If You Take Two Girls to TFIOS...

There are good friends. There are great friends. And then there are the friends that you trust enough to watch you disintegrate into a puddle of tears and not judge you, because chances are they are themselves also a puddle of tears.

For me, that friend is Kate. Kate is basically me. Just copy and paste my personality and thought processes into a different body and that basically explains the dynamic of the friendship. We have several theories as to why this is, the most significant one being that we're both actually just different regenerations of the Doctor Who character River Song (for those of you who don't watch Doctor Who, just ignore that reference, because like most Doctor Who things, it'd take a whole blog post to explain).

It's weird to think that I only met Kate a year ago, in our very awesome production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. She was one of the aforementioned Wives and I was the barmaid/least dressed person onstage. I suppose the day we coordinated our wardrobe so that we would be twins, and actually became friends should have been an indication of what the rest of our friendship would be like.

Ah, the summer of the flapper phase. For me, obviously. Not for Kate. 

In any case. Months and several emotional crises later, Kate and I decided to attend the movie The Fault in Our Stars. Which is based on a book by the amazing John Green*.

*Side note--is there a word for being attracted to men with glasses? Because that's a thing that I definitely have. Stephen Colbert, John Green, Hank Green. . .other various guys. 

Technically, the TFIOS movie counts on its own as an emotional crisis, and if you've read the book, you'll understand why. Typically, I'm extremely stoic when it comes to emotional things, and while I was touched by the book, I didn't cry at its ending. Generally I like to think of myself as half-Vulcan, and while occasionally something gets to me, it's rare. Before seeing the movie, I hadn't cried for, you know, about a year and a half.  I'm not one of those people who enjoys a good cry while watching Titanic or whatever the kids are watching these days. It doesn't feel cathartic. It feels messy and also uncomfortable. 

I don't think I was emotionally prepared enough to take on the movie. Graduating college has been bittersweet, so I've been a little down. And there's the baggage that's been metaphorically handcuffed to my wrist since my marriage ended that I only deal with on the occasions when I absolutely have to. That didn't seem relevant, though, since the movie is about neither of those things. I was a little skeptical about the possibility of tears. After all, there's nothing like watching a bunch of other people (especially when those people are much younger than you and possibly haven't gone through puberty) crying to take the tragedy right out of any movie and make it a lot more uncomfortable. 

All the same, just to be on the safe side, I armed myself with a box of tissues and set off to meet Kate at the movie theatre. 

Kate was running a touch late, so I settled in and bought myself a caffeinated drink from the theatre's concessions. This was a bad idea, because almost immediately everything got funnier (which, arguably, is not a proven side effect of caffeine). By the time Kate arrived, I was fully sure I was going to be that person in the movie theatre who laughed at inappropriate parts like an insensitive jerk. 

My caffeine face,  Kate and the box of tissues. One of these three things did not survive the TFIOS movie.
The other is a box of tissues.
And the other thing is Kate. 

And for the first half-hour of the movie, I totally did feel like that person. Granted, the first half-hour of the movie is exposition and buildup, but everything seemed funny and I ended up laughing silently into a tissue rather than crying into it.

That. Did. Not. Last. 

Kate and I are both only children, which is where 90% of our understanding of one another comes from. When you're an only child, your parents are the #1 source of love in your life but also the #1 source of annoyance. In a good way. The protagonist of TFIOS, Hazel, is also an only child, and she worries about how her parents will survive once she dies from the cancer she's had since she was thirteen. 

That was when things started to get a little misty. Because I get that. Kate gets that. Neither of us have cancer, but our parents are the people who have been the closest to us all our lives. We worry about how they'll cope if something did happen to us. 

By the time we hit Amsterdam, we were both puddles. Thankfully, everyone else in the theatre was a puddle too--the sniffles echoed around the theatre as though they were brought to us by THX.

Although it is entirely possible that the sniffles I was hearing were just mine and Kate's. Echoes are pretty powerful things and we were crying pretty hard. 

The movie ended, and that stupidly awesome Ed Sheeran song came on, and I think we even cried harder through that song because Ed Sheeran. 

The aftermath.

And then we went to get Frozen Yogurt because how else are you supposed to feel better after watching a terribly sad movie? By that point, our poor brains had had *enough* grief, and so instead we started laughing about how much we had cried. Which was an absurd amount. I'm fairly sure the attendant at the FroYo shop thought we were crazy, because we alternately were in hysterics, laughing; and sniffling.

It's a vicious, John-Green-induced cycle. Laughter. Tears. Laughter.

Tears.