one last look

Nina didn’t run.

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She trusted that Stan, her American lover, an FBI agent, would do what he needed to do, betraying his country to secure her freedom and safety. He didn’t.

I know what it is to be in situations where you either have to betray yourself or betray someone else, but I feel like what I’ve learned is that these situations usually mean that there’s something profoundly wrong with your life, like there once was with mine, like there is for just about every character on The Americans, living as they do within systems that force them to constantly lie about who they really are and what they really want.

Earlier today, Masha posted an audio clip from the film Heartburn, a clip in which the words “love never fails” are said. Heartburn is a film all about how sometimes love fails, or, rather, about how people sometimes fail love. Stan fails here, and as it turns out, Nina was wrong to believe in him. She should have listened to Oleg. But how could she have known? How can we ever know? Love isn’t really about knowing at all. It’s about faith, and most of us have probably failed love (in someone else’s eyes, if not in our own) at one time or another. 

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