Once, while on the last train home, a middle-aged woman seated directly opposite me burst into tears, and sobbed through a mostly incoherent outpouring of her grievances on her cellphone. People in the same cabin just bolted. They made for other cabins - where they could continue their conversations or daydreams in silence. I looked down nervously at my hands and listened to her narrative and it wasn't too hard to make out from her mangled cries of "
How could he do this to me!" in Chinese that her husband had probably cheated on her.
I wanted to sink further down in the cold plastic seat and weep a few commiserating tears but at the next stop, I got up and walked home. If that had been a scene in a Wong Kar Wai film, it could have been fucking beautiful. But because it's life, it's just filled with empty pathos.
Does life imitate art, or art life?
Why must I hold up life's moments to its celluloid counterparts and despair when it inevitably comes up short?