No Oscar, maybe.

Blanchett, Pitt, and company were perfectly good in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but the central character which I find myself the most interested in, in retrospect, is the retirement home which serves as a sanctuary and nursery for the young Benjamin, and as a haven at the end. Everyone needs such a place.

What else was right? Benjamin was right, that even the best and fullest of relationships cannot sustain the friction and ill-fit caused by insurmountable chronic physical conditions. A partnership may have occupied an utterly cherishable and eternally valued position in a person’s life story, but this esteemed place will not protect it from erosion when the tectonic plates of two lives shift unharmoniously. The white clapboard house with the piano in the parlor and a welcoming front porch might then be the refuge which fiction can supply, and real people might just have to dream about.

Wisdom from an older movie (based on the Anne Tyler novel): The Accidental Tourist. Sometimes who you should be with is not so much a function of who the other person is, but rather of who you are when you’re with that person. As wonderful and deserving as the other person may be, if you’re icky and mean around him/her then you’re probably not doing anybody any favors.

Still, you may not be able to rewrite the story line to fit the attractive parameters afforded by fiction, because you just may be one of those people who live outside the gestalt of storytelling (this may explain why--if in fact this is true of you--you can’t write fiction either.) If so, then you need to find another book to reference. Such as the only marginally fictionalized A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. From this book you can glean the following: Sometimes it’s just a trudge through the neverending trees, step after step, where the best pleasures available are your morning coffee and the occasional glimpse of wildlife. If this seems more descriptive of your story (using the word story loosely,) then it may be at least slightly comforting that even a trudge may, at the end, show enough signs of narrative that it’s worth telling about.