The Stars are Perfect
cooper green
“I ain’t no freaking monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride! You want me to take my heartbreak, put it away and forget?”
Those are some of Nicholas Cage’s first lines in Moonstruck, where we find him in the basement of the bakery for which he bakes “bread, bread, BREAD.” And what an introduction.
I love this movie. I love the music, the cast, the shots of Brooklyn at night, the big family and the grandpa with all his dogs, the little characters who surface to drop an all-time quotable and then are never heard from again.
I love the drama of it all. It always felt like Cage’s perfect role, like someone saw how absolutely bonkers he was and said “What if we craft a world in which Nick Cage’s behavior looks quite normal, quite reasonable?”
His counterpart in Moonstruck is, of course, an enigma of her own. Cher — stunning, proud, elegant, constantly weeping like she’s starring in an Italian opera — the perfect match for Cage’s endearing brand of insanity.
These two holding each other before a star-kissed Manhattan skyline is an image that has lived rent-free in my mind since the first time I watched the film with my uncle on a quiet night in rural Missouri. The timeless concept of love steamrolling the obstacles which work against it, two people fighting against the world — against themselves at times — to eventually accept that the only way they could possibly live their lives once they met was to live them together.
Feelings emerge abruptly after their meeting, over a steak dinner, and they’re in bed moments later. The rest of the film is a push and pull of denying and embracing, harmless secrecy and happy endings.
It’s Titanic, it’s When Harry Met Sally, It’s Romeo and Juliet — except if Juliet was engaged to Romeo’s brother when she met him.
Oh, right, I’ve neglected to mention the movie’s central conflict. As much as Cage and Cher strive beautifully to make the film about internal turmoil, everyday drama, and the bitch of life’s timing, at face value the real issue is that the movie begins with Cage’s brother proposing to Cher, and then she falls in love with the other guy. Cher and Cage only meet when she invites him to the wedding! And in the end, the only reason everything works out is a family’s natural ability to sweep things under the rug and a dying mother living longer than expected.
I don’t seek to disparage a moment of this drama, every ounce drips with exaggerated romance and New York nonsense — it’s a cinematic delight. I suppose what I’m getting at is that perhaps this movie is such a joy to dive into because it’s built on a fundamental untruth, something we have all wished for many hundreds of times, even knowing time after time that the way the world works in Moonstruck is not the way our world works.
The truth is this: a crush is just a crush, and so rarely does the fire of love we see dancing between Cage and Cher ever amount to much besides heartbreak and some fleeting memories.
“I love you,” Cage monologues in the film’s climax. “Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice — it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit.”
Corny as Cage is, waving his wooden hand in the street, this gets me every time. Because it feels like the film is finally breaking the fourth wall in this sort of self-deprecating, self-reflective moment, finally letting us in and saying “Yeah, obviously it doesn’t work like this. In reality, this shit just hurts and storybooks lie, including this one.”
Which is why, in retrospect, it makes sense I leaned so hard into this fairytale as I was deepest in the throes of one of my own crushes.
At 24, working at an ancient dive bar in Portland, I found myself playing the home-wrecker — twisted up with my coworker Alyssa on the couch after a long night out. Her live-in, long-term boyfriend was asleep just five minutes up the road.
The next morning, we both played Cher: desperate to just cover the thing up, forget about it, and move on with the way things were supposed to be, just good friends with a natural chemistry — me, single and happily so, her, nearly married and happily so.
But then of course, it happened again. And again. And again, again, again.
How could it not? We were caught in the grips of this crush, one of our language’s most apt terms. Every day we saw each other felt like we were slipping further into this mess of wild love and lust. Every day we didn’t see each other felt like a day wasted. It seemed like we were stranded between a rock and a hard place, in a limbo both unending and with a dreadful sense of impending doom.
For three months we carried on in there — somewhere between best friends, passionate lovers — both of us completely unable to get a hold on reality.
The cold aching moments of “this has to stop” mingled with hot breathy sex. The tumultuous conversations over coffee that led to afternoons walking together, led to IPAs and tequila shots and led right back to bed. It felt like we had a map, a route we discussed over and over, a clear view of how to extricate ourselves. And yet, we somehow kept ending up at the same dead end, wrapped around each other and for those brief, sweet moments, so immeasurably happy.
And that’s the worst of it, isn’t it? In Alyssa and I’s best moments, I felt something I don’t think I’ve ever felt before or since. I felt like I solved the puzzle, found someone I clicked with so intensely that when we were together it felt like all the best parts of spending time alone, but better.
But despite the heartwarming finale to Moonstruck, wherein Cher and Cage find the love they’ve sought for so long and hold on to it, this is not how these stories end in real life. The storybooks are bullshit.
There is no version of this relationship in which people live happily ever after. There is resentment, distrust, and various rotating extremities extended into the ocean as three people try to fit onto a raft for two, sharks circling below.
I think for a while I really believed Alyssa was going to leave her boyfriend and be with me. And that then, within months — with me on the cusp of leaving Portland for New York City — expected that she, being from Queens, would be happy to pack her bags and come with, or just ask me to stay.
I was thrashing and fighting for this strange reality we’d carved out for each other, even as I felt the walls closing in.
And at the end, when I knew it was over but still refused to let go, I even wrote her a letter.
Alyssa,
I feel like we left on a really bitter note the other day and I don’t want to do that, because there’s nothing bitter about this. The bottom line is that I love you, and it’s really really hard for me to be around you and feel like I have to hold that back. I don’t know if that’s how you feel about us anymore, but it’s all I can think about when I’m with you right now. It’s obvious I need to take some time away from you, but I don’t want you to think that comes from a bad place. It’s coming from a place of love. I guess this is one of the hard parts I said we had to do. I know you’re confused and I’m trying not to hold that against you but the ups and downs are too much — your changing feelings about our relationship and your relationship from week to week are giving me emotional whiplash.
You asked me how I hoped this would turn out. I’m not sure how well I answered, but basically I hoped it involved you and I drinking beers on a hardwood floor in an apartment of your own. And I guess, in some deep romantic place in me, I hoped you were going to convince me to stay. I don’t know how all that works, I don’t know how you’re ready to do that so fast, I don’t know. I realize that’s all glimmer and no substance, but I wanted to paint the picture for you anyway, because I thought it was a nice one.
I hope you find what you’re looking for in this next chapter, whether it’s more of the same or something new. I want to come out on the other side of this with you, whatever that means. I’m so excited for you and the things coming in your life. But I’m going to miss us. For the first time in my life, I felt like I spoke a language with someone that no one else could understand. Life is more colorful with you in it. I hope we get the chance to explore that sometime.
Until then, I’ll think of you every time I cry during a movie, whenever I see an oyster or an opera, when I serve a martini or catch Maggie Rogers in a Chaka Khan shirt on Instagram — and always, always, always when I think of Cher standing under the full moon in New York City.
I’d love to pick things up on a fresh foot when we’re ready, however that looks for us. And if you need me to, I’ll try to figure out how to fall out of love with you.
Nothing has worked yet.
Cooper
Reading this letter now — years removed, having barely spoken to Alyssa since it reached her hands — I’m left with a bizarre cocktail of emotions. I’m proud of a sad, bitter, defeated me writing something filled with so much heart. I know I was angry then, but there’s no anger in these words.
I feel too, though, how badly I wanted this to convince her to choose me. How badly I wanted her to tell me not to move to New York City, but rather to stay and be with her: a woman I’d only known intimately for a single winter season.
And folks, I’d love to tell you that I learned something from this. I’d love to tell you that the reason I am writing this is because I have seen the mountaintop, I have reached its zenith and seen the truths of what will work and what won’t, and have made peace with the concept that crushes are inherently wastes of time — by nature, too good to be true.
And though I will watch the lies of Moonstruck one hundred more times, I will not tell that lie to you myself.
Still, I find myself falling in love with strangers. Still, every time, I must convince myself that my life will go on without them, as it always has.
I woke up this Sunday still reeling from the flirtations of a patron at the bar where I work. The warm eyes from across the room, the “I can’t believe I haven’t asked your name yet,” the “See you next Saturday.” Two drinks was all she had, that was all the time it took for me to mentally redraw the borders of my life around her.
What a mess of emotions that left me with on a Sunday morning. A taste of that thrill, the excitement of something, the possibilities — oh the possibilities.
And a good dose of shame too, of course, considering my long-term girlfriend. Had I returned her flirting, returned it too much? Or did I milk that moment for the flattery and walk away at the right time? What are the odds I ever see her again? What would my girlfriend have said had she watched us?
Who even is this person and what the hell am I talking about?
I see that apartment I dreamed of with Alyssa, an apartment I’ve seen myself in with so many women, so many strangers, living a life that is not mine but I made, somehow, from nothing in my mind. And I wonder how much of it is real, how much of it is attainable, how much of it is just a dream.
I was right about a few things in that letter: my ideas for us were all glimmer and no substance. But it was a picture worth painting anyway, because it is a nice one. It is human to dream, it is human to crush, despite all the ways it can mislead you, all the lies it can tell you.
But the line that will never leave me from that letter to Alyssa is this: “Life is more colorful with you in it.”
As far removed as I am from that crush, that moment in my life, I still feel something when I read that and think about the color she brought to my world, in a series of short, heartbreaking moments.
I cannot put into words how much it hurt to see that color fade, but neither can I describe its absolute radiance while it lasted. And when all is said and done, maybe that’s a fair trade.
Because Nicholas Cage was right — we are here to ruin ourselves.
After all, who are we to stifle the fantasies that light the quieter days of our lives? On a cool summer night in Brooklyn when anything is possible, when all the context and the pain falls away and, for a second, it really is just about who you love and what could be.
cooper green
Cooper Green is a writer based in Queens, New York. He left journalism for a career bartending and writing about his feelings. He loves mountains, the Portland Trail Blazers, and good soup shared with good friends. You can reach him at clygreen@gmail.com.