Chungking Express

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it.

I’m sitting here in the afterglow of watching Chungking Express (1994), listening to The Cranberries. I don’t listen to very much music anymore. Maybe a few hours per year, excepting the music found in movies or at the grocery store, those incidental musics. When I was younger I’d spend hours, weeks listening on repeat, getting in to all kinds of moods. The difference now is that I view feelings with a sort of impatience. I feel I don’t have the time to be feeling. Feeling is too temporary, too locked into this life and this moment. I want to know the total shape of life, and not just my piece or any one’s.

Chungking Express is the kind of movie I would have fallen in love with 15 years ago. I was always falling in love. I fell in love with every girl I ever met, and plenty more that I hadn’t or only imagined meeting, or only imagined. I fell in love with my friends, the guys too, different versions of them as different versions of me. Admiration and obsession crashed out of me into any corner of my experience. I thought the world of people mostly. Sunbursts, yes. Worship, yes.

It was too much.

I miss being into people that hard, but I also remember how all consuming it was. It left very little time to think about anything else. But I do miss it. There’s an immediacy to life that I miss, the feeling of each moment mattering. Even if things went the wrong way, as they always did, that sort of sorrow was filling. It filled me up. It could replace meals, the intensity of it like a strong hum that wrapped around every inch of my skin, and even in sleeting rain the sorrow with its steel grip could squeeze my blood the whole cycle through, pressing me into life like the dregs of a reluctant toothpaste. Love licked me up and pasted me slapdash into every square of a waiting calendar, the excess juice streaming down the weeks, caustic rivulets sizzling, erasing all remaining empty moments until only 100% love remained, and I was completely booked for years. In each room of me there was a figure from my life, and I played house with every single one, met-cute with them in every hallway, lobby, elevator, broom closet, got exhausted of them, reunited, wished them well, cordially tolerated them at major events, secretly reconnected, grew accustomed to, missed on long trips, wrote wistful letters to, dedicated my life’s work to, collapsed into bed next to, bumped into years later, lived in the 1950s with, vanquished a supernatural horror alongside, high-fived in space one time, shrugged in tandem with as the world ended, grew up with as next door toddlers, oh, and all the rest. So many imagined lives, so many possible and impossible moments, so many ways to be a part of someone.

Yes, there’s definitely something to be said for having a full heart. And in the midst of that I even managed to actually date a few people, to really have some real moments. Yet in the grand cross-section of possible it’s such a thin sliver, just a frail flash of tinsel to what could be and could never be. And that’s really how I think of it. They say that one who reads lives a thousand lives. A thousand lives! That chokes me up because a thousand is a pittance. It isn’t in the same universe as enough. Even if I could live through everything that every person in history and futurity has and will have ever experienced, that wouldn’t satisfy me. I’d also want all the rest, all the lives that never happened, all the impossible non-existent people. I want to know them too, to be them too, to be with them too. I love and do want to love every single one.

My life, this reality, it didn’t stand a chance. It could never have been enough for me. And that’s why I don’t care. This small thimble, this sip. And my thirst is wider than the thickest galaxy. I would chug a nebula and a half just to get my lips wet, as preparation for the first bite of the appetizer of the evening meal preceding the first day of the never-ending feast that I actually want to be having. It is so less than laughable, that I’m to fit the amount of feeling I long for into this mote of a life.

And yet, while I was watching Chungking Express. I admit I was incredibly bored in parts, but even during those parts I was simultaneously enthralled and, I felt, exactly where the movie wanted me to be. I felt connected and for its duration, it was enough. I was present.