Yi Yi

Nobody tells you that loneliness isn’t the opposite of love. That the two can exist in the same place, at the same time, so close together you can barely tell where one ends and the other begins. You can be completely loved, genuinely loved, and still carry this quiet sense of being unreachable somewhere underneath it all. Not because anything is wrong, and not because anyone failed you, but because you’re a person sealed inside your own experience, and so is everyone around you, and that distance between people never fully closes no matter how hard you press against it. And the saddest part is that we do try. We talk, we explain, we confess things in the dark that we would never say in the daylight. We reach towards each other constantly. But some feelings are just to big to find the right words to describe, and by the time you find the right words the moment has already passed, and you carry the unsaid words with you, adding it to the collection. This whole interior life is created , it is rich and heavy and completely real, that the people closest to you can sense is there but will never fully see.  So we move through our lives alongside each other but also strangely alone inside them. And somewhere in the middle of all that reaching and falling short, time passes. Really passes. The version of you five years ago is someone you can remember but not return to. The doors that closed behind you are closed. The lives you didn’t live aren’t waiting for you somewhere. And this, when you finally let yourself feel it, produces a kind of sadness that has no single cause you can name. It just shows up sometimes on an ordinary afternoon and sits with you for a while.  I think about this more than I probably should. What I keep coming back to though is that this feeling, as heavy as it is, is also somehow beautiful. Because the ache is evidence of something real. You can’t mourn time unless time meant something. You can’t feel the distance between yourself and another person unless that person matters. So the weight isn’t empty. It is made of everything that ever meant something to you, whether you knew it at the time or not. Maybe that’s why ordinary life looked at long enough starts to feel extraordinary. Not because anything special happens but because you finally stop waiting for something special to happen and just look at what is already there. The meals, the commutes, and the evenings that don’t become memories because nothing remarkable happened. We treat these like the pause between real life, like we’re waiting for something to begin. But this is it. This is already it. The unremarkable Tuesday is part of the total. The small conversations, the specific lighting, the person sitting across from you right now.  Another thing the movie suggests is that you can’t see your own back. You move through the world facing forward, toward what’s coming, and everything behind you, everything you leave in your wake, everything you mean to the people watching you go, stays invisible to you. There’s so much about yourself that you will never have access to. The shape of your own absence. What your presence feels like. How you look when you don’t know anyone is looking. And at some point you have to make peace with that. You have to stop trying to see the whole picture, that makes it easier to just be present inside the parts you can see.  Which is here, which is now. Which is with the people around you, also sealed inside their own experiences, also reaching, also carrying things they don’t know how to say.  We’re all just trying to get to each other. We mostly fall short. We keep trying anyway.  That seems right to me. That seems like enough.