“The hand knows….”

It’s eerie how things come full circle in life. I was trying to explain this to a friend the other day, how I believe that we all operate within our own cycles, and that things are constantly happening for reasons, but sometimes we can never figure out what they are.

Is there such a thing as fate, or is it only strong coincidence?

Perhaps this is a discussion for another time, but it’s something I’ve been wondering this past weekend. Because in my life things are constantly circling or cycling, or eeirly coinciding.

For example, Friday night, I ran into a former fling. On the subway, ironically enough right by his apartment in Brooklyn, a place that I refused to visit the whole month (keep in mind this is a long time for me) we were dating. I had been thinking about how he was doing, for some odd reason, just the day before, and now, bamn, at 7:34 on a Friday night, we were walking in sync up the subway platform. He was this guy who told me, on our last date, that my problem was that I chose to live in the future and not in the present, and that because of this I never enjoyed what I had. And it took me months of self analysis to realize he was right. Is this the end of a cycle, or is it only the beginning?

And in SF, I was on this friendster date, and I needed a drink..badly. I chose a random bar across the street from where we met, just to get into darkness quickly, or more accurately to get out of the date. I didn’t know the bar from a hole in the wall, an expression my mother uses with affection, but when I got inside I realized that I did indeed know the bartender from that very same hole. He was an old friend from college and it had been years since we last spoke. Yet now we know that we’ll continue to cycle in and out of each others lives.

Which brings me to Donnie Darko. See, this movie, this cult like classic, has been playing every Friday and Saturday* night at the Pioneer Movie Theater on East 3rd St. I’ve been meaning to go, but midnight is such an awkward hour to decide to sit in a movie theater. I’ve usually been out or I’ve stayed in, and either way I’m not ready to sit still for two hours. But last night, walking home from the bar where I coincidentally met another boy I hadn’t seen in four years, I passed the theater. And this time, I went in.

*except the two Saturdays I originally tried to see it…

And Donnie Darko was a great movie. A hard to explain but excellent feature. And it freaked me out, because it talked about being alone and living life and all this other stuff that I could relate to, even though I will have to see this film at least two more times to really understand what I’d been watching. But it had taken me almost two years to see this film, and finally I needed closure. I needed the Donnie Darko cycle to end. I needed to take action.

Why last night? Because I was sick of being non-committal on this front. I was sick of wanting to see Donnie Darko, but not actually seeing it. I was sick of not keeping to my plan.

Life will continue to cycle. It’s all about how you use the machine.