It was the kind of movie theater that didn’t have a marquee. Grand Avenue Cinemas was located on a dismal stretch of Long Island, sandwiched unceremoniously between a liquor store and a Dollar Tree. The four of us had driven there from Jones Beach, the sun waning in the sky, on the kind of perfect summer day that seemed to signal that the summer was coming to an end.
Scott and Julie—my two best friends in the world—were up in the front seats. I’d known them both since middle school, and though we’d all left New York for different colleges, we’d always managed to come back home for the summers, carrying on like we’d never left. No summer was this truer than 2010—the August after graduation—when we were back in the city, waiting for the Great Recession to pass and for our lives, as we’d been promised, to change.
In a few days, they would. The three of us would be leaving New York again, only this time more permanently. We’d landed jobs in other cities, found roommates, paid security deposits on new apartments. It felt like being on the precipice of something great and thrilling. There would be no more school breaks and no certainty about the next time we’d see each other. The day at Jones Beach, followed by a night out on the Lower East Side, would be our last hurrah—the end of this chapter of our friendship as we knew it—and we vowed to savor it for as long as we could.
Only, I’d taken a hacksaw to the plan. Sitting next to me in the back of Julie’s car was Rachel, a sophomore from my college whom I’d developed a crush on. We’d flirted for weeks over text before I convinced Julie to pick her up from the PATH train that morning. The black one-piece she’d worn to the beach clung effortlessly to her body. Her hair was a cascade of dark curls that Scott would later compare to Medusa. Reaching across the backseat, Rachel pressed her hand against mine, the gloss of her suntan lotion making her arms glisten.
Rachel wasn’t 21, so the bar idea was out. Scott offered a hookah lounge that didn’t card that we used to frequent in high school. I suggested somewhere dark and quiet instead. Julie and Scott were no fools. We’d pulled these kinds of stunts before—privileging flings over friendship—but never when the stakes were this high. Still, though I could sense their disappointment, neither of them called me on it. When we finally got to the theater, Scott and Julie lit up a pair of cloves in the parking lot, and Rachel and I went inside.
The lobby reeked of stale butter. The carpet was a shade of maroon so deep we could only speculate at its last cleaning. We didn’t even know what was playing, so I chose the movie with the closest showtime. Toy Story 3 would be the kind of movie we wouldn’t be tempted to pay attention to. It had been over a decade since I’d seen the original and I felt no more regard for Buzz and Woody and the gang than I did for anyone who would spoil a last opportunity with Rachel.
The opening should have convinced me otherwise. A buoyant montage of Andy as a young boy playing with his toys fades out to the clipped Randy Newman lyric: our friendship will never die. We learn that Andy, now seventeen, is leaving to go to college. All his toys but Woody will soon be relegated to his parents’ attic. Sitting next to Rachel, I felt my heart jump. What had once been his most important confidants in the world were suddenly barely more than an afterthought. I felt the betrayal in my bones. I tried to hide the tears in the corners of my eyes.
The rest of the movie proved only more devastating. Woody and the gang end up on a landfill conveyor belt that leads to an incinerator. In what appears to be their dying moments, the toys wordlessly express their love for each other, accepting the end of their lives as I felt my own adolescence going up in flames around me.
In the movie’s final scene, Andy donates his toys to a neighborhood girl named Bonnie. He introduces each one to her and is surprised to find Woody at the bottom of the box. Although initially hesitant, he passes him onto Bonnie along with the others. For a few precious moments, Andy is not a young man about to go to college. He is running around in Bonnie’s backyard with Woody on his shoulders, just like he did all those years ago. Driving away from the house, Andy seems to make peace in a way that I still hadn’t: that moving on means being willing to let go.
The tears flowed with abandon. I brought my own hand from Rachel’s armrest to my face.
“They’re just toys,” she said, when the credits rolled. “Kid’s stuff.”
I nodded, choking back tears. I couldn’t tell her that, deep down, I was each one of those scared toys, staring down the fiery inferno of adulthood. Without really knowing how it happened, my friends and I had grown up, trading our innocence for a shot at the world. Only, it all felt so sudden. No matter how long we’d known this time was coming, there was no good way to prepare for it.
I stood up after the credits and turned towards the exit where the two of them had been sitting. Letting go, mourning the past, acceptance. It all seemed so infuriatingly out of reach. But perhaps, then, it didn’t have to be that way. Was it possible to grow up and not let go? To move on but still remember? If we could look back on our fondest memories and allow them to be part of our core being, we could go forward without abandoning the past. Like the toys’ new lives with Bonnie, ours would not just be an ending but a beginning too.
When I saw Scott and Julie, their eyes were bleary, faces red. I could sense they felt it too. Whatever came after wouldn’t be the same, but it didn’t have to be. Without saying a word, we smiled at each other and bounded, sobbing and exultant, into each other’s arms.
*
Originally published in Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears.