Frances: It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it... but it’s a party... and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining... and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes... but - but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual... but because... that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s - That’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess.
Frances Ha
written by Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
Libris.
A childhood place.
A place of barefoot summers, Cricket in the garden, a billion tennis balls lost to the neighbours’ fences.
Laughter echoed off the tarmac, as we scaled trees like mountains, branches biting into palms, scraped knees stinging in the cold breath of early evening.
The days sometimes being harder,
The worried lines of my mother’s face as she made ends meet.
The pain in her eyes at the world that seemed endlessly uphill.
A place of reckless evenings. Illicit cigarettes lit on cracked windowsills, the sharp scent curling into the dark. Warm cider in hand, mud trailing behind Pete like a signature. Mattresses dragged to the living room; makeshift kingdoms for drunk confessions.
That New Year’s Eve when a friend vanished down the familiar streets, and we scoured the night with hearts pounding louder than our footsteps. It was a place where love grew wild, and grief sometimes lived far too close to home.
It taught me loneliness before I had the words for it. Held me when I couldn’t hold myself. Summer nights with windows wide curtains breathing like lungs, my mother’s hand in mine as I wept that whole summer away.
It caught me in the freefall of first heartbreak, a quiet witness to the cracking of innocence. It became a shelter when the world outside grew too sharp, too loud. At 3am, in the black silence, that room held the worst of me without turning away.
It was pilgrimage and pause, where sorrow slept beside love. Where my mother stood with an unshakable grace, her strength woven into the bones of the house.
It was my stillness. The place where broken pieces stitched themselves back into skin. It was my sanctuary. My beginning. My home.
