Finding a familiar plot

I haven't been to the movies in more than two years.

Oh, I've watched a lot of movies. I've lost untold hours -- OK, days, weeks or months maybe -- watching movies on cable. Some I've seen several times, some I missed along the pop culture highway.

But I haven't set foot inside a movie theater in more than 24 months.

I used to go to movies with some regularity, even alone. I had decided some time ago that I wasn't going to let being single, or having a weird work schedule, keep me from doing things I wanted to do.

Then for a while I had a significant other and we went to movies quite a lot. After the relationship ended it just felt lonely to even think about going to a movie alone. After I got passed that, there just haven't been many movies I was dying to see. I'm sure people would tell me I've missed some good cinema in the last couple of years, but off the top of my head I can't think of any films I really wanted to see.

Oh, wait, there was at least one film that I wanted to see and did go see: "Brokeback Mountain". So, I guess my whole not-setting-foot-in-a-theater line doesn't hold up to scrutiny. But the primary point is the same. I just haven't been going to movies, or had any real desire to go either.

But in the last few days I've been seeing some previews for a movie that has piqued my interest. It's called "The Lake House," which reunites "Speed" stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. But it's not the stars that is the draw. It's the story, or at least what I can glean about the story from the movie trailer and details on imdb.com.

Here's the plot outline as detailed on the Internet Movie Database site: "A lonely doctor (Sandra Bullock) who once occupied an unusual lakeside home begins exchanging love letters with its newest resident, a frustrated architect (Keanu Reeves). When they discover that they're actually living two years apart, they must try to unravel the mystery behind their extraordinary romance before it's too late."

The storyline resonates with me. I can relate. It sounds a little like a story my ladyfriend Brat and I have lived off and on for a long while. In our case it's not time, but distance, that has kept us apart. We've had a prolonged correspondence and conversation across time and space. Perhaps there is something profoundly intimate about corresponding with someone, whether in letters written with ink on paper or in real time with pixels on a screen.

I've long known that I am better at expressing many things, particularly emotional things, in writing rather than with the spoken word. But I suspected maybe I was just weird or verbally inept. But for centuries, lovers separated by distance or duty have writing to lovers and loved ones with stunning clarity and eloquence. Perhaps technology took that away from us. Or perhaps technology is now giving that power and purity back to us.

Oh sure, there is a proliferation of typographical and grammatical errors all over the Internet and blogosphere. But there is some stunning writing out there as well. People write about the things and people and events most important to them. They write with passion, wit, style and flare. People let us see their heart and that's a powerful, poignant thing.

Brat has let me see her heart, even though she has tried to hide it or protect it from time to time.

And isn't that what we are all looking for? Someone to connect with? Someone who we understand and appreciate and who gives us those same things back? In an exchange of embraces, emotions and bodily fluids, of course.

Movies
Writing
Long-distance romance