in just 101 minutes*

How long does it take to fall in love… with yourself? Do you love yourself? When did you know you loved yourself? In the movies love happens in a tight hour forty five. Day and night collapse and time is a magical construct. I’ve experienced the time bending power of love with a partner. But what if I became my own hype person and best friend? It could be the greatest love of all! Interviewers would ask, “What’s the thing I love most about me? What’s the habit that irritates me but also makes me laugh at myself?”

My self-love affair has been a Liz and Dick epic for many decades, but a new honeymoon phase is waxing; it’s my Before Midnight moment. Full disclosure, the Museum of the Moving Image screened all three of the Richard Linklater Before films in sequence this weekend, and I watched them all FOR THE FIRST TIME. (I missed Before Sunrise when it first came out and never got back around to it before Before Sunset came out and obviously couldn’t see them out of order and voilà, the decades passed.) The timing was perfect. The series is a masterful exploration of romantic love– how we romanticize and fictionalize, literally tell stories to ourselves and others, and it’s also exposes the raw reality of sustaining a (loving) long term relationship. Like the embattled middle aged lovers, I find myself in the moment where my Jesse says to my Celine, (paraphrasing) even though I’m the mayor of crazy town, I love all of me. It’s a choice. I embrace it all, the evolution and the stuckness, the willingness to try and the unbending opinions. I love my inner pre-teen with a thirst for play and my inner crone sizing up the whole parade and finding it wanting. If anyone is asking, the thing I love most about me is my curiosity; the thing that makes me laugh at myself is my inability to tell a succinct story. I love I keep trying.

*running time of Before Sunrise