Subtitles

“What if this is what we’re in love with?” she said. “Missing each other.”

If I ever wanted a haunted, romantic epic, I sure got my wish. Here we are, from two different worlds, societies, cultures and languages, thousands of miles apart, incurably ill-suited to be together in the same place at the same time for long, navigating a tumultuous international love affair the world cannot understand.

It seems our love thrives when endangered; our absence making our hearts grow fonder. The story is paradoxically cutting-edge, post-modern and yet simultaneously old-fashioned in its elegance. I deliberate over smoky memories of us walking hand in hand through the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul, clashing between the deceptive glamour and possibility of the West and the cold, totalitarian austerity of the East.

And there we are. Somewhere in-between the two.

In the background of our passionate embraces are fragments and illustrative glimpses of us traversing this exceptionally strange realm known by so few.

When together, it’s like we’re desperate to never let go, knowing all the while the days are numbered, the airport goodbye is inevitable, and life will force us to before long. Both time and politics have a way of bending us to their will, after all.

Are we addicted to the pursuit? Are we in love with this story of the already but not yet? What is this place we’re in? A love without borders? What this ‘someship’ is exactly and where it’s headed I can’t say with any certainty. The path is unclear, shrouded in a dense fog of mystery. We’re adrift, out there somewhere in a great infinite expanse, sporadically finding the right winds to adjust our sails so we can spend just a little more time together.

I’m slowly trying to learn each letter of this new alphabet we’ve uncovered but I can’t exactly make out all the sounds and meanings of the words. Where we are, what we’re doing, where we’re going, who we’re becoming, where we’ll end up is all in a language I cannot read just yet.