jem on jém

[ENTRY 013]

terminal\user\jem\journal

'And there's this feeling, once you leave where you're from, like, where you grew up, that, um, you don't totally belong there again'.

Being back at my parents’ home at the time of writing, this quote seems to drift past my mind once more. It’s one of many quietly affecting (borderline devastating) lines in Aftersun. And when I think back to the first time I saw it a couple of years ago – driven by an impulse after a tiring day of uni — I remember a thought crossing my mind during that line while I sat alone, glued to the screen.

'Is that gonna be me?'

I felt this a lot throughout the film. Ultimately, just one of many scattershot thoughts happening in quick succession. You look in the chat logs of my brain, and you’ll find millions of them produced every nanosecond. Everything from errors to observations is just swimming around. It’s like the synapses firing in the Spider-Man opening titles.

Getting to the point: when I come back 'home,' I don’t feel like I don’t belong here. I’m not a stranger to these people I call my family. I miss them dearly and try to savour whatever free minute I have with them (he says typing away while his Mother scrolls through Facebook at max volume).

There’s a sense of genuine connection I have to this place through my family, not out of obligation, but love, and that’s where it sort of just… stops. I don’t belong here not because my old bedroom is now used for storage and hanging laundry, or I’ve lost connection with people, but because I needed to get the fuck out.

With every visit back here, an appreciation for the choice I made back in September/October shines quite brightly. Maybe it’s become blinding because I can’t put a finger on what it is. I know I don’t miss the noise; the periodic yelling at someone on a TV because they don’t look conventionally attractive or say something wrong, or the long phone calls that stretch well past midnight, oscillating between hushed lows and screaming highs of Tagalog.

It’s like returning to an old save file. It’s been a while, sure, yet I remember my way around the place and how to drive. But everything is frozen. Everyone moves on with their lives when I come back, yet somehow I’ve missed out on everything. All developments heard on the phone or during occasional visits suddenly come to fruition now. The more I think of it, the less it feels like returning to a save file, actually, and more like returning to a live-service game in it’s 20th season of whatever bullshit it’s up to now.

I’m padding for time in full honesty. Another case of letting life take the wheel while I look at my phone. Buried somewhere in the thesis statement of this entry was a quote from one of the most genuinely meaningful, poignant, and seminal viewing experiences of my life and applying it to my own. But the parallel isn't paralleling.

I resonate with Calum in his every solemn look, every silent plea, smile, breath, all of it bubbling to the surface but never taking the lid off. And to an extent, I think I understand why he can’t go back, because, of course, he isn’t talking about where he was at the time geographically, but rather the person he was at that point in his life. The friendships he formed, the experiences he had, the mistakes he made, some holding more of a life-altering impact than others, it’s fair to assume. He can’t go back and edit things, pluck out all the bad or airbrush the blemishes. It’s all permanent.

'Is that gonna be me?'

If I can look anything like Paul Mescal, then I’ve succeeded. But probably more importantly, if I can look at this very real, yet still fictional character, harbouring the most unruly, dark behemoth of a sadness while keeping it at bay, and decide to learn from it, that’s the real success. I’m not chalking up what is clearly the very real amalgam of Charlotte Wells’ personal experiences as a cautionary tale, but a labour of love in the truest sense. A work that transcends the digital and analog to convey some of the deepest depths of feelings with such careful reverence and palpable authorship.

I don’t want to go back to where I was (in life) when I used to live here. I want to keep this chapter of my life slammed shut, yet I have to come back. I’m not regressing, but there are small reminders everywhere I have to live with, like that I don’t care about most of the friends I made here (save for one, though most of the real ones I still talk to actively managed to leave, and well before I did). I am no Calum in the making, in the sense that I don’t care if I don’t belong here anymore on some level, but I empathise with his longing for a sense of self and willingness to be of service with the time he has left.

Forever, he’ll remain a comfort character to me, as fucked as it may be interpreted.

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