I go to the movies the way some people go to church—not for answers, but for scale. I like the act of arriving early, the small ritual of choosing a seat, the way the room exhales when the lights dim. There is relief in surrendering to the size of it all. Movie stars loom larger than life, faces impossibly magnified, pores and expressions turned into weather systems. On the big screen, they are not just people; they are surfaces onto which I project longing, courage, beauty, failure. I don’t want to meet them. I want to see them, unreachable, radiant, held at the correct distance.

I prefer small theaters, the kind that smell faintly of dust and old upholstery, where the chairs creak and the aisles feel too narrow for urgency. These places feel cutting-edge to me, not because they chase the new, but because they resist the obvious. They show the unpopular, the strange, the films that don’t know how to advertise themselves. A revival screening of Victor/Victoria. Something translated, something out of season, something that makes you wonder who else thought to come. Often, the answer is no one. And I tell myself I like that.

For a while, I really do.

The movies are a camera obscura to me, a darkened chamber where the outside world is inverted and projected onto a single luminous wall. Inside, everything slows. The ordinary laws of proportion give way. A face becomes a landscape, and a landscape becomes a feeling. I sit still while light does the work of translating reality into something legible. In a camera obscura, the image is real yet displaced—faithful and strange at once. That’s how films feel when they’re working on me. I watch deserts, city streets, kitchens, lovers standing too far apart, and I experience them as if they’re both distant and intimately mine. Upstream Color showed me orchids and lust upside down, and I wanted that.

The pleasure comes from knowing I am protected by a darkness. I can look without being seen. I can feel without needing to respond. Like a camera obscura, the theater teaches me that perception itself can be an event—that simply watching, attentively, can be enough. For those two hours, the world is reduced to light passing through a small aperture, arranged just for me. I am allowed to be quiet and porous. I am allowed to let the image enter me without explanation. The hurt, I think now, is that I’ve learned this lesson too well.

I am good at doing this alone. I have mastered the solo date. I know which seat avoids the flicker of the exit sign. I know how to unwrap candy silently. I know how to linger through the credits without embarrassment. There is a competence to it, a self-sufficiency that looks, from the outside, like peace. I can tell myself I am independent, reflective, devoted to my inner life. And all of that is true. But it is not the whole truth.

What I don’t say out loud is that I keep rehearsing solitude until it starts to feel permanent. Perennial. I return to the same theaters, the same kinds of films, the same posture of quiet attention. Sometimes I am the only person there, sitting in a room built for dozens, maybe hundreds, of bodies. The theater looks best when the lights are off, when its age is hidden, when the chairs—older than I am—are relieved of the burden of being seen clearly. In the dark, everything is forgiven. Cracks disappear. Time loosens its grip.

But when the lights come up, I feel the absence more sharply. There is no one beside me to lean toward, no shared glance that says, Did you see that too? No murmured comment withheld out of courtesy, then released into the night air. I leave carrying the entire experience alone, as if insight were something I must hoard rather than offer.

I wish I could extend this enjoyment to someone else. Not as a performance, not as proof of taste or intelligence, but as an invitation. I want to share the way a scene rearranges me, the way an old film can still feel dangerous or tender. I want to sit next to someone and feel the risk of proximity—the possibility that my interior life might be visible, or even welcomed. Instead, I perfect the art of keeping it contained.

There is a quiet grief in realizing that I am stuck watching these same movies alone, returning to the same dark rooms, telling myself this is enough. The films change, but the pattern doesn’t. I am faithful to the experience, but cautious with the extension of it. I know how to receive. I don’t know how to offer.

I go still. I keep going because the movies remind me of who I am when I’m not guarding myself. They show me scale, beauty, contradiction. I saw Best in Show with my Mimi, and even at that age (8?) I was understanding the humor; we really enjoyed that one. Why does that one stick with me? They teach me how to look. And maybe I’ll trust that the pleasure I feel in the dark isn’t diminished by sharing, that it might even deepen. Until then, I sit in the glow of the screen, alone but paying attention, hoping that learning how to watch is also a way for learning how to reach.