet, we fall in love, we can’t stop ourselves, we’re meant to be, I give up everything inside me, and then it stops. The movie just stops! I don’t know how it ends! It’s just me, waiting for a house in Vermont that I can’t live in and a man who makes me promises he can’t keep.

Fitz: I am not the bad guy. I am not the guy who lured you into some degrading… I am not the bad guy.

Olivia: I know that.

Fitz: You want this to be easy, you want this to be simple. It is not easy, or simple.

Olivia: I know that.

Fitz: So you can’t just stand here staring at me with dead eyes like I’m some… This didn’t just happen to you. I didn’t happen to you.

Olivia: I know.

* * *

I won’t lie; Scandal hits just a tiny bit too close to home these days.

No Sally and Thomas

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ3UBneiB9I

Fitz: The Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson comment was below the belt.

Olivia: Because it’s so untrue?

Fitz: You’re playing the race card on the fact that I’m in love with you? Come on! Don’t belittle us. It’s insulting and beneath you, and designed to drive me away. I’m not going away.

Olivia: I don’t have to drive you away! You’re married, you have children. You’re the leader of the Free World. You are away. By definition, you’re away. You’re unavailable.

Fitz: So this is about Mellie?

Olivia: No, no! This is… I smile at her and I take off my clothes for you. I wait for you. I watch for you. My whole life is you. I can’t breathe because I’m waiting for you. You own me, you control me, I belong to you…!

Fitz: You own me! You control me. I belong to you. You think I don’t want to be a better man? You think that I don’t want to dedicate myself to my marriage? You don’t think I want to be honorable, to be the man that you voted for? I love you. I’m in love with you. You’re the love of my life. My every feeling is controlled by the look on your face. I can’t breathe without you. I can’t sleep without you. I wait for you, I watch for you. I exist for you. If I could escape all of this and run away with you? There’s no Sally and Thomas here. You’re nobody’s victim, Liv. I belong to you. We’re in this together.

* * *

Oh, Fitz. You always did make my insides melt a little.

My favorite story

It is a question I’ve been asked many, many times over. And it is a question that, as much as I hate to admit it, I’ve always loved to answer.

How did I meet you?

People ask because, I suspect, it is inconceivable to them that someone like me would be in your life. Someone so unlikely, so wrong, so absurdly different that they can’t imagine you ever having chosen someone like me.

And I answer because I find it so amusing at the way some of them respond. Some like the story of how we came to know each other, others like the story of how we actually met. Many don’t realize that the two are actually, however distantly, connected.

But mostly, I answer because several times now, people have said that the story of how we met is a story so clichéd, so bizarre, that it’s something that is only read about in books or seen in the movies.

Now, three years later, people still ask — a little less superficially now, because it has been three years, but a little more curiously as well. And I answer, because I realize that it is a story that I — never mind anyone else — had only ever read about in books or seen in the movies.

While everything that follows it may not be perfect, I still tell the story because it gives me hope that if we could have the clichéd how-we-met story and still beat all the odds of falling prey to the predictable end that most clichéd stories come to, then it is a story worth telling.