Before Sunrise

Nothing in this film has ever happened to me, really.

Almost everything Ethan Hawke does and says in this movie annoys me. He's slimy, verbose, pretentious, and he has that goatee, that peach fuzz goatee that just screams "faux beat poet." And he doesn't. Shut. Up.

Julie Delpy doesn't get a free pass. I want her to buy a hairbrush and raise her standards.

But Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy together have these conversations and little adventures in Vienna that remind me of places I've been and conversations I've had, and I'm so busy relating to these characters and drifting along with them that I can't take time to be annoyed.

I'm so busy relating to them, I'm too busy to realize that I used to be, sort of, just like them. I'm haunted. Maybe I'm annoyed because I'm reminded too much of a person I used to be. I can't tell you everything.

At some point, maybe I spent a night with someone on a couch, listening to Toad the Wet Sprocket and the autumn rainfall outside, and not really talking, but just lying still, together, until the world seemed to stop.

Maybe I turned to someone at a party and complimented her on her Airwalks, and realized her smile made me want to change everything about myself, and maybe I thought that was a good idea at the time.

Maybe I walked in the snow, across campus, to meet someone in the middle of the night just because we were both awake and it seemed like a good idea — and then we met and realized we were just silly for thinking life is like a movie.

Maybe I spent a night sitting across from someone in a restaurant, eating bad food and drinking bad coffee (I don't drink coffee, but there may have been coffee present), and confessing dark and dysfunctional neuroses and making her laugh.

(Maybe I was just talking about movies the whole time.)

Maybe I drove her home and nothing much else happened. Or maybe it lasted 3 years.

I miss the all night conversations, the untethered feeling of nights with nowhere to be the next day, and the electricity of new.

I'm not wishing for those things again, but I do miss them. Before Sunrise reminds me of that electric feeling, but also reminds me of all the mess I went through to get here.

Adulthood keeps me from idealizing the past. That was all prologue anyway.

I got married for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that all I have now is better than all of the above. I'm serious. I can miss these things and watch a film that reminds me of these things, but when the film is over, I have what I have now, which is not so much a surge of electricity all at once, but more like a lifetime power supply.

Maybe all this is ridiculous and pretentious. Of course, maybe I've been talking about a movie the whole time.