I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people with whom you’ll connect. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.
– Before Sunset (2004)
“what if” is by far the most hopeful word i have come across.
what if Ram met Jaanu at her college and lived happily ever after?
what if Heer actually married jordan before moving to Prague?
what if that day at the metro station, priya had stopped manu from going to his boss’s house?
what if Kathir stopped anitha from walking towards a busy road, and apologized?
These questions are strangely comforting to sit with.
They’ve made me realize that love doesn’t always move the way we want it to.
And maybe the couples I’ve mentioned know that better than anyone.
I feel an ache when I watch love stories that don’t end well.
Not the kind that finish after the film ends, but the kind that stays, asking for mercy. These characters love each other deeply. They fight, they try, they hope. And still, destiny slips out of their hands. I don’t just miss the people they lost. I miss the versions of themselves they never got to become.
I think there’s a certain feeling from seeing melancholy and sadness on screen. you don’t necessarily Have to go through what the characters went through, but when you see them struggling, you see them crying, you see them longing for each other, it hurts.
but how do you possibly get out of a tragedy like that? a life imagined and unfulfilled?
when you’re in love with a person, you adopt a lot of them into your own being. you talk like them, you Pick up their little quirks, and even start thinking like them. And every decision you take, even subconsciously, begins to link itself to their feelings. i think that’s the tragedy of it all, to spend all that time with a person only to see them turn into a stranger.
Heartbreak, longing, and loneliness don’t arrive loudly.
They stay. And they change you.
Maybe that’s why i tend to come back to these films again and again. not because they depict sadness on the screen well, but they respect how complicated love is, and sometimes, it doesn’t go the way we want it to.
what a pity to see people in love not end up together, i suppose it’s the greatest pain of all.
I hope that somewhere down the line, Ram is sitting with his new-found love, looking up at the sky, quietly wondering where life went by.