life as movie

10 or 11 years ago, I watched a very interesting and relatively unknown movie, "Before Sunrise". It was a very simple movie about a backpacker who met a stranger on a train and they started chatting and decided to stop in Vienna and spend the night walking through the its enchanted streets before they had to go on their own way the next day. There wasn't anything spectacular, but the simplicity and exotic setting has imprinted very deeply in my heart and mind. As an adolence, I had wished for this kind of intense and passionate experience in a foreign land meeting someone who capture my heart and my imagination. Something magial.

Last summer, I was backpacking in Easter Europe for 2 months; it was an intense and awesome experience. And in the unspoiled and edgy land of Romania, I met someone. We spent 3 intense days together, the day I had to leave was one of the hardest thing I have had to do. As my bus pulled away and seeing the person I 'love' slowly disappearing from my sight and the uncertainty of whether we would meet again, tore through my heart. In the movie, the 2 protagonists made a pack to meet again in a year's time, but one of them didn't turn up. Life is like a movie, after I left Romania and we started chatting on the net and things grew from mere infactuation to something more serious; promises were made, expectations were born. Instead of waiting 1 year, like the movie, I have only to wait 4 months. When the day got closer, the anxiety grew stronger. The days leading up to it, I felt the distance. Nothing like the physical distance that seperate us; but a distance that could not be cross with any boat, nor traverse through by any vehicle, nor reach by any plane; a distance that chill the heart and warm the cheeks. The date approached and he wasn't there...

Devastated? That is an understatement. I know well enough never to put expectation on a night of passion and a long distance relationship. But I've never been the one to conform and I try to believe that there is 'hope', there is always hope. But non-conformity doesn't guarantee love.

What is love? It is just mere feeling? How is it possible that a feeling could evoke such extreme reaction? At one moment, it sends you heavenwards, through the clouds, to mingle with the stars and bath in the moonlight. And the next moment, you go through hell, heart rip out with red stingy tears.

9 years after "Before Sunrise", the director and the 2 actors decided to make a sequel, and so "Before Sunset" was born. In the movie, the 2 protagonists chanced upon each other in Paris 9 years after they first met. And walking through the Bohemian streets of Paris, they chatted and chatted, and love was reignited.

I wonder if, like the movie, I have to wait 9 years to continue this love. Is there such thing as "true love waits"?

As I wander through this land of nowhere, I wonder if this Chinese saying "Life as movie, movie as life" is true...