COLUMBUS: Nothing to Something

"You grow up around something, and it feels like nothing."

Growing up in my small hometown, I often felt underwhelmed by the blatant mundaneness of it all. It was a mindless suburbia that I felt had nothing to offer me, and I passed the days by dreaming of my future home in a bigger city, where I would finally have time away from the streets and buildings that often felt obscenely familiar. When I look back on my memories of growing up, it feels as though I'm watching my life play out on a movie screen - crystallized and contained in a square. It's as if now that I'm a few years distanced from my past, I can see it and understand it in a way I couldn't before.

This is what Kogonada does with Columbus - we're often looking at its characters and its places from specific, pre-determined angles, usually at a distance. It is a porthole, contained but deep, into the lives of Jin and Casey. But it's only in those close-up shots of the characters' faces that we get a glimpse into their deeply felt emotions, the pain and passion they feel individually and together suddenly visible. It captures a brief period in time when their lives intersect - it's the kind of relationship that is so fleeting it feels insignificant, and it isn't until later that you realize how impactful it really was. We can see this reflected in both characters' relationships to their parents, Casey's relationship to Columbus functions in a similar way: a city she was once indifferent to over time became the source of her all-consuming love for architecture.

My town wasn't nearly as aesthetically rich as Columbus, but my relationship to it has changed with time. Perhaps not so much as a physical place, but rather in the way it represents the relationships and experiences that have shaped me. I can only wish that at the time I had seen these moments for what they really were, but maybe that's impossible. Looking back, I can now pinpoint the time when I realized writing would always be a part of my life in some form. I can see more clearly the person who served as a mentor to me in so many different aspects of my life. These are things I took far too much for granted at the time.

While the experiences of the characters in Columbus are not my own, I still feel an intense intimacy with them - maybe because they help me to see what at one time I couldn't. It's been exactly a year since the first and only time I've watched the film, and rewatching it today was somehow exactly what I needed. It reminded me to look closely at the chapter of life that I'm presently in, and to soak up each and every moment that might almost feel like nothing. Because in a few years, when I look a little closer, I'll realize that it's something.