Director’s notes on the airport scene

More urgency. More intensity. More desperation. More more more. This is the best love you’ve ever known, and you haven’t had enough, and you’re scared you’ll lose it. You need him to know that. You need to do something to make him hold the other end of the rope taut. You’re pulling and pulling so the line won’t go slack. Be greedy and ungraceful with your body here. You’re trying to drink him, memorise him, absorb him as if you could store this up for later, when you’re parched. Don’t contain the crying. Get to a point where you can see this might be the end and then let the dam break. Let all your fear and love spill out all at once, so when he says he loves you, don’t pull back and say I love you too in a way that looks anything like the polite exchanging of compliments. Say it like a howl at the moon, and then over and over like a prayer. Like someone trying to manifest a wish or save a life. With absolute fervour. Because you get what this will mean, you already feel the weight of the absence coming down on you, and the weight of the time it will last. You know exactly what is going to happen and how it will feel. So take all that weight of what is coming down the pike and put it onto your heart in that moment and try and use your body and his and those three-four words as a lever to try to hoist it. You’re trying to move a mountain. You’re trying to stop time. You’re trying to beat the facts off with all your might for just a minute longer. And then, in an instant, ricochet off him with all that force and go through the gate.

BEFORE TURNING THIRTY

Before turning thirty, I made sure to become a wino. Cabs were my game—playing the easy red; an often tart ritual at $9 a bottle. Makes you feel heavy, wine does, like your drunk is standing on your shoulders or finding purchase in the pockets under your eyes, controlling you like a lazy eddy tugging on reluctant pond scum. You tilt helically, following weather patterns beyond your slowed perception. I became a wino before I turned thirty and made my bed each night in the eye of a storm.

Before I turn 30

Before I turned 30, I learned to slow time. I did this by doing. From a long stale stiffness, I creaked into motion, oiling my rusty joints with new landscape, new language. I cracked open the vacuum seal and let new air and spores flood in. I rusted and oxidised, fermented, grew mould, weathered. I reimagined the thrills I had dreamed for myself and gifted myself new ones. I put my body in the world and my heart on the line. I gave myself a work out. I ran on empty. I refuelled. I played go fetch with my curiosities. I stopped hiding and played seek. I breathed and bred patience. I trudged, I shrugged. I stopped trying to cohere and made elastic my identity. I had thought I'd have to be my own anchor. I discovered that I was in fact my own sea.

NOTES ON MID-SEPTEMBER

I.
There's a comfort there, in the moment after the summer's din finishes and the autumn's calm begins. There's a comfort there and an open window and a heavy blanket to let it in—a pattering portal and a softed weight on the skin to undo the sun's steady burdens.

II.
The pointed finger of a jilted lover, autumn's wrath comes in hot by day and cold by night with rains—oh man, the rains—and no winter coat nor summer short can prepare you for the muted passions of another year's gradual fade to dark.

III.
Fluttering wings sing with smiles in the low lantern light.

Signs

The next time they met, he was an ecologist. She went with him early one weekend morning to walk slowly through the woods, more a perusal than a hike, his pace like a bookstore patron with all afternoon to spare. She watched him browse, scan, pause, trying to make sense of what he took note of and why. To him it was not all just a fresh flat green. He noticed impossible things. Tiny abnormalities, the slightest disturbances in an invisible design. "I could never do this," she said, admiring, over an apple split in half. "But you do," he said, smiling. "We both read signs."

LATE AUGUST TIMBRE

It's all about the sightlines. Construct as high as materials will allow, but be sure the eyes are tied to the center of the pitch or we'll be left with an audience of leaves, at a point too late to rake them in.

Big questions

The big questions arrived with eerie periodicity, carried by strangers, lonely people in lonely cities, in disconcerting interactions I tried to skid swiftly over or dodge entirely.

A young man with a too-large frame and a too-young face, his manner bright and peering like a high sun, trying to spot something in my demeanour that would reveal me. We walked around, introduced by a friend, I took advantage of his weirdness to get beneath the city's thick skin, trying both to go through him and avoid him as he grew ever warmer, ever more entitled to my thoughts, asking every ten minutes: Qué te llama la atención?

Another young man, in another city, both ambitious and invested heavily in the material, both seemingly indifferent to the terrors in their environment, both accustomed to howling dogs and isolation, to little birds dying without wounds. He is grave and watchful as tries to orient me — a confusing stranger from so far away, another body in his unfinished house, in his solitary life — demanding with a fanatical intensity: Qué esperabas de México?

And a young woman in a bar in a winding, gridless city, bursting with energy, the first to dance, up on stage, pelvis against the guitarist's thigh, a public execution of inhibition, long hair whipping, jeans sneakers sweater backpack, like a lost student of Delhi University, perhaps not even drunk, but fervent, fevered, after something. Taking a pause once she'd got everyone else up, glaring at sitting me, she jabs a finger into my chest and yells over the drums and amps: Qué significa esto para tí?

I know what kind of answer she wants — what kind of answer they all want — and I refuse. To her, the bringer of the biggest question, I am especially obtuse. She rolls her eyes in disgust at my utter lack of life, gets up and goes back on stage to dance. I know that girl. I probably was that girl. So full of feeling, so stuffed with the significance of everything, so convinced she is alone in seeing into the deep.

My answers, unspoken, were these: What I notice is private, what I expected I have forgotten, and what this means, I don't know, we will see.