i watched past lives and ugly cried two hours after

ask me again in 10 years what love is and i will say the same thing i said 5 years ago. or even yesterday.

i don’t know.

this is how it goes. this never knowing. much like

who am i?

or

what am i meant to do?

or even

what am i supposed to be doing?

the frances ha existentiality of it all that drowns out the day-to-day.

make plans, god laughs.

i’m so glad i watched past lives on my laptop. if i had watched it in theaters, i would’ve embarrassed myself too much, too far. halfway through the film, it got hard to focus on the movie through my blurry eyes, tears crusted over my ducts. my macbook, overheating, dried the streaks of snot over my touchpad. i was dirty all over. sad all over. and in public, i would’ve looked like a complete fool.

when the movie ended, i called four friends. people i would secure my life with. none of them answered. and the crying became a panic attack. sight and sound and proper breathing out the window. and i sat there in my muted room, listening to myself weep and weep.

nora and hae sung, childhood friends in korea, are spliced apart when nora’s family emigrates to the us. nora goes into playwriting. hae sung goes into engineering. they are reunited 12 years later over skype. nora shows him eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. he watches it on a laptop, criss-crossed back arched. they stay up for each other. become tired for each other. fall out. another 8 years later, they spend a week together in new york, confronted with all the what-ifs a lifetime offers.

there’s a lifetime of questions i have for you. a lifetime of your hands to hold in every night on every subway train with every swing of the season that shifts every moment of change that feels momentous. that fools me into thinking i’ve changed, for the better. enough to tell friends that i’m okay. that progress is being made. that i’m far behind the mess i’ve left in weekend benders. when really, they’re shoulder close. i could turn a cheek and remember the sour burn of the one more tequila shot i shouldn’t have downed, but did, and it stays there, regret or guilt, that traps itself in my throat and i try to swallow it like the way a sparrow might slip birdfeed down its beak, only to find that its needed nourishment is a stone that stays at the pit of its petite belly, stays still so long that its stomach becomes a stone, stays so still that it forgets what flight is, forgets the difference between here and there.

nora’s husband allows all of this to happen because he understands that there is a world in her so much left to be discovered. and by allowing nora to see hae sung, she is allowing herself to bridge herself to her now and her before. and aren’t these bridges ways in which we map out our futures?

fortunately, one friend called me back. and over facetime, i cried even more and we broke down the movie, each scene, each line, still vivid in my head. still vivid in hers. snot trailed down to my lips and i could taste the salt of myself. she’s someone who has seen this before, all my falling-aparts. after late thursday shifts, we would go to mcdonalds to share a 20-piece mcnugget order with $1 menu items. if it wasn’t mcdonalds, it was over orange chicken and eggplant tofu at panda express. we would let our pasts roll off our tongues, incorporate them into the songs and signs of the times. lorde’s melodrama and frank ocean’s blonded, solange, the year of realizing things, and seeking freedom. going back to the old-age question of what the fuck am i doing with my life? but it was in the ennui and exploration of the question that was the living, we realized, bringing us to conclusive tears, food court baptisms that brought blush into our cheeks and wonder for the rest of the week.

the whole film centers around this idea of 인연.

“there’s a word in korean: 인연 [in-yeon]. it means ‘providence’ or ‘fate’. but it’s specifically about relationships between people. i think it comes from buddhism and reincarnation. it’s an in-yeon if two strangers even walk past each other on the street and their clothes accidently brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. if two people get married, they say it’s because there have been eight thousand layers of in-yeon over eight thousand lifetimes.”

and isn’t it pretty to think so? that every person we’ve met was layered with the possibility that things were meant to be? and even if things didn’t work out, that there’s a redo for some other timeline of ourselves? that the future outlines a possible us in some kind of fated love? that, in the end of all ends, things will work out?

years from now, in a future too generous to be true, i am waking up to the silly way you breathe, tempo unsure of wakefulness, as if you understand that there is so much to live for with how little you sleep, dopamine chaser, and this is apparent with the small smile that always ends up on your lips. because you find so much joy in the little things. people passing, a stray cat, a child with an ice cream. we could walk to our corner cafe for a cold brew. or a wake and bake. simply lie in bed. book in my hands. endless tiktoks in yours. because you’re easy to please, your laughter ends up in between all of my sentences. i read one sad line and you ground me right there in the linen sheets. a gallery for the afternoon. lunch? dinner? a walk through the park? a nap in the grass. music, all throughout the day. a glass of wine. more music. a bit of dancing. maybe we’ll go out all night. catch a sunrise. and do it all over, again and again, countable lifetimes on these little, possible hands of ours.