Time of Arrival
(Arrival spoilers)
I saw Arrival about three hours ago and already I’ve forgotten the first few lines. I may as well have seen it three years ago. Amy Adams in voiceover says something like, “We’re so trapped by memory, our sense of the flow of time. But I don’t know if I believe in beginnings and endings anymore. There are days that exist outside of them.”
I’m paraphrasing, getting the language all wrong, but you get the general idea.
Meanwhile, it’s been three years since I sat next to her in that Irish bar and said “Maybe there’s still hope for me” and she said “There’s a lot of hope for you, Carolyn,” but I remember how she looked in that moment like it was three hours ago.
Last year I wrote about Life Is Strange for VICE, beginning with,
In a 2011 interview, the writer Jeanette Winterson said, “Time is never linear. You always feel that everything happened just yesterday but also 100 years ago. I don’t want to experience time in a line.”
Like Life Is Strange, Arrival suggests–narratively and structurally–that we don’t live life in a straight line. And don’t I fucking know it?
Arrival also asks whether we’d still form those connections, have those experiences, knowing how they might turn out, the pain we might ultimately have to endure as a result. And of course I’ve asked myself many times if I still would have spent time with her, that person who seemed so real to me and made some kind of sense to me, who made me feel real and vulnerable, too, who reminded me of parts of myself that I’d forgotten existed, if I’d known that things weren’t going to go the way I wanted them to. But I always come back to the same answer.
Of course I would have. I just would have tried to savor it all a bit more.
Notes
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