““It’s like our time together is just ours. It’s our own creation. It must be like I’m in your dream and you’re in mine or something.””
EXCERPT FROM ZOE'S NEWSLETTER
To Family and Friends
dated: March 25th, 2017
Oliver and I continuously joke that we are experiencing 'a trip of a lifetime' within our whole trip of a lifetime. That is, there are so many countries, so many cities, so many sites we have visited that have played a part in our dreams - our 'one-day'-s and our 'I wish'-es. One such trip within our trip was our visit to Vienna...
Vienna will forever sit in my mind as the setting of one of my all time favourite movies: Before Sunrise, by my all time favourite director: Richard Linklater. (If you are looking for more suggestions of his movies, do try Boyhood and Dazed and Confused.)
In the movie Before Sunrise, the two main characters meet on a train, then taking a chance, they disembark to spend one evening and night together, walking through Vienna. They fall in love, of course, but the director takes this tale beyond the cliches of the usual love stories, using this story to show how we will always fall in love with new beginnings, with mysteries, and how traveling through new places can facilitate this by allowing us to be a wholly new person.
Vienna was our Before Sunrise moment. We rediscovered the joys of learning a new city - it's roads, it's quirks, it's main attractions and hidden gems. We fell in love with each other again too. I often feel I am falling back in love with Oliver - not that we have ever fallen out of love, mind you. More so that we find ourselves cycling between days of cooperative partnership and contentment, to days where we look at one another with new eyes - stopping to actually look, not just glance, at the other; appreciating some part of them that was, perhaps, taken for granted only a moment before. Thus it was, hand in hand, that we walked all over that city from East to West.
Every day we would get up and walk an hour into the city; each evening we would return after sunset, to sleep in our little car in the parking lot outside of town. The spaces in between, they were magic...
