Questioning Solaris

She says it with such complete and comforting finality, "We don't have to think like that anymore. Where we are, everything is forgiven. Everything."

A thought passes: I wonder if she's the one in my dreams. I wonder if the one in my dreams is my own Rheya.

I want to think that, if given the chance, I would never have pushed her away. Again. And again and again.

Then I wonder, who is it that's really adrift? The one who is calm and attentive in her presence but awakens, afterwards, heartsick and alone?

Or is it that she, having escaped my tortured gravity, is now content to wander in a space deeper than the deepest dreams?

Does she know that through all the days, of half-remembered dreams, I wait for her?

And, if she knows, does she even care?

Or is this the torture that she, or the mind which owns her, has designed for me?

If that's the answer, what about the mentioned forgiveness?

Or if it's true, as the visiting spectre states, that "There are no answers, there are only choices," then what are my choices?

Is it only, as I occasionally still think, "to sleep, perchance to dream...?"

LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2011

After You

After catching part of an HBO showing of Solaris this morning, then making the previous journal entry, I looked up Natascha McElhone, the actress who played Rheya in the 2002 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel.

What I found absolutely knocked me over. About a year after filming Solaris with George Clooney, McElhone was filming in Los Angeles when she got word that her husband had suddenly and unexpectedly died.

At the time, she was preganant with their third child and, to keep herself from being overwhelmed with grief, she began writing letters and journal entries to her deceased husband, telling him of the family's life and their efforts to cope with their loss of him.

About two years later, she began shaping those letters and journal entries into a book titled After You: Letters of Love, and Loss, to a Husband and Father.

Sounds like one that I'm gonna have to read...

LPK
LiveJournal
9.15.2011