(For the post about the Civil Wars, click HERE. For everything else, see below 
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Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan): Will you smile? If I admit I was wrong?
Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre): About what?
Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan): Thermo-dynamic miracles…events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter…Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold…that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.
Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre): But…if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle…I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!
Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan): Yes. Anybody in the world..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget…I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another’s vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come…dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
—Watchmen (1985, wrttten/illustrated by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons)—
Perhaps God puts you in the moment where you believe no one loves you on purpose. Does God, then, present you with a lie to see whether or not you believe it? Does God let us walk to the edge, only to have Him present his case? Does He want to listen for one moment more, to wait and hold out for something greater, for something we can’t see and can never see? What does He want us to wait for? What does he believe is around the corner? Perhaps He believes in Love more than any of us realize. Perhaps He’s the biggest hopeless romantic there is in the whole wide world, and we just haven’t stepped to the fact.
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A CONVERSATION BETWEEN FRIENDS
“Just tried to watch 500 days of summer again. I had to turn it off. It screws with your heart too much.”
“I have it on DVD, but every time I watch it I go into this weird funk for a few days. It puts you through quite a ringer.”
“Definitely. It’s incredibly well made and I think the point is to go against what the viewer’s natural inclination is, but man…I suppose the optimist may be able to pull some morsel of hope out of it, but I don’t consider myself an optimist. I am a realist with idealist roots.”
“I’ve gotten texts from 3 different people today. The first was a guy telling me he moved into the place he’s gonna live with his soon-to-be wife. The second was a girl telling me she just got engaged. You were the third, talking about 500 days. I trust you see the humor in this ”
“Jeez man! Haha. What a day! I’m sorry!”
“It’s alright man. If you had texted me telling you were engaged, I would’ve donated my bank account to charity and moved to peru. I think I’m an optimist with realist roots. I’m not sure what the difference is between an optimist and an idealist. I can’t help but believe in miracles, impossible as they may seem.”
“I think an optimist SEES things one way and an idealist WISHES they were better…But that movie is painful because I want to believe in love. It’s a longing that pervades my every thought and action.”
“Okay. Then I’m an optimist. Does the fact that Tom meets someone new at the end of the movie, signaling a new season of his life, change how you view the movie?”
“I want a fairytale end despite reality’s hardships. Not a fairytale story with a tragedy’s ending. We want to believe it’s all worth it in the end, instead of looking back and wondering whether it was…It’s realistic that he meets someone else, but my fantastic brain cannot accept it.”
“Interesting. Tomorrow, I’m meeting someone who left her name and number on a receipt and stuck it under my windshield wiper. It’d be cool if we got along, but I’m fully aware that it could be nothing more than lunch. But I have to try. For me, the movie is about finding the fantastic in the realistic, or vice versa. Perhaps the fantastic needs a little heartbreak in it to make it truly wondrous. To make it stick…It also depends on whether you see the movie as a commentary on love, whether there’s true love or not, etc., or about heartbreak, how to deal, what happens and why it does and how to come back from it.”
“Well said. I think you’re right about heartbreak making the fantastic wondrous. Maybe that’s what frustrates me about the movie–we don’t necessarily get to see how the new girl and Tom are together. It could be better than Summer. Maybe Summer was only part of the realistic road to a fantastic ending…As far as your situation, it’d be a hell of a story. I believe in it!”
“Thanks man. The necessity of heartbreak is something I’ve thought about for a few years. I’ve come to a peace about it, the fact that it had to happen to change me into who I am, but the fact that I’ve come to a sort of of conclusion doesn’t make it any less fascinating.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Even if we can make some sense of it, we’ll always have those moments of being puzzled by it.”
“Agreed. There’s always a small bit of you that wonders if it absolutely had to happen, if you were really so stubborn that the only way you could learn was through heartbreak. In the end, I have to believe it was necessary. Couldn’t go on if it was a trivial event.”
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What I’m saying is that the heartbreak needs to mean something. It needs to, at times, mean everything. At other times, it needs to be a stepping stone. I need to get a handle on my heartbreak. I may not need to understand it fully. I don’t think I should be able to control and define all the borders of my heartbreak state. There ought to be always some part of it, some uncharted territory I can’t quite map out and define and tell you exactly what happened and exactly how I feel about it.
This conversation occurred months ago. Turns out, one end of that conversation just got engaged. The other end, apparently, has to move to Peru. I believe both men have love in their hearts and I’m sure they both believe in Love to an almost insane degree. Both, I believe, went to the edge and found something. I say all of this with an element of faith. And an element of hope.
My sincere congratulations to the happy couple. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to catch. I hear Macchu Picchu is lovely this time of year…
You can’t leave yet. Macchu Picchu doesn’t speak very good English. It might be saying love can be found at the top of some ancient ruins, but it’s got a pretentious air about it. Love is found in the ruins that are our lives, because of ancient grace. Without all the bull shit. In conversations like the one above. If you’re going to Peru, take me with you.