Suggested listening: Quiet Eyes - Sharon Van Etten, Kokomo IN - Japanese Breakfast
In July of 2024, I began listening to the Past Lives soundtrack a lot. I think I clocked around 2,000+ minutes in less than four months from what I can gather (which is more than 50ish listen-throughs, which on paper doesn't look like a lot, but comparitively it feels like a lot). It wasn’t an album that particularly struck me during the film, instead it was music I discovered after rewatching the film with a desire to keep the emotion going.

The film, in its most simple plot, is about a woman who feels entirely torn between the feelings she has for someone she’s known since childhood, Hae Song, and her current husband, Arthur, with the caveat that her childhood-friend-turned-weird-talking-stage lives in South Korea, and she lives in New York and has a husband, and they can never be together because of that difference.

Yet, the solution isn’t just both of them being in the same place. The woman, Nora, is not simply picking between two love interests—instead, she picks between two lives. Hence, Past Lives.

It’s a particularly poignant movie, and funnily, one I remember discussing a little more than a year ago with someone in a bar who gave me the faintest feeling that our relationship echoed Nora and Hae Sung’s (or maybe it felt more like Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise. I’ll get to that). Maybe a little on the nose. Talking about the film as we sat there, as I wondered whether or not the mention of it was laden with subtext. I think the film feels particularly real for me because of that, and the choice of lives Nora has to make, or simply sees laid out in front of her, is something I feel I grapple with too frequently. I recall, at the bar, attempting to make guesses about the jazz band in front of us, what their lives were like and what they loved (the bassist, I guessed, loved McMansions). We tried to piece together the lives of the band by simplifying the pieces, talking about them as though it was obvious that this was their path, even if we did so jokingly.

There’s obviously no knowing the truth—Nora takes the moments she shares with Hae Sung and extrapolates them to the potential entire relationship. There’s this rather terse exchange between Nora and Arthur when Hae Sung’s in New York. Here’s an abbreviated version:


ARTHUR: What if you met someone else at the residency?

NORA: That’s not how life works.

ARTHUR: Yeah, but wouldn’t you be laying here with him?

NORA: This is my life. And I'm living it with you.


ARTHUR: Is this how you thought it would turn out?


NORA: This is where I ended up. This is where I'm supposed to be.


It’s crushing. Nora doesn’t make any attempt to soften the sentiment with a white lie. I think the same exchange by a different couple might be filled with a little more forced naïvité, pretending that they’d have met regardless, or that this was exactly what they wanted to happen in life. Nora doesn’t do that. “This is where I ended up. This is where I’m supposed to be” almost feels like a resignation, a kind of throwing her hands up in the air and a surrendering of agency. Arthur isn’t satisfied with this answer, and it makes total sense why he wouldn’t be. She doesn’t really know if this is the “right” or “wrong” outcome, relationship, or life.

The feeling is so large and overwhelming. It is so ubiquitous—the film doesn’t explore it just for romance, but for someone who feels split between two lives, two selves. One lives in South Korea, the other in New York City. They have different careers, lovers, lives.

I feel it frequently. To reference the first journal entry on my site, all this reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree. Life is too short to experience everything. We are left wondering whether or not we’ve made the right choices, despite that thinking never being particularly productive. Nora saying “this is where I’m supposed to be” is more comforting to her than it is to Arthur precisely because she’s trying to stifle the “what ifs” that invade her life. 

I’ve recently been struggling with this, with the what ifs. So often do I get thoughts about potential decisions stretched to some end, and I don’t know if those thoughts are ever productive. Short, sweet moments that might’ve been forever, or experiences with a life I don’t have, but could have. Wondering if that life path is closed because of my circumstances or because of external circumstances concerning the path.

In Before Sunrise, a film I told the person at the bar I despised only because I found Ethan Hawke to be a little annoying, a different form of the alternative life is explored. Like Past Lives, we see the good moments, the experiences that are formative to the memory—the sweet, wonderful moments that the characters will come to reflect on when they think about the experience. The film explores the thought of living with the experience despite not living the life. An experience exists just as the experience. Throughout the entire film, Celine and Jesse talk about how they’ll move onto respective romantic interests in their home countries and how their brief relationship will have been a blip, something to nostalgically revisit. I understand this—spending so much time with someone or something and being engaged for every moment is rare. In the film, they waver between believing that it’ll remain a nice memory and believing that they’ll always desire what they had in the future.

CELINE: You told me that our time together would someday make me happier with my future husband, but now I’ll wonder even more.

It’s hard to not think about days, weeks, months, that have passed and wonder, what if that was my entire life? What if I never stopped making adorational SoundCloud tracks because it worked out (or what if I only stopped because it did)? What if I had taken a totally different job out of college and risked more than I have out of passion? What if I had gone to a different grad school program? I drive myself to neurosis thinking about these things.

In Before Sunrise, the relationship is different from Past Lives—there’s an expiration date. Celine and Jesse know exactly how much time they have to see each other, so they talk about that fact. They’ve had a nice few hours together, but when they’ve crossed a certain threshold, they wonder about what comes next. We don’t receive that luxury—endings often catch us by surprise. In the moment, you might think, “well, this is great! I can’t wait to do it again!” Until, you don’t. And then you wonder if you could have been more diligent or enjoyed it even more, or had a conversation about it. I think about how I didn’t cherish my time at Columbia enough until I graduated. I feel sick to my stomach at times when that thought crosses my mind because I’ll never have that experience again. Even so, I was vaguely aware of the expiration date.

With other things, it’s not so clear cut. College is linear in that you start it with the knowledge that the experience comes to an end at some point. The timeline of everything else isn’t so obvious. You can never know when or if you’ll see someone again. The anticipation of hoping to see them again may be great, but so is the crippling nostalgia of a time that’s passed one by, not knowing if the last interaction is truly the last. I thought about this a lot when a cousin of mine passed in 2023. It was unexpected. My father, a rather emotionless man, couldn’t even bring himself to tell me over the phone about what had happened. The more I thought about it, the more confused I got. I regretted not enjoying the last moment I spent with him, and that regret comes from the retroactive knowledge that our lunch at Souvlaki GR would be the last time I would see him. I couldn’t have known in the moment.

On a different note, there’s a scene from my life that I often revisit in my head that feels so much like Before Sunrise—saying goodbye to somebody and narrowly catching a train, as opposed to missing it. I think about the potential that exists within that day a lot. The life that might’ve been. Maybe that day needed to end as it did. Fate had its way. But, I didn’t see that person much after that despite wanting to, and I still don’t know which way I should be processing it all. Up until then, I hadn’t spent a lot of time with them, and after, I could only think about how easy it all felt, like two puzzle pieces interlocking to complete the puzzle.

I became obsessed with waves for a while after that. I know exactly why. Waves are all different. They’re transient, and they crash. You have to savor each wave because you’re aware that it’s the last time you’ll see it before it crashes onto shore. Celine talks about the brevity of connection at some point:

CELINE: It’s like if you knew your relationship had to end in two years, there would be no room for fighting or wasted time.  There could be more love and appreciation for one another. It’s like, if everyone you met you knew was going to die at midnight, you would be a much more compassionate person. 

The person I talked to at the bar also mentioned the red thread of fate, and Past Lives touches on the notion of in-yun. Both refer to this almost divine providence that people end up with who they are meant to end up with—in-yun spans over several lifetimes, that all connections in a past life come into the present life. Fate identifies important interactions and guides us to them. I wonder if I put too much pressure on trying to control these things or not. I’m not certain if I’m doing the right things right now, and I’m really quite anxious about all of what’s to come. It’s relieving, perhaps, to latch onto the red thread/in-yun. The universe has it all planned out. I own my cat Fennel because the universe insisted that we needed each other. I think about the stuff that doesn’t work out, though, and wonder what the universe is thinking there. Some people end up in bad relationships forever, some end up alone. Others never feel a sense of satisfaction with their careers, and some have horrible and tragic fates before the red thread gets to work its magic. What is the universe doing there? 

I can’t think about it too much without pushing myself to be a little teary-eyed. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And, despite all of that, it’s impossible not to think of the past lives I could have lived or paths I could have taken, or paths that were closed because of bad timing. Ever since I was in middle school (back then, I was a devout Catholic boy), I remember pleading to God with the hope that he’d benevolently tell me what the right decisions were. This was in some module about colleges and careers in the seventh grade. What job would I really enjoy and be really good at? What’ll make me happy?

I keep thinking about this stuff. Waves are transient, I can’t dwell. In-yun and the thread are great forces, like God. Maybe I need to remind myself that where I am is where I’m supposed to be, but it’s hard to accept if you’re uncertain and find the sentiment hard to believe. I get why Nora cried in Arthur’s arms at the end.