There She Is | Essays on love, life and everything in between
The first time I watched Moulin Rouge was in 2003. I was 29 years old, and I fell completely, spectacularly in love with a film that tells you how it ends before the story has even properly begun.
In the opening moments, Christian, played by Ewan McGregor, sits at his typewriter and tells us that the woman he loves is dead.
There it is. No ambiguity. No opportunity to negotiate with the screenwriter. Satine is going to die, and we're going to have to watch it happen.
And yet, every single time I watch that film, I root for them.
I root for Christian and Satine as though I haven't spent the last 23 years knowing exactly how this ends. I want them to escape the Moulin Rouge. I want their ridiculous, beautiful, bohemian love story to triumph over circumstance. I want a happy ending that Baz Luhrmann has absolutely no intention of giving me.
I know she's going to die.
I fall in love with their story anyway.
And I think there's something rather extraordinary in that.
Because somewhere along the way, in real life, we've developed this peculiar habit of judging our experiences almost exclusively by their endings.
A relationship ends, and suddenly we start questioning whether it was ever what we thought it was. We revisit conversations, examine memories, look for evidence that the inevitable was always inevitable.
We ask ourselves whether we wasted our time.
But I have a question.
Why does the ending get to rewrite the middle?
The peculiar business of impermanence
The ancient Stoics had quite a lot to say about impermanence, principally because they understood something that we seem determined to forget: very little in life is ours to keep.
People change. Circumstances change. Everything we love exists within a world that is constantly moving.
Marcus Aurelius wrote extensively about the transient nature of existence. Not because he thought we shouldn't care about anything, but because understanding that things cannot last forever might encourage us to appreciate them while they're here.
And intellectually, I understand this.
Emotionally, however, I would occasionally like to have a word with Marcus Aurelius in a car park.
It's one thing to accept that everything is transitional when you're sitting with a cup of coffee reading philosophy. It's quite another when the transition involves losing something you desperately wanted to keep.
There's a wonderful cruelty to being human.
We understand that nothing is guaranteed, but we love as though it might be.
Perhaps we have to.
Don't look back
In Greek mythology, Orpheus travels into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, the woman he loves.
He's given one condition. He can lead her back to the world of the living, but he mustn't look behind him until they've both completed the journey.
And of course, almost at the very end, he looks back.
He loses her.
I've been thinking about that story differently lately.
Not simply as a warning about doubt, but as a metaphor for what we do when something beautiful ends.
We keep looking backwards.
We examine the past so intensely that we risk losing sight of everything still happening around us.
We become so preoccupied with the moment something was taken away that we forget all the moments in which it was ours.
And I don't think that's because we're foolish.
I think it's because we desperately want the story to have made sense.
We want an explanation. A reason. A satisfying narrative arc.
Unfortunately, life is not particularly interested in providing one.
Sometimes people love each other and it isn't enough.
Sometimes something extraordinary happens and then stops happening.
Sometimes you find yourself standing in a railway station wondering how on earth you became a woman who cries on trains.
Hypothetically, obviously.
The woman who got on the train
This year, at 52, I fell in love.
I'm not going to turn this into an account of another person's life, because it isn't entirely my story to tell. But it is my experience to write about.
Before it happened, I had a perfectly functional existence.
I'd been single for years. I had my independence, my home, my work, my children, my cats. I had built a life that belonged entirely to me.
And I liked that life.
Then, quite unexpectedly, somebody arrived, and suddenly there were train journeys, hotel rooms, ridiculously long conversations and the astonishing experience of looking forward to seeing another human being quite as much as I did.
There were places I might never otherwise have visited. There were songs that acquired entirely new meanings. There was the wonderful absurdity of discovering that, after all these years, I could still experience that completely unreasonable, all-consuming excitement of falling in love.
I felt extraordinarily alive.
And then, as sometimes happens, the relationship ended.
Now, I could tell you that I immediately accepted the philosophical inevitability of impermanence, thanked the universe for the experience and returned serenely to my independent life.
But I would be lying.
There was grief. There was confusion. There was an impressive amount of thinking. There were occasions when I would quite happily have returned my entire emotional operating system to its factory settings.
And for a while, the ending threatened to become the only thing I could see.
Until I realised something.
The woman who got on those trains was real.
The happiness was real.
The love was real.
The version of myself that existed during those months wasn't a mistake simply because the circumstances that brought her into being had changed.
Grief does not have time-travel privileges.
It cannot go back and make a beautiful Tuesday afternoon less beautiful.
It cannot reach into a hotel room and erase the laughter.
It cannot tell me that I wasn't happy when I know perfectly well that I was.
The ending is entitled to its place in the story.
It is not entitled to every chapter.
Would you do it all again?
Nietzsche introduced the idea of amor fati, the love of one's fate.
It's a concept I find simultaneously beautiful and deeply irritating.
The challenge isn't simply to tolerate what happens to us, but to embrace our lives so completely that we would be willing to live them again, including the difficult parts.
Not just the extraordinary moments, but everything that came with them.
Would I choose to experience something beautiful if I knew beforehand that it would eventually hurt?
I think I would.
And I don't say that because I've developed some remarkable immunity to heartbreak. I absolutely haven't.
I say it because the alternative troubles me more.
What would happen if we only participated in experiences that came with a guarantee of permanence?
Would we ever fall in love?
Would we adopt animals knowing we'd almost certainly outlive them? Would we make friends, travel, try new things, change careers or pursue dreams that might not materialise?
Would we do anything at all?
We'd be safe, certainly.
But there's an enormous difference between a life in which nothing bad happens and a life in which something wonderful happens.
I've become increasingly suspicious of the idea that emotional safety should mean avoiding vulnerability altogether.
Perhaps the goal isn't to construct a life in which we can never be hurt.
Perhaps it's to build one in which the possibility of pain doesn't prevent us from experiencing joy.
Love is not ownership
Simone de Beauvoir wrote about love in the context of freedom, rejecting the idea that a successful relationship requires one person to surrender themselves to another.
It's a philosophy I've found particularly useful as I've got older.
I don't want a relationship in which two people become one person. That sounds logistically exhausting, for a start.
I want two complete individuals who choose each other.
Not because they need rescuing, not because their lives are somehow incomplete without the other, but because being together brings something wonderful into both their worlds.
And I don't necessarily think that has to look like the traditional version of a relationship.
I've spent enough years living independently to know that I quite like my own space. My ideal romance probably involves extraordinary adventures, beautiful conversations, a few perfect days together every month and then returning to our respective homes.
Long term, not full time.
But there's something else I've come to understand.
Love being impermanent doesn't mean we should accept anything less than we deserve while it's happening.
We can appreciate the beauty of a relationship that ended without romanticising the circumstances that made it unsustainable.
We can recognise what somebody brought into our lives while also acknowledging what we needed and didn't receive.
Gratitude and disappointment are perfectly capable of occupying the same emotional space.
I know. Inconvenient.
Humans are terribly complicated.
The bit after the credits
Something I've noticed about romantic films is that they very rarely concern themselves with the practical business of continuing to exist after the big emotional conclusion.
The music swells. Somebody delivers a devastating line. The camera pulls away.
Credits.
But real life has absolutely no respect for cinematic structure.
The following morning, the bins still need putting out. The electricity bill arrives. A cat vomits somewhere deeply inconvenient. You have work to do.
And eventually, rather unexpectedly, you find yourself laughing again.
Not because what happened has become insignificant, but because your life is considerably larger than any one experience.
This is perhaps the most important thing I've learned.
I don't have to diminish a previous happiness to make room for a future one.
I don't have to decide that something wasn't extraordinary simply because it wasn't permanent.
And I don't have to remain emotionally stationed at the ending of a story to prove that the middle mattered.
It did matter.
It still matters.
But there are other chapters.
At 52, I have no idea what the rest of my life is going to look like. I've never been 52 before, so I'm largely making this up as I go along.
I know I want more adventures. I know I want companionship. I know there are places I want to visit, experiences I want to share, and quite possibly another love story somewhere in the future.
I also know that none of it comes with guarantees.
But I'm not particularly interested in returning to an emotional flatline simply because it's predictable.
I'd rather have a life worth writing about.
Even if some of the chapters make me cry.
Truth, beauty, freedom and love
I still watch Moulin Rouge.
I still know Satine is going to die.
I still find myself hoping that, perhaps this time, Christian will find a way to save her.
But I've realised that the reason I return to that film isn't because I expect a different ending.
It's because I want to experience the middle again.
I want the music. The absurdity. The joy. The impossible romance. The spectacular collision of two people who find something extraordinary in each other, even if only for a while.
Because the tragedy isn't that Christian loved Satine and lost her.
The tragedy would have been if he'd never loved her at all.
And perhaps that's what I want to remember the next time life gives me something beautiful without promising I can keep it.
I can grieve its ending.
I can be disappointed. Angry, even. I can wish the circumstances had been different.
But I don't want to become so consumed by what I lost that I forget what I was fortunate enough to experience.
Or worse, become too frightened to experience something wonderful again.
There is still so much life to be lived.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, there's a woman I'm rather looking forward to getting to know.
There she is.
