Past Present and Never Treatment 4

PAST PRESENT AND NEVER SYNOPSIS

ACT ONE

Bright light streams into Melias bedroom as she pushes back covers, rubbing sleep from her eyes.  She vamps at us, “Wow. Was I moaning? Do I look sexy when I’m half conscious? Don’t be fooled. That bedroom eyes thing?” Melia flirts.  She’s addressing her video journal as she goes about her morning rituals. She expects the camera to reply with refreshingly stark honesty because she is fed up with all the phony baloney plastic everything everywhere.  If there is one thing they will know about us in the future, it’s what a bunch of fakers we all were.

She meets with her friends, Cassandra and Brogen and together they document further evidence of the artificial state of affairs in the 21st century. People adhering to social norms where they pretend not to notice obnoxiously odd behavior, copies of copies of copies, which are all Andy Warhol’s fault, and reality television shows about plastic surgery.  “They all look like Drag Queens. Don’t they?”

Their video addresses future viewers who Melia speculates will have either a much harder or much easier life then we do and likely don’t speak English and won’t get our jokes.

The group heatedly debates how to address the challenges of preserving their time capsule, which the video is part of. The pressure is on for them since they have sent out press releases and committed to a date for sealing it. In spite of the temped response from the media they are stuck with a “do or die” deadline and have little time to resolve logistical challenges insuring the video and music will play five hundred years from now. Cass and Brogen vote down Melia’s idea of creating an alarm system to notify people in future of the time capsule’s existence.  For her it’s a terrible blow.  They feel the capsule should be entrusted from one generation to the next.  This works for them.  Cass just found out she’s pregnant. Isn’t that good news.  They are well on the way to creating a future generation that will care about their existence. For Melia, who is single, reaching the next generation with her journal is her only chance at living a life with any meaning. She’s confident that Cass and Brogen’s progeny won’t give a shit about her or the capsule.

Melia, a bit of an emotional exhibitionist, confides to the journal about how unfair the group process has been.  She started the capsule.  Now she is ganged up on all the time.  She pleads with future generations to see her point of view.  She longs for her words to make a profound impact even if they only reach one person.  She hopes the glimpse her journal provides into the every day lives of every day people and their every day struggles… and Melia’s every day pain… Melias every day suffering and misery and anguish and angst… and did she mention suffering? She hopes this message will give the future viewers a universal understanding of the human condition, through her humble life of longing to serve future generations through her suffering.

Reviewing her latest journal entry together with Cass and Brogen, Melia receives emphatic praise from her peers.  That entry says it all. It’s so raw.  It’s so real.  Yes, that is what the group is trying to achieve. They are united again and enthused by the power of their message they will forge courageously onward.

Cass and Brogen want Melia to capture their “true life” drama too.  They dreg up an old fight to have in front of the lens. A hearted effort quickly reconciles into mushy faced kissing which they approach with gusto. Melia looses interest in video taping.  It reminds her how profoundly alone she feels in a sea of fakers.

To make her point Melia shares with her journal the joys and absurdities of internet dating. As she surfs the singles sites she points out that “They all seem perfect, because they haven’t opened their mouths yet and destroyed the illusion.” She disses most of the ads for their “unrealistic expectations”.  She finds one ad that sounds very no nonsense and the guy looks decent in the picture, “which’” she warns the viewers “is probably nothing like what he looks like in real life.” And to demonstrate the point she sets up a date with, Rick, the CPA guy in the photo.

Sure enough Rick is more of a geek then the photo showed. His clothes are too tight, his belt too high, his tennis shoes too white, glasses with big lenses fifteen year out of style, and his hair slicked across his forehead in anticipation of the inevitable comb over.

Rick is a bit nonplussed to find a video camera in his face immediately upon greeting his date in a coffee shop. However he launches into his thesis on why he would be a suitable match. He unfolds a checklist showing the pros and cons of married life and different dating strategies, which he cross references to pie charts. He knows this is ridiculous but can’t help hoping she will be amused.

Melia explains there are lots of good reasons to date none of which apply to her since she isn’t looking for marriage and she all ready knows how to satisfy herself sexually, she’s here just as a visual anthropologist.

Rick expresses frustration and humiliation at being toyed with and storms off. Melia, realizing how cruel she has been chases after with an apology. “Let’s go out but not pretend to be more than friends.”  That isn’t good enough for resentful Rick.

Brogen and Cass think their capsule should be put in orbit. Melia argues that if civilization crumbles instead of progressing then they won’t be able to retrieve it. Since they barely have the cash to purchase a gun safe to house their time treasures the issue is settled after another heated debate.  They will secret their capsule in an old growth city park tree that is unlikely to get cut. Melia is sent to select a suitable hiding place.

During her investigation, Melia discovers a hollow tree and climbs into the branches where she can access the opening more easily. From that vantage point she discovers there is all ready something hidden in the hollow. It is a metal box.  Inside is a journal, a sketch of a woman with a small moon shaped scar under one eye, a music box, a loc of hair, poems wrapped around a locket and a framed picture of a young man standing under the very tree she is in.  She open’s the journal and reads.

Toffer, a turn of the century poet, composes and recites morbid sonnets as he walks through the woods. His poetry, always with an English accent, contrast against the frontier language of his daily struggles. It has plenty of imagery about how he would happily dismember himself in exchange for a reason to live.  But that reason arrives. He walks past a campfire with Irish settlers and overhears a ballad. In the story a young couple has a love so pure that a beautiful sorceress grows jealous and puts a curse on them. They are destined to live again and again in lives a hundred years apart.  They will never meet, never hold each other and yet burn with an unquenchable love.
”I found you in a fable 2 continents and 100 years away.”  He believes the story is about him because it feels so true. He has always loved, but never known who he loved until now. 

Reading on Melia learns this ballad caused him to put aside his suicidal ambitions turning his attention instead to love poems.  The journal then goes on to describe all the caressing and trembling that would transpire if he were ever to be reunited with his love. Melia, seduced by the erotic journal, works herself into a high pitched state of arousal, which climaxes as she falls from the tree cutting a moon shaped scar under her eye.

ACT TWO

Rick calls. He insists she owes him a real date.  Melia, aroused by the journal recognizes Rick as an easy outlet for her sexual frustration. As she dresses for the Rick date, she imagines Toffer, all ready a half presence in her life, bandaging her cut.  He jokes with her about Rick’s shortcomings. She now has a big black circle around one eye.

Rick’s idea of a night out turns out to include dinner with his conservative parents, who find wild Melia a bit shocking, wearing sun glasses to the dinner table. Loosing patience with their assumptions she takes off the shades and innuendoes that their son’s sexual appetites are the cause of her black eye.

Back at her apartment, she invites Rick up. When she steps in to kiss Rick, Melia sees Toffer.  There is a momentary stand still when Rick pulls away concerned that he hasn’t had a chance to brush his teeth and worried that he didn’t bring any dental floss. Melia, confronted with reality, pulls back remembering Toffer is only a dream and that she is a realist.  Rick, unaware that he’s advocating for a fantasy gently coaches her back to her romantic surrender as Toffer returns to life. Melia playfully runs after Toffer with a toothbrush. He runs camera as Melia’s models Rick’s clothes mocking his high belt line and white sports shoes.  She messes Toffers hair into a contemporary bad boy look, something both Toffer and Rick share from that moment forward.  He on the other hand gives her turn-of –the-century fashion advice searching in vain through her closet to find a long flowing dress. There is a wool skirt. “I wear it when all my other clothes are dirty”

Together they Google “Christopher Delaney” to see if his book of poems ever got published. One of the poems, called “I want to cut my heart out and put it in an iron box for you”, is posted on an “obscure poetry” site.  It’s full of Toffer’s usual morbid analogies and strong sentiment which Melia reacts to with fervor. The camera is pushed aside when things get steamy between them and the clothes start coming off.

In the night, Melia wakes to the sound of Rick’s snoring.  She fetches her ever present video journal to document the horrors one faces in a real life relationship.  She turns to Toffer’s journal for solace and reads herself to sleep.  She dreams of a happy future with Toffer, where they retrieve together the time capsule she’s made, and chuckle over how lonely they once both felt.  Melia wakes happily nestled against bed-head Rick’s shoulder as he rigidly watches her afraid to break the spell. She hustles him out the door and tossing his shirt after.  “I’ll text you.”

Melia’s phone buzzes with a message from Cass “where are you?” Melia texts back “coming. Surprise 4 capsule”

The idea of including the journal in their capsule thrills Cass.  This is just the angle they can work to get sponsors and press interested. Melia thinks sponsors will spoil their message. Cass wants the journal, but Melia’s not quite ready to turn Toffer into a press package. Meila agrees to transcribe and upload a few sections to the website instead of relinquishing the journal.

In the section she shares, Toffer’s journal speaks with confidence that his words will one day be found by the right reader, his one and only true love. His is a spiritual love, uncontaminated by the base needs of physical union. An eternal love! Toffer reassures his journal reader that these words were meant for her and that she will know they are because she will feel it in her heart.  He insured she would find them through a ritual of his own devising. Just like him, she is consumed by a burning love she has always felt but never known the source of.  But they have met many times in his dreams.  He describes her personality: a wildly passionate and creative woman hemmed in by pragmatic notions, quick witted, a beauty hidden behind bravado reaching for a future where they can be together.

Toffer’s tries his hand at many art forms, hoping to discover talents that will help him create a lasting work far reaching and memorable enough so that it will find his love 100 years in the future. He consults a blacksmith regarding the possibility of preserving his heart in a lock box for her. He tries to patent inventions that are 100 years before their time, a cup holder, refrigerator magnets, solar panels.  He sketches a woman with a small moon shaped scar under her eye. It could be Melia, but his work is impressionistic, it is hard to know for sure. He writes stacks of poetry.  But he tears up his room in a fit of rage when rejection notices come from the publishers. If he kills himself now, will he reach the end of eternity sooner? He is desperate to find a way to reach her.  He puts messages in bottles and throws them out to sea. He hangs love letters from branches.  He tries to hire someone to deliver them 100 years later, but this proves impractical. He hasn’t the money or any delivery address.

In fact, he has no money, not even enough to pay rent for the bare wooden room he calls home.  When he tries to sell his paintings a wealthy woman belittles his romantic notions and offers him a job mending her fences.  He takes the job but they quarrel further when she tries to woe him away from his mythic love telling him man can’t live off love alone. Toffer quits his job and goes on a hunger strike to prove he can. Of course red wine isn’t included, since he is a poet after all. And he wanders the street drunkenly posting his love poems on any surface he can find and waiting for slow death to overtake him when starvation comes.

Cass is thrilled with the journal. “Middle aged fat women’ll salivate over this kind of stuff.  We should put it in the capsule and make it a Cinderella challenge. Tell us in 100 words or less why you are Toffer’s dream girl and we’ll wrap your essay and picture with his journal in the capsule.”  What ever woman comes forward that best fit’s Toffer’s description of his dream girl will be proclaimed his love. Brogen meanwhile will look into carbon dating or any way he can to prove the journal legitimate.  If it is then it predates the earliest known time capsule by almost 30 years.

Melia steals away to the tree where she found Toffer’s stash to make her own journal entry. She now addresses her video journal as Toffer, supposedly 100 years in the future.  She has serious misgivings about making his journal known.  When she puts her camera aside and opens his diary it seems to address almost as if he were there in conversation with her the issue she was just discussing.  She is amazed by this and offers her own journal an entry expressing her excitement over this synchronicity. She wonders if it’s possible for their thoughts to be so in alignment.  Again the journal seems to answer her.  With growing excitement, she asks a series of test questions and receives answers somewhat similar in appropriateness to her questions as one might receive when reading tarot cards or throwing the I-ching, in other words she clearly stretches her imagination  to make his response fit in places. Once this “dialogue” between them has been established to her satisfaction she challenges him on his notions of romantic love.  In response he wishes he could build her a treasure trove.  He would hide it in a cave underneath a waterfall.  He would leave her his favorite books, his journals, paintings, music and proof of his true love.

When Melia returns to her apartment she finds Rick dosing on the doorstep with wilted flowers in hand waiting for her.  The groggy Rick contrasts sharply with the passionate Toffer. Rick takes the consummation of their relationship seriously assuming that they are moving quickly towards the marital commitment previously discussed at their first date. He forges nervously ahead, bending on one knee in the hall but is overtaken by an asthma attack.  He offers her a ring but before she can say “no” he passes out.

He wakes to find her camera in his face.  Accepting his humiliation he insists that before she tells him “no” she has to see the dress he brought, which both his grandmother and his mother wore on their wedding day.  Its a hundred years old. He knows that girls like dresses; “the dress is everything, isn’t it”.  He makes her try it on and it fits perfectly.  She promises not to say “no” tonight, but shoes him away with, “tomorrow is not tonight.”

She is left alone in a wedding dress with Toffer’s journal and moonlight spilling in through the window. She opens the journal to read about the love ritual Toffer devised that would bind him to his true love across the 100 year abyss.

Toffer stands beneath the tree where Melia found his journal.  He lights a circle of candles.  Melia comes to the same tree also lighting candles.  Toffer tells her he will always be with her.  “No amount of time and space can diminish my love.” Melia answers, “And I will find you again in the future because time can’t dim my love either.”  They each kneel beneath the tree and commit to love one another and no one else for all of eternity. Afterwards in mad joy she runs through the woods frolicking, rolling in the grass and soiling Rick’s mother’s wedding dress. Melia visits historical landmarks mentioned in Toffer’s poems as his verse swims through her head. Evidence of Toffer’s great love for her shows up everywhere. 

Wheels screech to a halt as a car barely stops in time to avoid Melia. She smiles sweetly at the car and steps back to the curb.  It’s almost too early for traffic as Melia floats through the city streets in the tattered wedding gown back to her apartment. “Toffer, I love you”

“I love you Toffer” says a curly haired bombshell.  “You’re the man I’ve dreamed of my whole life, Toffer” confides a sultry sophisticate. “I never thought I’d know true love” a transvestite seduces, “Until I found you Toffer” he blows a kiss.  Cass and Brogen mimic the transvestite. “Until I found you” Apparently there are dozens of Cinderella’s out there that see themselves in Toffer’s journal.  This response is just from the website update Cass did yesterday.  “When the article comes out in the Seattle times we’ll be flooded with responses.” Brogen promises to contact the Seattle historical society to see what he can find out about Christopher Delaney. So far all they know is that he wrote really bad poetry. “Where is Melia?  We need her help to organize the time capsule event. We need the journal.”

Melia sits in Toffer’s tree reading his journal. Toffer’s hunger strike is not going well.  He’s had several fainting spells, the last of which left him face down in a muddy byway. Rescued by the woman whose fence he once mended, his recuperation is slowed by his continual refusal to eat. The doctor diagnoses pneumonia, caused by exposure in his weekend condition. This pleases Toffer because he welcomes death. He’s bitter and angry at love today for its cruelty. He distains the corporal limits that keep him from his one and only and wishes for a thousand deaths praying that there is an end to time. “Grim reapers bring me to her.”  He begs deliriously for Amelia to save him. To send him proof that his words have reached her and courage in his quest to reunite. 

Melia is concerned.  “How can I reach you?” she begs her journal.  “Death won’t solve anything. Please live Toffer. You have to live. There must be a way to overcome the curse. If your life time is not long enough then maybe mine will be.  But don’t leave me.  I only just found you.  Write in the journal. Tell me what I can do. I need to know everything you can tell me. Don’t die.”

She falls into darkness as a distant car screeches to a dull thud halt.  She dreams she is with him.  She begs him to live.  “Love alone is not enough. You need food, water, air to live.” They walk the streets of his time together and she is charmed by the authenticity of it all.  Each fiber is unique and unpracticed.  His is an age of innocence. And they turn a corner together into the 21st century where Toffer sees the fabrications and advertisements as tremendously imaginative and colorful. They argue over the nature of love with her insisting that practical considerations such as eating, breathing, sleeping must be addressed.  Money must be made to keep shelter over his head.  And Toffer swears that no comfort can be had without her at his side and that only a spiritual life can sustain him.  If he had any money, he would leave it for her.  But Melia quotes his journal and proves he is at deaths door.  As their argument heats their passion raises and they throw themselves into a frenetic embrace.  He carries her across a threshold. There is a confusion of disrobing as she kisses him. “Be with me Melia. Say yes” and she does.  “Yes.  Yes.”

Melia throws the sheets aside and pushes herself up into his arms as dizziness and pain overwhelm her.  Rick sets her gently back onto the emergency room hospital bed.

“I love you” he tells her squeezing her hand. She pulls back orienting herself.  “Where is Toffer’s journal?”

Rick returns it to her with her cell.  Cass and Brogen will be here soon. They called her and he told them what had happened. But Melia focuses on the journal.  She concentrates, opens to a page, but sitting up proves too much strain for her head and she asks Rick to read it to her.

Toffer is improving. In his delirium, he had visions of her and it gave him hope.  He now finds signs of her love in every happenstance. Coincidence stands in for proof to him that he is reaching her across the hundred years and she is reaching back to him.

Cass and Brogen arrive. What happened?
“She stepped in front of a car by her apartment.” Fortunately Rick arrived. No bones were broken, but she has a concussion.  They are waiting for a doctor to see her.

Cass is concerned with their impending event. They need her now. They have a sponsor. They have shelled out all this money for a huge media event planned in two days.  Ever since they included the excerpts from Toffer’s journal, the media is going crazy.  They need the journal so they can have it authenticated and copied.

Melia doesn’t think they should.  What if this message isn’t meant for everyone? What if it was meant to be private? A bitter argument ensues.

Cass and Brogen insist that Rick hand over the journal. But he refuses.  “It’s hers.” He argues “Says who?” asks Cass. “I do,” insists Rick. “And who are you anyway?” asks Cass.  “Her fiancé.” He boasts.  “Since when?” “Well…she said yes a few minutes ago.”
Melia denies this. Rick crushed and resentful surrenders the journal to Cass. Cass tosses it out of Melia’s reach to Brogen and they dash out the door making off with her treasure.

Melia, upset buy the loss slings furious insults at Rick, who takes each one like a blow as his asthma attacks and the hospital staff rush him to another room. Melia yells after him that the wedding is “defiantly off, not a real plan, never was,” just wishful thinking on his part. “You are just projecting your fantasies onto me. You just see what you want to see and believe what you want to believe.”

Melia comes to Cass and Brojen’s apartment to apologize. She offers to make the copies for distribution and Cass sends her home with Toffer’s journal.

Back in the privacy of her apartment Melia builds a shrine for Toffer.  She projects his image onto the wall so she can dance in his arms.  She takes his journal to bed and pleasures herself. In the morning she wanders through the woods to their tree, wearing a long flowing dress and weeping tears of joy.

Toffer’s life takes a turn for the better as he grows closer to the woman that nurses him.  She buys some of his paintings.  He is grateful, humbled and willing to admit that love alone is not enough to sustain him. She seduces him and he succumbs.  He tells Amelia that he imbued this woman with her soul, that he felt her body in his arms, and that it was as if he was sleeping with Melia.  But then he gets graphic in his sexual descriptions of her pendulous breasts and his hungering groin.

Melia is grossed out by Toffer’s indiscretion.

Melia rips pages from the journal.  She rewrites his encounter with the woman. In this version he resists her advances protecting of fidelity towards his perfect future love.

At the warehouse Cass and Brogen arrive with coffee in hand. They are having a real disagreement, nothing like their act one performance.  Quick thinking Melia captures it with her camera. “What are you doing here?  Turn that off.” 

“I brought the journal.”
Cass “Oh, goodie, I was just getting to the good part.”
Melia “You mean where he slits his writs?”
Cass, “He does?”
Melia “Don’t worry.  He’s not particularly good at things.”
Brojen, notices that pages have been taped in “What’s wrong with it? Is this how it was?”
Cass reads, “And though she is beautiful I can get no satisfaction.  Though I try and I try and I try.  Did you write that?”
Melia “It was like that.  But I’m pretty sure the whole thing was a hoax.”
Brojen, “This doesn’t belong to you.  History belongs to everyone.”
Cass preaches back to Melia the importance of the project both to the future which needs to learn from the past and to the many Cinderellas that believe in love because of Toffer.

Melia fights with her friends. They banish her from the project and throw her out of the warehouse when she tries to take Toffer’s journal back.  Outside she tells her journal that she plans to start a new time capsule and only the real truth will go into this one.

Melia still wears Rick mother’s once glorious wedding dress which is tattered and muddy, a perfect compliment to her black eye. She arrives on his doorstep to negotiate a truce and a marriage arrangement.

Melia and Rick make wedding plans as she documents it.  She has written a morbid poem condemning romanticism which is to be read at the ceremony and which is clearly a rebuttal to Toffer’s poetry. Rick calculates costs for everything always in favor of economy and Melia vetoes anything that implies love or romance in the ceremony.  In fact she plans to wear a black dress to symbolize that love is dead and their marriage is more clear-headed.

When Melia stops at a coffee shop she notices Toffer’s picture next to the headline of the Ballard tribune.  Cass and Brogen have designed a huge dedication for the capsule at tomorrow nights art walk where the title of Christopher Delaney’s love will be bestowed on the best hundred words or less Cinderella.


That night, with Rick’s reluctant help, Melia breaks into the warehouse and finds Toffer’s journal. He documents her ritual as she lights candles in a circle and takes a blow torch to it. She curses him and his love hoping he will never find her not even at the end of eternity. To obliterate him further from history she sacrifices her own video journals to the flame to wipe out any mention of him accept this in which she declares he was a two faced lying wretch of a man.

With the arrival of police lights outside the Melia snags her camera but ditches Rick.

ACT THREE
Back at her apartment, she makes tortured melodramatic journal entries denouncing Toffer’s infidelity.  These managing to include enough gory self deprecating imagery to reaffirm how entirely well matched they are. She projects his image onto the wall so she can argue with him, sarcastically filling in his imagined responses, until she hears herself say, “All I did was what you told me to do.  I faced reality, why don’t you?”

Her fury crumbles.  Sadness takes over. She wails with her face in a pillow. She hugs her camera in a fetal embrace. She kisses it.  She rubs it against her body erotically. She stands in front of Toffer’s projected image swaying drunkenly and listening to the music box he left for her.

Rick, who evades the police, breaks into her apartment through the fire escape and steps into the projected image of Toffer.  He offers words of comfort to Melia.  He fully understands that she does believe in love and the man she is in love with is not him.  Her feelings for Toffer are stronger than what Rick can offer and he understands how she feels because that is how he feels towards her and it’s as real as what she feels for Toffer. Melia starts an apology.  It is for Toffer and her video journal not Rick.  “I’m sorry I destroyed your legacy.” To prove her love she documents herself telling Rick that she can’t marry him.  She doesn’t love him.  “See Toffer, I am true to you.” She pleads to the journal.

Rick is savagely disappointed not at all the “charts and graphs man” from their first interview. Apparently he expected her to choose him over “this imaginary libertine.” Rick and Melia argue. She quotes bitter things that Toffer said at the height of his despair. Rick quotes more optimistic poets but ends with paraphrasing concepts that Toffers expressed during Melia’s first encounter with him.

Melia goes to the warehouse to apologize to Cass saying she is sorry she didn’t understand what had happened that she had fallen in love with Toffer and was out of control.  Cass is shocked because she didn’t think it was possible for a progressive woman that doesn’t believe in romance to fall for a poet that’s been dead a hundred years.  “I had no idea you were a Cinderella.”  “This says it all.” Melia tells her and gives her the video showing her destruction of Toffer’s journal.

When the press shows up for the time capsule dedication and Tofer’s journal is gone, Melia tells her story and shows her footage. “I thought I was his love but really I was the jealous witch that cursed him to live with out her.  I’m sorry also to all the Cinderellas that have lost their shot at love because of me. I only hope you can move on and find something in else in this world worth loving.” 

Melia returns to the places she visited with Toffer which are cold and empty now and no longer imbued with the essence of romance she felt when reading his journal. She throws a message in a bottle into the ocean and watches mournfully as it washes back up at her feet.

Rick finds her overlooking the cliff at Discovery Park.  He’s brought a book of Toffers poems that Brojen found in his research.  Melia is thrilled “It’s as if I’ve been given another chance.”  But when she unwraps it and flips it open she learns from a brief author’s biography that Toffer married the woman he worked for. Melia is devastated. Instead of making a show of her misery, she hides it now. 

Rick sees through her pain and consoles her quoting obscure poets with a rye smile.  He encourages her to forgive herself. He confides that when he met her he thought the only relationship possible in today’s cynical age was the no nonsense practical kind and that he had to keep his heart locked away behind the charts and graphs where it would be safe. But what Melia and Toffer had was real consuming, passionate and brought them to life in a way he didn’t believe was possible.  When Toffer hurt her, part of him was happy because he didn’t want her trapped in a dead end relationship. She hurt Rick’s feelings.  Now he knows how it feels to burn with desire for someone you can’t have, but it’s better than not feeling at all. He’s glad because knowing what he wants increases the probability of getting it. And he’s glad he locked his heart up because now he has it to offer to her.

Melia looks up at Rick, with his bad boy hair, quoting obscure poets with a rye smile and he looks like Tofer when she first found him, on the night she first slept with Rick.

Melia and Rick are married under Toffer’s tree.  Melia makes a final journal entry for Toffer, telling him that finally they are together because she has found him at last… in Rick.

Rick has a surprise for Melia after the wedding.  He takes her to a wooded part of town and sneaks her through a back fence in disrepair.  Inside there is an overgrown water fall and behind it a cave.  In the cave are all the treasures that Toffer spoke of.  The locket, the music box, books of poetry and a portrait of Melia with a moon shaped scar under her eye.  The signature reads “dedicated to my wife Amealia”.  “Toffer?” she asks.  “From me.” Rick answers.

Together Rick and Melia lock her journals into the steal box she found Toffer’s diary in. They wrap it in plastic and climb up into the tree and lodge it back into the hollow.