One part of my travel experiences was crossing the International Dateline multiple times, gaining or losing a day in the process, reliving a date on the calendar or missing it altogether. One year, for example, I missed my birthday as I was fast-forwarded from the day before to the day after.
That experience certainly helped me empathize with those born on Leap Day. But it also is the closest to time travel I’ve ever achieved.
Another memory of travel is days and nights spent walking around foreign cities in Europe, Asia and South America, usually with a new acquaintance as my guide. It would not be a far stretch to imagine I could have fallen in love on one of those walks, say in Brussels, Paris, Taipei, Madrid, London, Kuala Lampur, Singapore, Amsterdam or Tokyo; perhaps on occasion that actually happened.
But since my memory is fickle and it flickers rather than illuminates, any reality it contains has merged with my still-strong sense of imagination. That’s why a certain kind of love story resonates with me, an example of which is the 2015 film “Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong,” featuring Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg.
The film is set in Hong Kong, which is one of the many cities where I have also walked around several times. It depicts how the pair meet as strangers and fall for each other during two random encounters a year apart. It is sweet, sensitive, subtle and hopeful.
And it will remind some of “The Before Trilogy,” set in Europe in 1995, 2004 and 2013. In the second (and best) of those films, a couple spends the entire film walking around Paris, talking and (re)falling in love in the process.
Both the Tomorrow and Before films are about human connection through conversation. Travel is often lonely; international travel especially so. Being alone in an American city is one experience; being alone overseas can be more extreme. You truly can feel lost and in need of somebody to help you feel found again.
This does not require romance, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. But maybe it is when we are at our most vulnerable that we succumb to temptation or perhaps in a less judgmental sense when we actually find our true selves. Both could be true, or neither. Of one thing I am quite certain. It is at such times of need and longing that we can turn into each other’s angels.
(I published the first version of this essay in 2021.)
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