The Terminal

Just went to see the terminal this afternoon.  It was a good combination of serious and funny.  I feel like it had some meaning and insight for me, but I'm trying to piece together exactly what that was.  Airports are definitely funny places.   
 
Now, if you haven't seen it, you might not want to read this next part, because it's about the ending of the movie.  I was happy, because for once, he didn't get the girl in the end.  Tom Hanks' character, Victor, and Catherine Zeta-Jones' character, Amelia, don't end up together.  Yay for real-life endings that aren't forced.  Okay, maybe not real-life endings because it is the movies, but still.  I was just glad that the story ended with them going their separate ways, without being a big dramatic tear-jerker or something. 
 
Things don't always go the way you want them to in life.  And sometimes you just get to have people in your life for a little while before they move on.  We have to be okay with that, which isn't always easy.  I am one of those people who wants to keep in touch with everyone I've ever known.  They are all so special to me.  It's like if I lose contact with that person, I lose contact with that part of my past. 
 
I guess that is one weird thing about being at this time in my life.  Everything seems so transient.  I go to college and have this great group of friends for four years, then spend one day in a cap and gown and poof! it's all gone like a long dream you don't want to wake up from.  Same thing with high school graduation.  And now I'm here in the lonely land of graduate school wondering where I'll be transported to next.
 
And part of that confusion comes from trying to figure out what kind of person I am without all those people around me.  By the time I graduated college, I had a clear role in my group of friends, a clear picture of who I was to these people.  I thought I knew how they viewed me and I was comfortable with that.  Then, fast forward to grad school where I'm teaching public speaking to people who are barely younger than me, taking classes with brilliant grad students, and barely holding it all together.  I've made friends now, but it's still kind of like, hmm, i wonder how these new people think of me?  Who am I becoming in their midst?  Is that who I want to become?
 
I get homesick for people a lot.  I guess it's never really the places that you miss so much as the people there and how they make you feel.  The person that you are when you're with those good friends.  And when that time is over, you just have to be thankful.  They left their fingerprints all over your life, wriggled around in your heart, and now they're off somewhere new.  So I guess I'm hoping to really take advantage of the place I find myself in now...to roll up my sleeves and get down to figuring out why I'm here in this place, right now, with these people.  I don't want to lose the opportunity to let this place affect me and to let myself affect this place.