A Story that Shows Thousands Similar but Not Identical

I was watching this movie. Now I don’t cry at movies, shows, books, etc. I read and watch stuff all the time. Any realistic fiction is my favorite, so I gotta except some sad stuff. I’m used to it, I know when it’s coming. I’ve learned to predict and mentally prepare. So when I tell you I don’t cry at these things, I mean I really don’t cry at these things. Unless I’m delirious at six am.

SPOILERS: Holding the Man

However, this movie was very sad. I didn’t think it would be sad, it wasn’t necessarily advertised like that. I wasn’t complaining though. It was the story of two high school sweethearts that managed to make it through getting outed and going to separate universities. I thought it was some cute gay love story with good representation of my community. I was enjoying it despite the main characters weird wigs and hair styles. However, I quickly remembered this movie takes place in the 1980s and 90s. Right during the aids crisis, in case you didn’t know that. Slowly you watch as their lives crumble into each other. They’re in their early twenties with a new diagnosis of HIV/aids. You watch them go through cycles of feeling it will end soon, “with people dropping dead it’s impossible to ignore. A cure is definitely coming” and coming to terms with the fact that their lives together could be cut in half. Soon one of them gets diagnosed with cancer. I don’t think it’s ever said what cancer it is, however, it’s easy to gather that he wouldn’t have it if he didn’t have aids. His partner, the other main character, is diagnosed with manic depression, bipolar disorder nowadays, while grappling with this new reality of machines, drugs, and white walls. Skip 30 minutes and a lot of emotional distress, it’s happening. He’s about to die, it’s coming to an end after so much of worthless fighting. And if you’ve ever lost someone to cancer you know how incredibly terrible it is to watch someone completely deteriorate in front of your eyes after taking every ounce of straining power in them left to keep a place in the world. In the scene it goes silent, with only his struggling breathing coming through your computer’s speakers and it slows…slowly…until the last, tiny wheeze sounds and no more come after.

You’d expect me to cry at that scene but I don’t. I hold my breath, sure, but I don’t cry. Not yet, anyway.

After the characters around him slowly realize he’s passed it cuts to his lover having a complete breakdown. He’s sobbing, that type of sobbing that causes you to not be able to breathe. The type of sobbing that debilitates you to the point of exhaustion. You feel yourself collapsing inward and the only thing you can manage your body to do is curl up into itself. It’s that type of sobbing and that’s when I cracked. That’s when I started crying, not the debilitating cry or a single tear, a crying in between the two, like most cry’s. I cried slowly for the rest of that movie and after. It ends quickly after his death by telling you that this was a true story, based on a memoir written by the surviving lover. You learn that he finished writing the book ten day before his own death in 1994. Slowly the credits fade in after you’re shown, the same picture the actors took themselves, of two young boys sitting on a lonely patch of grass with faces similar to the actors, but not quite identical.