Right person? Wrong time? Bullshit?

 

Normal People, Past Lives and LaLa Land; the fantasy of perfect timing, contemporary 'horror stories' and why they really devastate us.   

Normal People

At seventeen, I am a prophet. As I wrap gifts for my 'best friend's' eighteenth birthday, among a small library of vinyl and sentimental odds-and-ends, I bravely include a fresh copy of Sally Rooney's infamous sophomore novel, Normal People. But the spine is already cracked and leathery because I have opened it numerous times to underline a few short passages. They are as follows:

"Well, I like you." (page 13)

"They've done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks. People can really change one another." (page 283)

And the renowned classic, 

"You should go, she says. I'll always be here. You know that." (page 283)

(This is a line so quietly catastrophic that it has since been cut, clipped and featured in many a heart-rending edit of the TV adaptation which stars the situationship of all situationships; I am of course talking about Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones.) 

Connell: I'll go.

Marianne: And I'll stay. And we'll be okay.

After six long years, this is how I choose to confess my feelings. With someone else's words that I've marked up and made mine, because I am too afraid to speak my heart aloud.

This is a bold move, one that I look back on with regrets. I do not regret the confession itself --the world of romance could always use more honesty-- but I do regret the timing. And the method. 

Timing, because he had a girlfriend-- and one I really liked. (I hope she knows I'm sorry, now. Both he and I were villains). And because he was moving away. A year older than I, he was sloping off to university and with him, his family were packing-up to head down south and settle there by the coast. So, this was truly goodbye, we would not reunite in half-terms nor holidays for casual visits.

I regret the method mostly because it makes me twitch with embarrassment, in hindsight. And because I seemed to have crossed the stars myself that day, rather than left it to fate, or planted an ill-fated seed or given him the idea on a silver platter: that we were always going to be the 'right person', but never would we meet again at the right time. 

Nevertheless, I trek up the hill to his red-brick house folded in the grounds of a manor (very Jane Austen) and we sit on garden furniture overlooking the vale as he carefully peels paper away from each thoughtful gift. When he inevitably unwraps the book, he thanks me and promises to read it. 

Like us, Marianne and Connell grow up in the same small town. They navigate school, family, and social hierarchies while their complicated feelings for each other simmer beneath the surface. Their connection is constant, yet... elusive. Moments of intimacy are punctuated by misunderstandings and silence. They speak up, they retreat, they reconnect, always dancing around each other, learning and unlearning how to care while life insists on pulling them apart.

Oh, if only I knew it then.

Like I said, I'm a prophet, a seer, an oracle.

Evening falls like the final curtain and I must go home. We walk down the hill, two miles to the meter to my front-doorstep, and all the while I'm sobbing uncontrollably at the prospect of being left behind in this tiny, unremarkable hamlet. 

"Summer was just beginning but there was an ache in the air, knowing that my oldest friend was leaving me to suffer the heat of it alone." - Excerpt from a creative writing project I wrote about this day and submitted in my first year of uni, still clinging on.

He says, "If you have anything to say to me, you should probably say it now." And I am overcome with an unearthly, teenaged rage. How dare he? He has had the better part of seven years to come out with it, to do something, anything, and only now, in our final few minutes, does he look to me to be brave. 

I am brave. I tell him I love him. 

He tells me he can't say it back, not because he doesn’t return these feelings, but because he has a girlfriend (on the outs though they may be). Brilliant! He takes my hand by way of apologising, I think. We stay clasped desperately together until he passes me off to my mother like some cumbersome parcel and says a very tame goodbye. 

Then, he is gone.

After that, driven by spite, I bagged myself a boyfriend. The first of his kind. And me and my best friend eventually lose touch. I'd receive the odd phone call. One I distinctly remember, in the first few weeks of Autumn term, when he phones-a-friend for advice on how to dump that aforementioned girlfriend, who I was almost sorry to see go. But the following year I leave for university, too, and I believe we will never meet again. I do still think of him, often.

It is here I am introduced the myth pedalled as Right Person, Wrong Time; I subscribe wholeheartedly. I choose to blame circumstance, distance and youth.

Past Lives

At nineteen, I merrily waltz into my second year of university with optimism that borders on insanity. Then, the rug is swiftly pulled out from underneath me; I get dumped. 

This is earth-shattering. I am wrecked. So wrecked, in fact, so distraught, that I burst into tears at the counter of my local Pret-a-Manger and the barista (bless him) tells me to take my iced americano --free of charge-- because I am clearly having a terrible day. In these few weeks that I spend horizontal in bed, curtains drawn, all I want is a friend. 

So, I call the one that knows me best. 

He picks up! And we spend three hours talking. I am surprised to discover that he's now living in Tokyo (less surprised to discover that he has another girlfriend, briefly. They break up shortly after we reconnect, landing us both in the same sorry spot). It’s a comfort to know that there is still someone I could cling to who knew me. The grittiest, spikiest, most awkward parts of me. 

This becomes routine. He is an early riser, while I'm a late sleeper; so the mismatch of timezones works in our favour. He talks to me down the phone in his mornings, readying himself for the day, while I lie awake at night in bed, restless and unoccupied, replying. We talk about everything; the people we're seeing, the new cities we live in, how strange it is that years and distance so easily collapse when you know someone inside out. We talk about smaller stuff, too. Like movies. 

One day, he recommends Past Lives. 

I don't watch it. I'm a busy woman, after all. We spend so much time stumbling across different continents and countries that year. I too had moved abroad to study, I spend a month volunteering with a marine conservation project on a quaint little Greek island, I holiday with friends and family across Spain and France and Italy. But no matter how far the world stretches between us, we find each other. I call him from sun-beds and beaches and dim hotel bedrooms. 

We discuss it later, how we both fell back in love like this; old feelings kicking up toward the surface. 

(There is something about this, even now, that I find terribly romantic-- the idea of falling in love with someone's voice; their thoughts, rather than their presence).

By late summer, we are both back in England once more. We take this opportunity to slip, almost accidentally, into sleeping together and 'dating', I guess, without defining it by that concrete term. Less of a beginning, this seems to be the natural progression of our relationship. And one evening, we do sink into the sofa and watch Past Lives. 

Two childhood friends grow up in Korea, until Nora (or, Na Young) emigrates to the US. They reconnect briefly in their early twenties via Skype, and then again in adulthood when Hae Sung finally visits her and her husband in New York. There, they spend a final few days together, and accept that whatever they were or are or want to be cannot exist in the life she has built for herself. Before he returns to Korea, he says:

"I liked you because you're you. And who you are is someone who leaves." (Celine Song, 2023)

This lands awkwardly. Here we are, curled into each other on a single mattress, watching this relationship fail on-screen. We know very well that we are these people who like each other and who must leave. He voices it explicitly.

"When I watched it in Japan, I thought of you," he says. How he imagined that we would swim in and out of each other's lives from childhood until our early thirties, when one of us eventually outgrew the other without ever having the chance to try. 

But this is trying, isn't it? This is the right person, at the right time. 

Or perhaps it is in-yeon (因缘). 

"There's a word in Korean, in-yeon. It means providence or fate. ... If two strangers walk by each other in the streets and their clothes accidentally brush, that means there have been 8,000 layers of in-yeon between them." (Celine Song, Past Lives)

This philosophy implies that every connection you share is a consequence of compiled interaction in a past life, and that you are earning layers of in-yeon in this one to shape relationships in your next. It certainly softens the blow of a break-up, believing that you might meet again in another lifetime and finally, finally have collected enough in-yeon to share Sunday mornings in bed, stolen kisses in the kitchen, even sticky children, for decades. That when you do, it is because fate has allowed it, even made it so; that you are destined to be the right person at the right time in the right life. 

I like this idea. 

LaLa Land

At twenty-one, we do not speak (though, of course, I'm still hopeful this may change). Things get progressively messier and deeper, but I must board my flight back to university so timing is --once again-- just wrong. We do not speak, but we do still share a Spotify Blend; an algorithmic stitch tying us together in the ether.

Every now and again I pull it up, and frequently I find that he's been listening to Mia and Sebastian's Theme religiously, which feels needlessly masochistic. And almost communicative (though I'm well aware it is not). That's the strange beauty of it, I suppose. In the twenty-first century, we are provided a window which allows us to witness waifs and splinters of another's interior without context, conversation or reply, through the phone in our pockets.

I had not seen LaLa Land in a very long time, not since the Oscars' debacle when they botched the Best Picture announcement. But I decided to watch it last night, spurred on by this itching nostalgia to feel, to remember.  

It charts the beginning, middle and unravelling of a relationship between Mia, an aspiring actress, and Sebastian, a jazz musician with hopes to open a club. They meet in Los Angeles and fall in love, all the while in pursuit of their dreams. They support each other through successes and setbacks, but their ambition gradually drives a wedge between them. Until, they break up. 

And though I have only ever watched it through tears, they do meet (accidentally) one final time. When they've each achieved what they wanted, needed, and are content apart. But... they still look back. 

They both smile, appreciate that love passed between them, that love was transformational even, the genesis of their becoming, but that it is not lasting even if the effects linger on. Then it ends. I assume they both forge on happily down their own separate paths. 

(This post is a look-back, in its own way. How very Orphean of me.)

What La La Land offers is a comparatively shallow examination of character. Unlike Normal People, it  sidesteps miscommunication and emotional failure. Unlike Past Lives it does not delve into cultural divides or geographical distance. Instead, it relies heavily on timing, half-baked ambition and misfortune as its primary antagonists. It is the simplest (and therefore the most unrealistic) reproduction of the Right Person, Wrong Time trope that I have engaged with thus far, because it fails to ascribe the collapse of a good, healthy relationship onto anything other than bad luck; at least the other two works offer heartbreak a plausible, tangible raison d'être.

And yet, it was through consuming this trope in its most basic form that inspired revelation.

So what can we glean from tales of imperfect timing, dubbed 'horror stories', both in media and from our own experience? 

Well, there is a common thread that strings Normal People, Past Lives and LaLa Land together. It strings many works together. Uncomfortably, it runs through my own life. And perhaps through yours, too. 

I am reminded of a quote in Richard Siken's poem, The Worm King's Lullaby:

"Somebody has to leave first, this is a very old story. There is no other version of this story." 

The thing is, love wavers when life intervenes. This is the crux of Right Person, Wrong Time and it happens time and time again. I mean, there's a reason these works are so beloved, spliced-together in TikTok edits or dissected in video diaries and winning awards. They are somewhat vessels for our own longings. Though their fundamental point is so easily, and so frequently, overlooked when romantically wrapped-up in comparing oneself to these characters and their respective tragedies; as I have here. 

They are almost always framed as love stories. They are not love stories. When you strip back the cinematic gloss, they are examples of human failing.

In popular media, we're lead to believe that if it is destined, love will skirt, bend, and stretch around circumstance. It will force itself into whichever mould you have, and fit. And it can-- but through the experience I have shared here, I have learned that love demands action. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable, to inconvenience ourselves, and to meet another person halfway and the ones we so desperately want are not always, not often, capable of such compromise. Not because cosmic timing is wrong, but because they are people and people are flawed. They have priorities, and foibles, and their own half-baked ambitions. So do we.

I have spent a decade believing that one serendipitous day, we'd meet in a moment that allowed everything to fall seamlessly, indefectibly into place from which we could continue on without obstacles, but that is simply delusory. 

We had to make it work. And we couldn't, or wouldn't-- depending on perspective.

Right Person, Wrong Time is a fantasy framework that we apply ourselves to, over and over again. There are of course exceptions (before you ask, no you are probably not one of them), but in my humble opinion, the right person is not the one that greets you in the middle of the street on a sunny day as their very best self, they are one who shows up imperfectly and stays, adapts and chooses you relentlessly, despite timing.

I am not preaching original material-- my two-cents have definitely been passed around before. But it has taken me ten years, books, movies, music, and more crippling heartbreak than I'd care to admit, to unlearn that love is not something that magically happens, it takes persistent, mutual effort-- you make it work, or you must let it go. 

What I've learned:

Love isn’t automatic-- you actually have to do the work.

People are imperfect-- they’ll mess up, forget things, and frustrate you.

Timing is never right-- you just have to keep showing up anyway.  

Another spiral, grace-fully done xx

credit: @.laura_bee on TikTok

Works cited:

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Catherine Magee, Normal People

Celine Song, Past Lives

Damien Chazelle, Lala Land

Richard Siken, The Worm King's Lullaby