Review / Personal Essay by Logan Kenny
It was October 2020. My long-distance girlfriend had been sick with COVID-19 for six months, in and out of ICUs and specialist care facilities as a variety of doctors tried to help her recover from the effects that the virus had wreaked on her body. Things seemed to be getting better. She was out of the hospital and was recovering in a bed at her mother’s place. We had spent the last six months in a state of limbo, often going weeks without being able to communicate due to the stresses that the virus placed on her immunocompromised body. She had a blood disorder, sickle cell anemia, and it meant that COVID tore apart her immune system and fucked up her body for months after the remnants of it had faded. The doctors were teaching her how to walk again because she’d spent so long in bed that her muscles had forgotten exactly how to do it. She was determined to get better and I was determined to be there throughout the whole process, even as the fear of losing her to the virus took its toll on my mental and physical health. It was the hardest ordeal of my life at that point, not knowing when I’d be able to talk to her, not knowing if she’d even be able to get better. But the two of us hoped and prayed and talked about our future together, how we were going to watch American football in her New York apartment and walk her dog Paco in Central Park, how we were going to see London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh together once she was finally able to come to the UK. I was going to teach her how to ride a bike and how to swim, she was going to take me to CrossFit classes and make sure I knew how to make her coffee. Her diet became fundamentally altered due to the effects that the post-COVID symptoms had on her body so she was unable to eat tomatoes, so I had done a lot of research to try and make her a pizza that didn’t require them, since it was her favourite food. The two of us experienced a colossal amount of anguish, her as the person fighting through the virus and dealing with all the chaotic pain that came alongside it, me as the person who loved her and who was trapped 4000 miles away as she fought for her life. But in October 2020, it seemed like it would be okay, like life was going to bless us by manifesting our shared idea of the future. She was out of the hospital, she was going to get better. Everything would be okay. All the pain would be worth it, because there was light at the end of the tunnel. I didn’t know it would be the last time I ever talked to her. I didn’t know that our light-hearted conversation about the announcement of a new Dexter series would be the final words I’d ever hear her say to me. I didn’t expect to be stranded alone in an island of grief when that series started airing and she wasn’t there to watch it with me. She is gone forever and I am left to pick up the pieces. I was 19 years old and I could taste death on my tongue, feel it in my fingertips. My worst fear had come true. The woman I loved was dead. Nothing could fix it, nothing could take it back. She was gone.
It was October 2021, a year since the last time I spoke to her. I am in Canada, lying on the bed of my current girlfriend, the woman I met and fell in love with after I accepted my fate as a griever. I became an object of pity for others to gaze upon with heartbreak and sympathy. We hadn’t been dating long enough for me to make it to widower status, nor could I continue to call myself her boyfriend since she could no longer be my girlfriend. I laid in my new partner’s bed, a woman that I love as much as I’ve ever loved anything, and cried my eyes out over the woman that I’ll never get to see again. The guilt within my soul raged intensely that day, the anniversary of our final conversation. Guilt for moving on so quickly, guilt for not dying in her place, guilt for feeling anything aside from crushing despair. As I felt my girlfriend’s hand wrap around my stomach and hold me tight, I cried harder and talked about the things that hurt to think about, the anger over her death and most importantly, the type of grief that is the hardest to talk about: the grief for the future we didn’t get to have. I grieve the unwatched football games, the dog walks, the scents of her body and apartment that I’ll never get to know intimately. I will never know what her flesh felt like against my body. It hit me at that moment, above any other in the year since her final goodbye, that I would never see the woman I’d given all of myself to ever again. My only shot of seeing her body is in dreams, where I run towards her image and wake up before I can feel anything tangible, before I can hear her voice or truly believe that she’s okay. Soon, there will be a time when I’m older than she ever was. A while after that, there will be a time when she’s been dead longer than she was alive. People will eventually forget her; she will exist through stories, old photographs and historical records instead of the vibrant, smart, incredible woman that I knew her to be. She will never be back on this planet. I couldn’t keep her alive. I couldn’t take it away from her. All that’s left are the memories and the scars. After my tears stopped, I turned around to my new love and kissed her on the lips, embracing the love I’d been grateful to experience again. In that moment, I was aware of the tragedy that comes with love, the acknowledgement that my pain could replicate and manifest again. It is something that I cannot survive a second time. But even with that knowledge, I kissed her and held her tight and dove straight into the abyss with her, because I know how beautiful that love is, the love that keeps you with someone for months of suffering due to the hope of a bright future. I grabbed onto it again and I will not let it go.
It was September 2021, a month before I flew to Canada to be with my current partner. I don’t talk about her much anymore, except with my new partner and with friends occasionally. I am scarred by the last time I talked about her death with friends who weren’t intricately aware of my situation. I tried to make a joke that required knowing the context of her death, and as I explained what happened to her, the faces of my two friends turned from amusement into bereavement. I can still remember the sadness in their eyes as they realised that I’d gone through an unimaginable pain before I’d even turned 20. When I got to the joke, they laughed but it was a laugh embedded with devastation, a laugh that showed how different people would look at me, how I’d be viewed by the people in my life if I let my grief define me. I was scared of being seen as that, and as a consequence, I have let my memories of my partner remain close to my chest. I haven’t shown the world her, keeping our special moments to myself. Since doing that, I lost my natural desire to write, the words didn’t flow out the same way. I devoted myself to my new relationship, something that has brought me a happiness that I thought was impossible to feel again, but the words dried up and the desire to change that wasn’t strong enough. I haven’t been proud of anything I’ve written since the last time I talked about her through my writing. My personal work has completely stopped, only typing out essays when it’s for work or school and struggling intensely with those. I have failed her not by moving on with my life, but for letting my fear over being perceived as a beacon of loss stop me from talking about an amazing woman. I will always be the last person she ever loved. When people tell you that in relationships, you don’t expect that it’ll be proven true within a year of dating, but for me, it was. At 20 years old, I will have the burden of being the last love of a woman who was too good for this world for the rest of my life. I will never be able to be worth that. That is something that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get over, that she loved me during her last seconds of life. I make an effort to talk about her more with the people that matter most, but she stays private mostly, a ghostly assemblage of memories that I see whenever I close my eyes.
Before her death, one of the major ways that the two of us communicated was through voice notes. She got into the habit of sending them to me throughout the day and into the evening before her hospitalisation, leaving me longer ones after I’d hung up the phone and fallen asleep. They ranged from 10 second riffs to 25 minute emotional monologues and they were perfect, making the moments where we weren’t able to be directly on the phone considerably easier. It’s no exaggeration to say that those voice notes saved my life when she got sick and I went weeks without hearing from her, I would listen to them constantly, neglecting music or other stimuli in favour of losing myself to her voice. We found a new routine while she was in the hospital: she would send voice notes whenever she was awake and had enough energy to talk, before we’d have phone calls whenever she felt capable. Those new voice notes became something to look forward to on a daily or weekly basis, little capsules of her that I could keep with me and help remember that things were going to be okay. I started to fixate on the idea that there would never be new ones from her at a certain point and I doubled down on my obsessive listening, neglecting other responsibilities and interests in order to close my eyes and be with her voice. Those notes exist on my phone and are backed up in multiple different places, they are the most important things I own, they are irreplaceable and the only physical proof that I have that she loved me. Sometimes grief can make me forget that she was here once and that she gave all of herself to me, but the notes help me remember, help ground me. If I ever lost them, I would shatter into a million pieces. I will never forget the sound of her voice. I will forget a million other things as I grow older but that is not one of them. Because it will always be there when I need to hear it, even when she’s been gone for longer than she was alive. That’s one of the fundamental reasons I immediately connected with Drive My Car.
Following his wife’s death, the protagonist Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) constantly listens to a tape of his wife reading the lines of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. Before her passing, he would use the tape to learn lines and gain a fuller understanding of the play that he’d be directing and starring in, but while the ostensible motivation is the same, there is something different to the way he fixates on the tape following her death. There are rarely moments of silence as he sits in his car, aware that he’s taking on a project that will connect him back to his wife’s words. This doesn’t change when the major narrative of the film begins, with Tōko Miura’s Watari being hired as his driver to take him from his theatre residency to his temporary living arrangements. Even with the company of another person, the car largely remains the space for him to listen to his late wife, to recite lines for a play he’s consciously not performing in himself, to try and believe that this is just a normal production even though he knows it can’t be. The growth of Kafuku’s arc is built around slowly letting go of the tape, knowing that it’ll be there when he most needs it for both artistic and personal reasons, but realising that he can’t build his life around the voice of a dead woman forever. It is the impossible thing about grief: when do you choose to let go? How much of the person you love do you leave behind for your own sake? When is it time to let yourself be alive?
I don’t listen to her voice notes much anymore, they made me too sad too often, like I was trapped in the past waiting for a future that wasn’t going to come. There will be times when I will develop the intense need to hear her voice again and I’ll be able to, and it will be a beautiful, relieving feeling that surrounds me with peace. I just need some time.
The first time I had sex following her death wasn’t with my current partner, but a stranger I met on a dating app. She didn’t speak much English, I didn’t speak any Japanese, but we managed to connect enough to meet up and fuck in her flat. Over the course of the few minutes in between meeting her and fucking her, my brain seemed to malfunction and stop processing information, it felt like I wasn’t physically present in my own body. I had had hookups in the past before my relationship but this was different, something entirely predicated on a need for sexual entanglement, without any real interest in getting to know the person or to communicate with them in a deeper sense. We had sex and it was okay; it was a physical urge that I needed to get out but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. After it was over, we just laid there, mostly silent, covered in sweat, both having little idea what was going through the other’s brain. When we started to communicate, we did it through non-verbal gestures and touches as well as a translation app on her phone. Nothing too major could be communicated, but there was enough to get by, to have a little laugh and work through the awkwardness, something to make this more than just an empty experience. When I got up to leave, she helped me with my mask, forcing me to get down on my knees so she could reach my head. As she wrapped the straps around my ears, she looked directly into my eyes and for the first time that day, she kissed me on the lips. It took me completely by surprise and before I could process it, she had slipped the mask over my mouth. I was gone a minute later and have never seen her again since. I look back on that kiss with fondness, more so than the sex itself, because it struck me as a gesture of temporary intimacy. It reminded me of what it felt like to be wanted by someone, and helped me remember that I didn’t want my entanglements with women to be built upon silence and lust. There is a conflict in myself when I look back at that day. I found satisfaction in being able to communicate with someone that I didn’t share a language with, doing a good enough job that we were able to share a fleeting moment of intimacy, but a persuasive emptiness flows through my body when I think about the details of the sex. In some ways, I believe that emptiness stems from my grief, I rushed into something sexual to try and deal with my pain, but there’s something intangible that I can’t quite articulate. It’s something that I’m not sure I’ll ever have a singular interpretation of.
Drive My Car’s approach to sex is a similarly confounding experience, with the only physical depictions coming in the opening act between Kafuku and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), and an affair she has with Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), an actor she works with on the television drama she’s written. The sex between Oto and Takatsuki is passionate but stripped of any intimacy, it is animalistic, lustful and lacking of any tangible knowledge between the two of them. Kafuku walks in on them together but doesn’t say anything, just turning around, walking out the door and pretending like nothing happened. You can see what the revelation does to him the next time that he has sex with Oto, however, as he is reminded of the exact sights that Takatsuki must have seen. In their final sex scene together, Oto is displaying the passion and intimacy that comes from knowing someone’s body intimately, yet Kafuku is numb to everything. She begins their routine following her orgasm, where she intricately spins the web of a new narrative for Kafuku to eagerly listen to, but this time, the words seem alien to him. He feels as dissonant as I did, like he is entangled in bed with a stranger, trying to understand her. The intimacy of their sex is no longer there. The next day, she will die and the last memory he’ll have of her body is that feeling of persuasive emptiness. Nothing can ever change that.
So much of Drive My Car is about the inability to communicate. The central conflict that Kafuku experiences is that he failed to talk about his wife’s infidelity before she passed away, and he doesn’t know how to live with the idea that he let his genuine feelings of anger towards her slip away in favour of trying to maintain the status quo of their relationship. She clearly wanted to discuss the issue on the day that she died, but Kafuku was afraid and drove around aimlessly, not wanting to return home in case their dynamic changed forever. In turn, Kafuku largely struggles to communicate his true feelings to Takatsuki, who stumbles back into his life while auditioning for his new performance of Uncle Vanya, and often keeps him at an emotional distance while directing him. Kafuku isn’t a silent man but he has a particular ability to use his words to convey as little about his own life and emotions as possible, keeping his cards close to his chest for the majority of the runtime. This aspect of his character becomes more interesting when paralleled against his work, a new production of Uncle Vanya featuring a multilingual cast and script. Many of the actors will not speak or understand their co-stars’ languages, yet through extensive rehearsal, they will know what they’re communicating to each other and to the audience. In turn, the film becomes about the alternative means of communication, the ability to form connections with others without the use of language. Some of the best scenes of the film are built around the characters figuring out how to convey themselves. An early audition between Takatsuki and his Taiwanese co-star Janice shows intensity that blurs the lines between performance and reality, in spite of the fact that neither can remotely understand what the other’s saying.
A dinner table conversation between Kafuku, Watari, one of the theatre organisers and his wife Yoon-a is another brilliant encapsulation of the film’s thesis on language. Yoon-a is mute but not deaf, so she can understand words perfectly but only in Korean, which makes existing in Japan a harder proposition. She communicates via sign language and receives translation from her husband, who acts as the intermediary throughout her audition and the dinner conversation. Their discussion shows a love and intimacy between the couple that Kafuku clearly recognised from his own relationship, a devotion to each other that he misses intensely. The only way she can be understood is through him but through acting, she is finding a way to be understood for herself, even if the language barrier isn’t going away.
Yoon-a is a character of significant importance throughout the rest of the film, being the focal point of scenes which show how acting can be used to find emotional truths within other people. Much of the second act depicts the rigid rehearsals of the play, as the cast sits down at a table read with Kafuki as he makes them read their dialogue, not letting them think about the ways they’ll use their bodies. The importance of this minimalist set-up is for the cast to understand exactly when their co-stars begin and stop talking, ensuring that they can remember the entire flow of the play even without verbally understanding it. Kafuki is translating his methodology with his wife’s tape onto the set, making sure that each performer knows the material as well as he does, so they can more easily lose themselves in the emotion without worrying about the language barrier. Yoon-a’s importance to the film comes in the first rehearsal we see that utilises physical movement, an outdoors performance between her and Janice. The two exchange their lines, Yoon-a through Korean sign language, Janice through Taiwanese, and manage to find an emotional crescendo together. At a certain point, the camera captures a little grace note between the two as they look away from the others watching. We see a connection that’s formed through performance, a little special thing that only these two will ever get to share, an intimacy that seems to transcend the stage. Kafuku observes his actors get to the stage of emotional communication and honesty, but still relegates himself to the sidelines, not quite ready to go in depth. We see in scenes between himself and Watari that there’s potential for him to be more open, he listens to the tape less often and manages to create a trusting environment for them to talk about some of their past experiences. She mentions how her mother taught her to drive before she passed away when Watari was 18, with Kafuku noting that makes her 23 now. She hints at a deeply abusive relationship between her and her late mother, before describing her aimless driving following her death, just continuing in her old car until it couldn’t drive anymore. He briefly mentions that his wife has died, but doesn’t go into it much further.
The transition towards Kafuku’s vulnerability comes in the film’s best scene, where he sits in the back seat with Takatsuki after another unproductive discussion in a bar. Kafuku mentions the affair and at first, Takatsuki plays on the defensive, suggesting that Kafuku might be paranoid or grasping at straws. As the conversation continues, Takatsuki realises the extent of his director’s grief and sorrow at the lack of resolution from his marriage. There is never the direct acknowledgement or confession over the affair, but something far more challenging and almost mystical. Takatsuki begins to tell a story that Oto had told him, which Kafuku realises as the story that Oto told him in the film’s opening scene. He interrupts Takatsuki and makes it clear that he was unaware of the story’s ending, something that causes him discomfort to this day. However, Takatsuki knows more about the story, things that Oto told him but never told her husband. The look on Nishijima’s eyes is remarkable, as he processes both the joy of finding out the answer to an unsolvable question and the overwhelming pain that his wife told someone else the ending instead of him. The story continues and it becomes clear that Oto has told Takatsuki this version of the narrative because it’s subtextually about Kafuku, how she knows that she’s hurt him and how desperate she is to face the consequences of her actions. By the time Takatsuki reaches the end of the tale, he implies that Oto was planning on confessing to him about the affairs. Instead of their exchange in the car being about anger, it is about comfort and catharsis through storytelling. Over the course of the film, Takatsuki reveals himself to be a violent, impulsive, selfish and fucked up man without many redeeming qualities. After this scene, it will be revealed that he’s accidentally killed someone out of sheer anger and he’ll leave the film forever. He has consistently been trying to engage with Kafuku because of his own fixation on Oto and his desperation to feel the same way he did working with her scripts. But, at this moment, seeing the fear and the sadness within his director’s eyes, he allows himself to be calm, insightful and ultimately kind. The one selfless thing he does in this film is to provide Kafuku with the conclusion to Oto’s final story, a missing piece of the puzzle that otherwise would have remained unfinished forever. The two of them bond together in that vehicle, communing over the woman they both loved, working as a unit to find peace in her departure. Over the course of the scene, Takatsuki’s defensiveness completely fades and he is left with a relaxed, ethereal satisfaction, as if he knows that this is the best thing he’ll ever be able to do. Alternatively, Kafuku’s stoic expression morphs into a desperate frenzied look as he tries to soak up every modicum of information, all of Takatsuki’s perspectives on the woman he loved so much but never fully knew.
Hamaguchi’s masterful composition ensures that a 10-minute scene that’s entirely set within the backseat of a car, that is only about two men telling and listening to each other’s interpretation of a story, can be the most compelling and emotionally provocative sequence of the year. The yellow light which streams in through the car window overtakes Takatsuki’s entire body, making him seem like a heavenly spirit that’s here to guide Kafuku through this stage of his grief and creating a dreamlike sensation that lasts throughout the sequence. There is so much space for each man to perform, and Hamaguchi selects the perfect moments to transition back to Kafuku’s face. However, the element that maximises the scene’s emotional potential is one miniscule cut after Kafuku opens up briefly about his and Oto’s young daughter, who died when she was 4. Kafuku brings up that she would be 23 now if she had lived, and the camera cuts to a shot of Watari’s eyes through the car’s mirror as she finally understands their connection. Hamaguchi’s minimalist set-up as a director can often lead to his visual merits being under-discussed, but this edit is a perfect encapsulation of why he is contemporary cinema’s most exciting director – it’s a cut that believes in its audience to put all the emotional pieces together in the midst of a sequence that gives both the characters and the viewers space to process their emotions. However, like with certain experiences in my life, there is an intangible which means it’s impossible to truly articulate just how much this scene made me feel. The only possible comparison I can make is in my favourite film, Tron: Legacy, which has a scene involving the protagonist Sam Flynn leap onto a holobike in The Grid for the first time, gaining a sensation of familiarity and confidence amongst the unfamiliar. In the only moment of the film where time slows down, he begins his run as Daft Punk’s score subtly builds, creating a sensation of anticipation. As the bike forms underneath his body, time speeds up, the score kicks in and we are back into the film’s element. Yet, every time I see those 30 seconds, I start to cry. I can’t explain it. I’ve never really been able to. But somehow, in that sequence, I see everything that I’ve ever resonated with in cinema. I’ve never felt that exact way towards any other scene in a film. I genuinely believed I’d never have that feeling for the first time again. With Drive My Car, I got it.
After the car scene concludes, Kafuku’s ability to communicate or process information has been shattered; he is drained and no longer cares about the foundations of his routine or rules. He takes care of his car religiously throughout the film, being clearly fixated on it which leads to some distress when he’s required to use Watari’s services. He makes it clear that he doesn’t want smoking inside the car or anything else that could cause disarray. After talking to Takatsuki, he doesn’t care. He gets out two cigarettes and encourages Watari to smoke alongside him, lowering the car roof and letting their hands lean out of it, staying there together in between puffs. Watari’s clear understanding that he doesn’t want to talk about it much more is beautifully conveyed by Miura’s performance, only mentioning that she believes in Takatsuki’s sincerity to reassure him about the truthfulness of the sentiment. For once, their relative silence is a display of understanding and safety instead of emotional relegation. Him letting go of some of his restrictions just for a couple of moments is a sign that he can be vulnerable with someone again, even if it’s not romantic, sexual or even built around verbal communication. The two of them continue their journey together following the revelation of Takatsuki’s murder charge, embarking on a long journey to Watari’s hometown that she left five years ago. In the car, the two reveal more about their circumstances, with Watari talking about how she left her mother to die when their house collapsed without knowing why, and Kafuki talking about how he was afraid to come home because he didn’t want their relationship to change. Both believe that if things were different, they could have saved their loved ones. After a day or so of travelling, they get to the town which is a deserted place covered in snow, and climb the hill where she and her mother lived. The wreckage of the collapsed house is still there, a visual reminder of the trauma that Watari experienced. Finally, the two of them talk about everything, expressing themselves beyond the brief snippets of their pain that they’ve disclosed. They get the pain off of their chests, with Watari talking more extensively about her mother and her potential mental illness, and Kafuki finally allowing himself to be angry at his wife for the pain she has caused him. His complete breakdown on the mountaintop has been building for the entire film, his restraint snaps in half and he allows himself to be angry, to grieve, to hate her and miss her with equal fervour. Nishijima gives the performance of the year – one of the very finest performances that I’ve ever seen in a film. In the midst of his emotional outburst, Watari reaches out and hugs him for the first time, as they hold each other through their pain. Once the tears stop, they continue to hold each other as Kafuki reassures her that they must keep living, even if thoughts of the dead will keep consuming them. It is the moment where they both learn how to live again. As I saw it, I felt the same way.
Drive My Car has two endings: one for Kafuki and one for Watari. The scene on the mountaintop was the culmination of their relationship on screen, now they must find catharsis on their own terms as well as with each other. Kafuki’s ending relates to the performance of Uncle Vanya where he takes over the role of the titular character, a role he hasn’t played since right after her death. Instead of being overwhelmed by Chekhov’s words, he channels his anger and his heartbreak into the role, finding a way to use acting as a form of therapy. His anger and passion for the dialogue is clear and he utterly dominates the stage in the scenes that we see. Kafuki’s arc comes to a close during a scene with Yoon-a, where they once again blur the lines between performance and reality, managing to create something beautiful together in spite of the language differences and the acknowledgement of artifice. Throughout the film, the lines of Uncle Vanya parallel Kafuki’s life to an uncomfortable degree but this is the first time that he finds relief in that comparison, strength through the medium that he’s devoted his whole life to. For once, he gets to be the person who loses himself in the performance, in creating magic with the text and the co-stars. It is a beautiful conclusion to his journey and culminates all of Hamaguchi’s ideas on artifice, performance and the ways in which we link ourselves to the art we consume. It is particularly ironic that I’ve found so much of myself in a film that’s all about finding personal meaning out of storytelling.
For Watari, her ending is more oblique, vague, harder to decipher. Yet, similarly to the scene in the car with Takatsuki and Kafuki, I find it impossible to think of her final shot without beginning to tear up. There is no explicit explanation of what has happened to her since her chauffeur duties ended, no further context for Kafuki’s life, just the look of optimism in her eyes and a vehicle that’s all hers (that is either Kafuki’s or one that looks like his). For so much of the film, driving is a coping mechanism for the two protagonists; it is something that they do to escape or because there’s nothing else to do. But here, it manages to represent something beautiful, a path directly into the future. The sun is bright and she has a smile on her face. It’s all going to be okay, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes.
It was November 2021. I’ve been home from Canada for over a month. It was the best couple weeks of my life and it managed to help me cope with my grief in a way that I could never have predicted. As soon as I got home, things started to go wrong: my dad got sick with the same virus that took so much away from me. Every time I started to work on myself and try to cope with the long-lasting trauma of her death, something else would happen that would remind me of it, bringing the heartbreak, fear and panic of the worst months back into my peripheral. My relationship was going brilliantly, but I felt ashamed of my trauma, ashamed to talk about the grief or the triggers that COVID continues to cause me. My issues with writing got even worse and I shut down in a lot of ways, struggling to eat or take care of myself properly. There were good moments over the month and a half but I wasn’t coping well with the flashbacks and triggers. So I went to see Drive My Car at my local arthouse theatre in Glasgow, being told that I was going to love it but not knowing anything about the premise. When it was over, I was a wreck. I was sobbing so hard in the theatre that the young woman sitting next to me asked if I was okay as the credits rolled. She was the first stranger I have ever told about her death. The film helped me talk about her, even just a little bit. I received some words of sympathy and instead of stinging me, they felt like a genuine consolation and her kindness made me cry a little more. I had plans to see another movie but I left the theatre building and walked around the streets of Glasgow in the rain, listening to a playlist of my favourite songs as I continued to cry my eyes out. I didn’t go inside anywhere else for about 15 minutes, just letting the rain soak my hair and my clothes, letting it wash away my tears. When I managed to make it inside, I told my best friend the extent of the issues I was dealing with and I called my girlfriend, telling her how much I loved her, how grateful I was for everything she’s done for me. After I hung up, I cried a little more and then began my journey home. For the first time since she died, I wanted the world to know about her. I didn’t want to be alone with the thoughts anymore. It’s all okay now. She was alive and now she isn’t, but I still am. I’ll still remember her.