What we've missed, Lucia.

Kate and I just watched "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir". (I've watched more movies in the past three days than I have in the past three months - no exaggeration. Which is stupid, because I have such a ridiculous amount of things to do. AGH!) ... Anyway. We watched "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir", with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison (also, George Sanders - creep of a character, but George, you'll always be so strangely fantastic)... and it actually made me feel incredibly sad. I mean to a point it's understandable, because it's a rather sad movie. But I mean, it made me so sad. After Gene Tierney befriends the grouchy-yet-endearing ghost of Rex Harrison (not Captain Gregg, a character, as the movie will have you believe - Rex Harrison is always Rex Harrison, in a grand old Rex Harrison way), he decides to leave her so that she can have a life with the living. So he stops "haunting" her, back when she's good and young, and she grows old - all alone. She never even really leaves the house after he goes away, which really defeats his purpose, I think. He left her so that she wouldn't be alone, but he ended up making her more alone than she ever was with him. That kills me.

And when he goes off, he delivers this grand old monologue to her while she's sleeping, telling her that she needs to find her own way in the world without him and all of that. "You must make your own life amongst the living and, whether you meet fair winds or foul, find your own way to harbor in the end." As a last thought, he tells her that he wishes she could have seen the North Cape, and adds, "What we've missed, Lucia. What we've both missed."

And then I suddenly got to feeling so very lonely. How stupid, to feel lonely for two characters on a screen. Only it's not just those characters or that story that got me... it just made me think about everyone else, and how lonely people can be. It's much more than I or anyone else can even imagine, and that makes me very sad.