Friday, March 5, 2010

on meeting a second time

When I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the theater, six years ago, I felt like I was watching a party from the wrong side of a thick piece of glass. I was younger and had misconceptions about the world. Love came in primary colors. Memory was fallible, but mostly immutable. I didn't get it.

I never bothered to see it again. People told me how wonderful it is, how much they loved it, how much I must love it, seeing as it's an oddball story about memory and vanishing. "It's just your kind of thing!" people would say, but I didn't get around to seeing if they were right until the other evening.

I loved it.

Sometimes, second meetings are like that. Not very often. Usually it's just more of the same. But sometimes I meet a person, or a book, or a song, or a place again, and I've put on some more time, or taken off a bit of prejudice, and suddenly it makes absolute sense.

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