It’s a dupe, you know?
Being alone, you steel yourself. There is no expectation but for self-perseverance and at least you’re allowed that thrill of pride. But if you set down your independence and let down your draw bridge and then it doesn’t work? Then you find yourself—or them—still impenetrable? Who can survive that?
You’ve been there, too. Those quiet doubting long drive homes. Those shut out, wordless, withholding trips beside a partner who’s closing down. Or maybe it’s you that has shut down this time, stuck enduring the nearly unbearable wait for them to simply notice. (...)
What I mostly loved about Lost in Translation the first time around, I think, was the gaps. It is a movie defined by what is missing. The quiet spaces and the unspoken words and even the now-classic final scene. The whispered farewell between Bob and Charlotte that we’re not asked or allowed to hear.
Do you remember this? There are entire websites devoted to analyzing and breaking down what Bob says to Charlotte in the film’s final moments, his aging cheek pressed to hers – soft and taut and flawless as a whole lifetime left before you.
I really love that Sofia Coppola never told us. I want something in all this to remain pure. If it must be a secret, then so be it.
And that’s the beauty of the entire movie, really – its sort of Japanese elegance. What it invites and never forces. The line that it toes. (...)
Finishing this essay took too long for no particular (and a hundred insignificant) reasons. Sitting on an airplane drinking gin and tonics and wondering about quinine and procrastinating it, I read this quote and finally pulled it all together:
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself.”
- Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories”And I thought: that’s it, exactly, and yet still only a part of it. Just like travel, we often enter into love for far different reasons than we choose to remain in that country. We change, they change. What we want changes. We learn them too well, the illusion burns off, they stop needing us, we let them down.
Somehow, we drift apart and there is an incredible loneliness in the indecision over whether we’ll choose to paddle after each other or not.
Sometimes it takes work to love a country. Most times, it’s never what you thought it would be and you have to decide if you can just let it be what it is, and love it fiercely anyway.
by Erica C., A Bright Wall in a Dark Room | Read more:
h/t and photo: YMFY
