Love in the context of "lost".

Love in the context of choice. Love in the context of reality as reality dictates, of the non-dream, of the non-fairy tale, of the non-illusion. Love in the context of day-to-day, of years against the ephemeral now. Love in the context of hospital rooms and office halls. Love in the context of the war, not of Helen. Love in the context of spaces between rocks and hard places. Love in the context of morning versus evening, of ticker tapes versus piano keys, of the light-bathed versus the sun-kissed. Love in the context of Alice out of Wonderland. Love in the context of unpaid bills and food on the table. Love in the context of right against wrong. Love in the context of lines and wrinkled brows and crow's feet. Love in the context of Daphne and Apollo. Love in the context of adjacents and acrosses and antitheses and polarities. Love in the context not of cascading guitar melodies, tenderness, smoke rings.

Love in the context of absolutes, of senses and sensibilities.
Love in the context of not-you.
Love in the context of not-us.

Up in The Air

There are movies that make you roll over with laughter, movies that make you bawl like a baby or weep like a young boy whose heart was broken by his first love, movies that make you swear under, or over your breath.

"Up in the Air" does none of those.

What it does is leave you with that nameless emotion slowly but surely tugging at your heart and prodding you to get on your feet to look for, or go to the people you love and give them a tight hug and tell them how much you love them and appreciate their presence in your life. Yeah, that cheesy sort of thing, you might say. But cheesy is as cheesy gets because when it comes to the people we value, there can be no such thing as saying "I love you" too much because there is no telling--it'll be completely beyond us--until when anything can, and will last.

The tragedy of being human is that we do not know. So, yeah, go and give your pa a hug, your mom a peck on the cheek, your friend a slap on the back, your dog a bone.

Before the moment goes up in the air, before it's too late for regrets, before the intention to appreciate gets rendered hopeless because either you, them, or the moment, has gone away.

And away is seldom a happy place.