Framed In Light

There’s a scene in Into the Wild—a dream sequence, almost a hallucination—where the boy looks at his parents, just as they’re graduating from college, and begs them not to get married. Not to have children. He pleads with them. You’re going to hurt them, he says, voice raw with the knowledge of what’s coming. And they don’t listen. They smile, wave him off, continue down the path that will destroy everything soft in him.

I think about that scene more than I should. Because it feels like something inside me was trying to say the same thing once.

Don’t do this. Don’t marry her. Don’t start a life just because it’s what people do.

But I did.

Not out of passion, not even out of hope. Out of inertia. Out of the illusion that time was a straight line and this was the next step. Out of fear that the alternative—being alone, being uncertain—would be worse. And now there’s a child involved. A beautiful, innocent child who didn’t ask to be born into a home where something feels missing, even if no one talks about it. Especially because no one talks about it.

So I stayed. I played the part. I showed up. And I tried not to wonder what it would have been like if I’d waited. If I’d been honest—with myself, with her, with someone else. If I hadn’t swallowed the quiet screaming and called it maturity.

Recently, someone told me to watch The Remains of the Day.
They didn’t say why. But the movie shook me.

It’s a film about restraint. About silence. About the slow suffocation of a man who believes that doing what’s expected of him is the same thing as living. He doesn’t say how he feels. He doesn’t reach for the woman who might have saved him. He watches her walk away, and he goes back to polishing silver.

The tragedy isn’t that he didn’t love her. It’s that he did—and buried it under the weight of duty, pride, and fear.

I see myself in that man more than I want to admit. Not in the way he walks or talks, but in the way he waits. Waits for the right moment to say the truth. Waits for things to fix themselves. Waits for a sign. And in the end, all he’s left with is memory. A memory that won’t hold him. That won’t sit beside him at dinner. That won’t save him from the emptiness he built himself into.

I wonder if that’s what I’ve done. Traded one kind of safety for another. Built a life that looks stable from the outside but is quietly decaying on the inside. And now it’s too late to ask for more.

I think of the boy in the dream again—pleading with his parents, knowing how this story ends, powerless to stop it.

And I think maybe that boy was me. Or the version of me I left behind when I decided to live someone else’s idea of a good life.

There are people we’re meant to love. And there are people we end up with. Sometimes they’re the same. Most of the time, they’re not.

And sometimes, by the time you realize which one you chose, you’re standing at a window, watching the past walk away in the rain, too well-mannered to call out, too shattered to wave.

Alas, I am Mr. Stevens.